Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793)

Maverick scientist, jobbing medic, sometime political philosopher, eloquent journalist, impassioned political activist – Marat was multifariously gifted but brutally extreme.

He was born in Neuchatel, son of a Sardinian religious refugee, but left for the bright lights of Paris, where he studied medicine.  He moved to London in 1765, where he began to write philosophical essays.  By 1770, he had shifted to Newcastle, where he probably worked as a vet, and was inspired by the radical MP John Wilkes.  Working mainly in Newcastle’s Central Library, fuelled by black coffee and deprived of sleep, he wrote Chains of Slavery (1774) over a three week period.  The British government went to great lengths to suppress circulation of the book - an original copy of the libertarian tract is still available in the Literary and Philosophical Society. Switching back to medicine, a work on eye diseases won Marat an honorary medical degree from St Andrews University.

Armed with this qualification, Marat returned to Paris, where he developed a lucrative medical practice working for the aristocracy, the proceeds of which allowed him to explore scientific research.  During the 1780s, he published a translation of Newton, was visited several times by Benjamin Franklin, was turned down for membership of the Academie des Sciences, but continued researching and writing, not just on science but also on political issues.

With the beginnings of the French revolution, Marat turned full time to political agitation, publishing his own paper from September 1789, which became named L’Ami du peuple: by contrast, he branded those with whom he disagreed “enemies of the people” and attacking everyone in authority.  Consequently, he was constantly in trouble.  


Appearing on one occasion before the Commission of Police, Marat said:

“Gentlemen, these are the disagreeables we have to put up with in the passage from slavery to liberty. Do you really believe that a Revolution such as this could accomplish itself without some misfortunes, without the shedding of some drops of blood? I entertain no hostile design against you, but had I to choose between my duty to the Commission of Police and my duty to liberty, my choice would be already made”

His words won over the Commission, which even offered him a coach to take him home.

At one point he overstepped the mark and was forced to flee to London.  Another time, he successfully appealed to the police to shut down those who were producing counterfeit versions of his paper to discredit him – an oddly legalistic move for a revolutionary.  At various moments, Marat had to go into hiding:  “exposed to a thousand dangers, encompassed by spies, police-agents, and assassins, I hurried from retreat to retreat, often unable to sleep for two consecutive nights in the same bed.”   Less romantically, he spent time in cellars, sewers and even a quarry.  


It was during this period that he contracted his famous skin disease, posthumously diagnosed as dermatitis herpetiformis.  His symptoms included itching and weight loss, together with headaches and insomnia.  Neither the debilitating disease nor his general appearance - "short in stature, deformed in person, and hideous in face" – were an obstacle to him marrying a young woman, Simone Evrard, who was a member of his typographer’s family.

In September 1792, he endorsed and encouraged the actions of the revolutionaries who dragged more than a thousand of their royalist enemies from the prisons to massacre them:  “What is the duty of the people? The last thing it has to do, and the safest and wisest, is to present itself in arms before the Abbaye, snatch out the traitors, especially the Swiss officers and their accomplices, and put them to the sword. What folly to wish to give them a trial! It is all done; you have taken them in arms against the country, you have massacred the soldiers, why would you spare their officers, incomparably more culpable? The folly is to have listened to the smooth-talkers, who counselled to make of them only prisoners of war. They are traitors whom it is necessary to sacrifice immediately, since they can never be considered in any other light.”

Jean-Paul Marat was elected to the Convention in 1792 as one of the Paris representatives.  There was an outcry when he came to the Convention, three quarters of the delegates declaring themselves to be his enemy, accusing him and Danton and Robespierre of aspiring to become a triumvirate of dictators.  In response, he stated:

“In order to better serve the country, I have braved misery, danger, suffering, I have been pursued every day by legions of assassins; during three years I have been condemned to a subterranean life; I have pleaded the cause of liberty with my head on the block!”

Marat was very active during the first half of 1793 in opposing the Girondins, the more moderate faction in the assembly, whom he considered enemies of the Republic, and who had done their best to remove him from influence or put him on trial.  He was quoted as saying “I believe in the cutting off of heads”.  Finally, in May the Girond fell, fleeing to the provinces or facing arrest in the capital.  Now the Jacobins were in charge, and the notorious Committee of Public Safety came to power.  Soon after, Jean-Paul Marat himself retired from public life, considering his political objectives achieved, and suffering from his worsening skin disease.

At this stage of his life, Marat would work in the bath, immersed in hot water, a handkerchief soaked in vinegar tied around his head, writing on a board placed across the copper tub.  It was there that a Girondist sympathizer, Charlotte Corday, came to talk to him on 13 July.  After a discussion of supposed counter-revolutionaries in the Caen region, she took out a kitchen knife and stabbed Marat in the heart.  Calling out to his wife for help, within seconds he was dead.

Once assassinated, Marat was sanctified by the revolution, as painted by Jacques-Louis David. In churches, his bust replaced the crucifix.  His remains were placed in the Pantheon with the inscription: “Like Jesus, Marat loved ardently the people, and only them. Like Jesus, Marat hated kings, nobles, priests, rogues and, like Jesus, he never stopped fighting against these plagues of the people.”  

However, within six months, the apotheosis of Marat and other fallen revolutionaries was reversed: the remains were reburied in ordinary cemeteries and his glorious reputation was soon replaced by almost the opposite assessment – that he was a blood-thirsty demagogue who was to blame for the outpourings of revolutionary violence.  He certainly used his extraordinary powers of propaganda to whip up fervor.  Yet he seems also to have had a genuine commitment to liberty, great political insight, and a wide ranging intelligence and charm.  Brilliant but brutal, disabled yet tough as nails, perhaps Dr Jean-Paul Marat was the eighteenth century’s equivalent of  Dr Enesto “Che” Guevara?.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

"To discover relationships and similarities between things that no one else sees. Wit can in this way lead to invention"

The aphorism is the one pleasure in life where less is always more. I have always liked this literary form, which R.J.Hollingdale tells us must be brief, must be isolated, must be witty, and must be philosophical. Although the aphorism has a central place in French thought - consider Pascal or La Rochefoucauld - my favourite aphorists are German: Friedrich Nietszsche, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the first place is reserved for the man who pioneered the aphorism in Germany, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who was also that country's first professor of experimental physics.

Born in Oberramstadt, the youngest of the seventeen offspring of a Lutheran clergyman, Lichtenberg was a weak and sickly child. He grew up with a malformation of the spine, perhaps due to tuberculosis, which made him a hunchback. He explained,

“My head lies at least a foot closer to my heart than is the case with other men: that is why I am so reasonable.”

During his life he had a multitude of real and imagined ailments, leading him to suggest:

"If Heaven should find it useful and necessary to produce a new edition of me and my life I would like to make a few not superfluous suggestions for this new edition chiefly concerning the design of the frontispiece and the way the work is laid out.”

Despite all this, he had many romances. His private life was unusual, and remarked on by his neighbours and contemporaries. For several years he lived with the teenage daughter of a weaver. After she died aged 18, he then took up with a washerwoman's daughter, with whom he had seven children, and whom he eventually married. But as he said

"Every man also has his moral backside, which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum"

Like another hunchbacked hero of mine, Antonio Gramsci, Lichtenberg jotted his thoughts into a series of notebooks, which he called "Waste Books":

"Tradesmen have their 'waste book' in which they enter from day to day everything they buy and sell, everything all mixed up without any order to it, from there it is transferred to the day-book, where everything appears in more systematic fashion ... This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First a book where I write down everything as I see it or as my thoughts put it before me, later this can be transcribed into another, where the materials are more distinguished and ordered."

However, Lichtenberg never published his approximately 4000 observations, of which perhaps the most famous is

"To err is human also in so far as the animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so."

Nor did he create his own system of philosophy. However, his writing is perpetually stimulating and insightful. As Goethe said of him;

"We may use Lichtenberg's writings as the most wonderful dowsing rod: wherever he makes a joke, there a problem lies hidden."

One Lichtenberg aphorism, taken daily after breakfast, would be the dietary supplement I would prescribe to stimulate thought and ward off boredom.

Lichtenberg's career was spent as a mathematician and physicist at the University of Göttingen, where his lecture-demonstrations were immensely popular. I was delighted to learn that his students included Novalis, the German romantic poet immortalised by Penelope Fitzgerald in The Blue Flower. After teaching several young English aristocrats, Lichtenbeg was invited to visit Britain, after which he became an ardent Anglophile.

While in England, Lichtenberg became a great favourite of the King and Queen: it is said that on one occasion King George III (who was of course German himself), caused a great excitement by coming to Lichtenberg's lodging at 10am one morning and asking to see "Herr Professor" to continue their fascinating conversations.

In London, Lichtenberg marvelled at the acting of Garrick, and wrote a book which described Hogarth's engravings in meticulous detail. He shared Hogarth's fascination with people's behaviour and interactions: he has been described as a "spy on humanity."

Back home, Lichtenberg conducted scientific research into astronomy, electricity, and lightning:

"That sermons are preached in churches doesn’t mean the churches don’t need lightning rods.”

Among his experiments, he noticed and described the electrostatic principle that would lead to the invention of the photocopier 150 years later. The great Alessandro Volta paid him a visit to discuss electricity in 1784. But although elected Fellow of the Royal Society, Lichtenberg made no significant scientific discoveries himself, writing:

"I would have given part of my life to know what the average height of the barometer was in Paradise."

Aside from his disability, and his writing, I relate to Georg Christoph because he was as much a procrastinator, as a polymath: he never got around to writing his novel either. His little asides often anticipate other people's advances - as when he considers whether blind people might read letters with their fingers. Typically, although he probably was the first conceiver of the hydrogen balloon, he never got around to trying it out. Perhaps his lasting impact on the world was his proposal of what is now the standard paper size system (A3, A4, A5 etc). His Aphorisms deserve to be more widely known:

"Let him who has two pairs of trousers turn one of them into cash and purchase this book."

Further reading

Lichtenberg GC, Aphorisms, edited by RJ Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 1990.

Stern JP, Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions, 1959.

Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727)

“I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, whilest the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Born prematurely, and abandoned by his mother at the age of three, Isaac Newton’s childhood was unhappy, and he was described as idle and inattentive at school. But he had a passion for learning, and eventually in 1661 went to Trinity College Cambridge, intending to get a law degree. There he became interested in astrononomy, physics and then maths, entering his thoughts in a notebook entitled Certain Philosophical Questions, in which he also wrote “"Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth".

When Cambridge University was closed because of the plague, he went back home to Lincolnshire, and spent two years reading books on mathematics, returning to become a Fellow in 1667. In 1669 he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, using his first lectures to demonstrate that white light was actually a mixture of the spectrum of colours. When he donated one of his new reflecting telescopes to the Royal Society, they elected him a Fellow. By 1666 he had developed the theory of universal gravitation: “... all matter attracts all other matter with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.”

In 1687 Newton finally published The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, usually known as Principia Mathematica, which showed how his laws of motion explained the movements of the planets and other heavenly bodies. Berlinski writes “Nothing like the Principia had ever appeared before the seventeenth century; and in truth, nothing like the Principia has ever appeared afterward. In very large measure, it was the Principia that ignited the furious dark energies that brought mathematical physics into existence and that have sustained its fires for more than three hundred years.” Newton’s universe is mathematical, proceeding like a clock due to universal laws. Sadly, the story of the apple falling on his head is probably a myth.

Newton had a complex personality. He wanted fame, but feared criticism – which meant that often he avoided publishing his results. He was anxious and insecure. Aside from his mother, and the niece to whom he was guardian, he seems to have had no emotional connection with women. He had ferocious arguments with colleagues and rivals such as Hooke and Leibniz, accusing the latter of plagiarising his discovery of “fluxion” (which Leibniz named differential calculus). In Geneva, I was delighted to find, in the wonderful Bodmer Library, Leibntiz’s own copy of the Principia, heavily annotated. Newton’s assistant Whiston said that “ Newton was of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew”.

Deeply religious, Newton studied philosophy and theology and astrology as well as science. He devoted years of his life and many thousands of words to esoteric investigations into the philosopher’s stone, transmutation and the elixir of life. John Maynard Keynes described him as “the last of the magicians”, and as someone who “regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty”. Newton was particularly interested in the form and dimensions of Solomon’s Temple, as described in the Bible, and also tried to reconcile classical mythology with the Biblical account. A staunch, if unorthodox, Protestant, he had opposed James II and welcomed the victory of William of Orange. He represented Cambridge University in the Parliament of 1689.

In 1678, Newton had a nervous breakdown, and avoided mixing with other people. In 1693, after the death of his mother, he had a second breakdown, during which he sent wild accusatory letters to his friends John Locke and Samuel Pepys. From then on, he retired from research. In 1696, he moved to London to work for the Royal Mint, becoming Master in 1699, in particular pursuing counterfeiters with his characteristic rage. In 1703 he was elected President of the Royal Society. As he got older, he became fatter and more languid, surrounding himself with bright young men who edited new editions of his work, but speaking very little in public. Probably the greatest of British scientists, he was the first to be knighted, and the first to be buried in Westminster Abbey. But his most famous quotations show his humility: in a letter to Robert Hooke he wrote: “If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants”:

Isaac Newton is claimed on various different lists of people with disabilities as having epilepsy, a stutter, or some sort of mental illness – depression, bipolar disorder or perhaps Asperger’s Syndrome. He was certainly a solitary individual, with a great capacity for sustained concentration, and a brilliantly intuitive mind. Rather obsessive, he risked blindness by staring at the sun reflected in a looking glass, and at one point inserted a bodkin (needle) into his eye socket, between eyeball and bone. Although there is considerable debate over the nature of his health problems, a contribution to his personality could be mercury poisoning, caused by his chemical research, which can cause hyperactivity, insomnia and irritability, all of which were characteristic of him.

Further reading

James Gleick, Isaac Newton, Pantheon, 2003.

David Berlinski, Newton’s Gift, Free Press, 2002.