He made up his mind
that real reform must benefit all the people alike and that it could be
secured only by direct popular action. This was the simple message that
filled the pages of the _Ami du peuple_--the _Friend of the
People_--a newspaper which he edited from 1789 to 1792. With fierce
invective he assailed the court, the clergy, the nobles, even the
bourgeois Assembly. Attached to no party and with no detailed policies,
he sacrificed almost everything to his single mission. No poverty,
misery, or persecution could keep him quiet. Forced even to hide in
cellars and sewers, where he contracted a loathsome skin disease, he
persevered in his frenzied appeals to the Parisian populace to take
matters into their own hands. By 1792 Marat was a man feared and hated
by the authorities but loved and venerated by the masses of the
capital. [Footnote: Marat was assassinated on 13 July, 1793, by
Charlotte Corday, a young woman who was fanatically attached to the
Girondist faction.]
[Sidenote: Danton]
No less radical but far more statesmanlike was Danton (1759-1794), who
has been called "a sort of middle-class Mirabeau.
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