Snippets of French History: Jean-Paul Marat 1743-1793

Although Marat claimed to be a physician, he had no qualifications, and his reputation as a physician was born when he managed to cure his friend of gonorrea.  He was interested in medicine and in the sciences in general and worked as an unofficial doctor in London for several years, and then in France.

He has gone down in history as a journalist, the most out-spoken and inflamatory journalist of his time, a politician who vigorously supported the Revolutuion and a fierce advocate of human rights.  He was arguably the most radical voice of the French Revolution.

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Snippets of French History: les sans culottes

Several people have asked me to write a “in-a-nutshell” summary of the French Revolution.  But I just can’t.  The politics of the years leading up to the Revolution, and the different factions, and factions within factions, in a constantly-changing political situation would be impossible to fit in to anything other than a very fat book.  The French Revolution was riddled with legislation and counter-legislation, small groups gaining a bit of power and then receding, mass murders, beytrayals and atrocities, shifting regimes and groups within the regimes … I recall a professor at University saying that it was like ever-moving and churning vomit with no way of knowing who was where and what was next.

So.  So, I have decided to split it up in to several different in-a-nutshell groups, starting with the sans-culottes.

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