Until this book by Keith Michael Baker appeared in late 2025, there had been only two English-language biographies of Jean-Paul Marat published in the previous ninety-nine years. As it happens, I am the author of the other two.

I find Baker’s work to be an invaluable contribution to the anglophone literature on the history of the French Revolution and a scrupulously honest account of by far its most controversial character. Baker’s specialty as a historian of ideas adds a great deal of value by situating Marat’s ideological writings in the context of the Late Enlightenment, and his earlier intellectual biography of Nicolas de Condorcet provides a perfect basis of comparison with Marat, ideologically, politically, and axiologically.

However, my positive appreciation of this biography requires one essential qualification. It is still a product of the Anglo-American academic historical establishment, one that perpetuates a Cold War bias and distorts almost all anglophone accounts of the French Revolution, and especially Marat’s role in it.