One month after this missive, the Parisian masses overthrew the monarchy and declared the Republic.

‘Nothing Has Changed!’ (1792) by Jean Paul Marat from Writings and Speeches. Voices of Revolt No. 2. International Publishers, New York. 1927.

THE Revolution has turned against the people and has turned out to be the people’s greatest misfortune…From the very beginning it was nothing but a continuous source of bribery and plots…

Not long after its beginning it became a constant means for public officials to carry on chicanery and oppression. It afforded even the legislators ( deputies) an opportunity for business jobbing, deception and crookedness, and now it must serve the rich and the speculators as a means of providing themselves with unlimited profits and monopolies, of profiteering in foodstuffs and interest rates, of ruining the people with a shameless system of pillage and exploitation, and of forcing the lower classes to sell themselves through their fear of declining into poverty…

Nothing has changed but the decorations on the National Tribunal; but the actors, the masks, the intrigues, the distribution of parts–these have remained the same. Nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed in the working of the political machinery, and this will continue to be the case until the people will have attained mental clarity enough to spoil the game of the impostors who are deceiving them, until they have become ruthless enough to punish the criminals who hoodwink them…

The first and principal reason for the impotence of our efforts to attain liberty is due to the very nature of liberty itself.

The plebs, I mean the lower classes of the nation, who have no one but themselves to depend upon in their struggle against the upper classes, in the moment of insurrection, no doubt, will crush everything by their numbers; but they will finally succumb, since they always proceed without understanding, without the arts, without wealth, weapons, leaders, with a plan of operation…This has been the case with the French Revolution. It is not true that the entire nation rose against the tyrants; for there always remained behind the nobility, the clergy, the legal class, the financiers, the capitalists, the scholars, the literary men, who were always a last prop and bulwark of reaction. While many well-informed, affluent and intriguing members of the upper classes at first took sides against the tyrants, they did so only in order later to turn against the people, as soon as they might have secured its confidence and made use of its strength in order to assume for themselves the posts of the privileged classes that have been overthrown.

The Revolution was made only by the lower classes of society, by the workers, artisans, petty traders, peasants, in short, by the entire submerged class, by those disinherited ones whom the rich call the canaille, and whom the Romans in their arrogance once termed the proletariat. But what most persons are not yet ready to believe is the fact that the masses really made the Revolution only in the interest of the petty landed proprietors and the clique of barristers.

-From L’Ami du Peuple, No. 667, July, 1792.

Writings and Speeches of Jean Paul Marat. Voices of Revolt No. 2. International Publishers, New York. 1927.

Contents: Biographical Sketch by Paul Friedlander, A Fiendish Attempt by the Foes of the Revolution (July, 1790), Our We Undone? (July 26, 1790), A Fair Dream and a Rude Awakening (August 25, 1790), Nothing Has Changed! (July, 1792), The Friend of the People to the French Patriots (August, 1792),Marat the People’s Friend to the Brave Parisians (August 26, 1792), Marat the People’s Friend to the Faithful Parisians (August 28, 1792), Guard Against Profiteers! (February 25, I793), Letter from Marat to Camille Desmoulins (June 24, 1790), Letter from Marat to Camille Desmoulins (August, 1790), Explanatory Notes. 78 pages.

The second in the Voices of Revolt series begun by the Communist Party’s International Publishers under the direction of Alexander Trachtenberg in 1927.

PDF of original book: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/voices-of-revolt/02-Jean-Paul-Marat-VOR-ocr.pdf