MARAT (Jean-Paul). Corrected proofs of his journal L'Ami du - Lot 7

MARAT (Jean-Paul). Corrected proofs of his journal L'Ami du peuple. 1790. 4 pp. in-8 printed paginated 3 to 6; some marginal paper loss. Passage from n° 272 of L'Ami du peuple published in Paris on November 5, 1790. It bears some twenty corrections, including 6 autograph words, but only some of these were taken into account in the final printed version. Civic denunciation as a method of political action Marat considered denunciation to be one of the legitimate means of expressing popular sovereignty: it would be the key to publicizing political life, and consequently the right to control elected officials and administrative agents - and thus to approve or denounce them. With this in mind, as the judges of the new judicial system were about to be elected in France on November 24, 1790, the article here printed from L'Ami du peuple gave Marat the opportunity to contribute to "proscribing from the new regime the monsters who defamed the old", i.e. to remove from these new posts the former members of the pre-Revolutionary judiciary. He thus evokes the particular case of a "criminal breach of trust" that had been afflicting a sieur Heintzler, a harpsichord maker in Paris, since 1780, whose wife, after stealing from him, had gone to live with her lover, a police commissioner named Fontaine. Marat exposes all the failings, misdemeanors and crimes of those involved in the police and judicial system, for which justice had not been served. Following this publication in L'Ami du peuple, Superintendent Fontaine would offer Heintzler a settlement, and Heintzler would seek Marat's advice. Marat would write to Heintzler to remain firm in his sentiments: "Public safety demands that violators of the law be punished". Marat's autograph has been affixed to the lower margin of the first page: "This issue was written in a cellar where the 'Ami du peuple' was forced to take refuge. I spent the night writing it...". Because of his virulence as a committed publicist, Marat was repeatedly prosecuted and had to spend long periods in hiding, a total of 35 months between September 1789 and September 1792, the date of his election as a deputy to the Convention. A modern handwritten note indicates that these sheets were found in the papers of Camille Desmoulins. Arthur MEYER (Mes livres, mes dessins, mes autographes, Paris, s.n., 1921, no. 123, autographs, 5-V; Paris, Drouot, Francisque Lefrançois et Noël Charavay experts, June 3-6, 1924, no. 129, 5-V). - Christian LAZARD (Paris, Drouot, May 19 1967, no. 62). - Robert GERARD (Paris, Drouot, June 19-20, 1996, no. 226).