The ARTFL Project

Jean-Paul Marat’s newspapers are a notable example of French Revolutionary populism.  Marat frequently ran into trouble with the authorities in the earlier days of the newspapers’ publication for his criticism of those in power. Printing of the journals was suspended on numerous occasions, often due to the fact that Marat had gone into hiding. He called the newspaper Le publiciste parisien for its first five issues, but changed the name to L’Ami du peuple in the sixth issue. This name remained with the newspaper until Marat was elected to the National Convention. He went on to publish the newspaper under other titles, most notably the Journal de la République française and Le Publiciste de la République française, until his death at the hands of Charlotte Corday on July 13, 1793.

SEARCH Les journaux de Marat using PhiloLogic4.

This digitization project has been carried out in conjunction with the New York Public Library, which provided the archival-quality page images of its seven-volume collection of L'Ami du peuple; the Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley, which provided the page images for all of the post-L’Ami du peuple journals; and the Stanford University Library, which provided funds for data entry.

The bulk of the collection consists of L’Ami du peuple, which comprises nearly 700 issues published in octavo between September 1789 and September 1792. Most issues were eight pages long, though some issues stretched to twelve or sixteen pages. Pagination of the earlier volumes was somewhat irregularly organized, while every issue after number 70 is individually paginated. We are aware of a number of apparent gaps and duplications in the numerical sequence of issues. These numbering problems have been well documented in other sources (notably Eugène Hatin's 1866 Bibliographie historique et critique de la presse périodique française, available from Google Books) and do not generally indicate which issues of the newspaper are actually missing from this collection. The only issue of L’Ami du peuple that would in fact seem to be missing from the NYPL’s bound collection is issue 399, which is replaced by a second copy of issue 299. Several numbers -- including 40, 41, 43-44, and 46 -- exist only in manuscript and are thus absent from the NYPL edition. The NYPL’s edition of the text is also missing four pages from issue 407.

These digital texts have not been checked systematically for accuracy. Additionally, some unrecognizable characters have not been keyed by our data entry contractor and have instead been identified in the text with a TEI “gap” tag. These errors will be corrected, where possible, in the future as a part of ARTFL’s ongoing database maintenance. In order to access the page. (3/2017)