Les Miserables (2012)
If the people were asleep, then the People’s Friend would just have to shout louder. He decided that in order to shock the comatose masses out of their stupor he would have to make a major adjustment in his agitational techniques. As early as the beginning of June [1790] he had asked his readers, “Will it always be necessary to treat you like overgrown children?”
Soon you won’t open your eyes to anything but cries of alarm, of murder, of treason … How can I keep your attention? How can I keep you awake? There’s only one thing left for me to do; I’ll have to take your tastes into consideration and change my tone. Oh, Parisians! No matter how bizarre this will make me appear in the eyes of scholars, I won’t hesitate to do it — your old friend cares only for your safety. I have to keep you from falling into the abyss.
It is somewhat amusing that Marat foresaw the judgment of future historians who would cite his inflammatory rhetoric to depict him as a “madman.” He announced in advance that he was going to become more shrill, more frenetic, more hysterical, more “bizarre,” if that was what was necessary to rekindle the Parisians’ revolutionary spirit. And that is what he did. As extreme as Marat’s polemical style became, however, it never declined in political sophistication. It avoided the crude street slang, expletives, and bathroom humor utilized by other popular journalists such as Hébert and Lemaire. Nor did he fall back upon empty ultimatums or abstract “Down with the government!” sloganeering. Rather than continuously calling upon the sans-culottes to rise up in unfocused revolt, he chose his issues carefully.
Jean-Paul Marat: Tribune of the French Revolution (Clifford D. Conner), p. 70
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