Jean-Paul Marat
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40 free Jean-Paul Marat trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Jean-Paul Marat is remembered for the way he died, yet the life before it is stranger than the famous painting suggests. He spent years as a physician and experimental scientist, argued with the leading thinkers of his day, and only in his mid-forties became the most feared journalist of the French Revolution. This quiz follows him from his childhood through his medical career in Britain and at the French court, his battles with the scientific establishment, and the paper that made him a hero to the Paris crowds and a menace to his enemies. It covers his trial, his murder in the bath, the woman who killed him, and what happened to his image afterwards in art, on stage and in a video game. It is written for history students, French Revolution enthusiasts and anyone who has seen the painting and wondered who the man in the tub really was. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the fun facts stick.
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Q 01Which young woman from Normandy killed Jean-Paul Marat in his bath on 13 July 1793?
Charlotte Corday
Charlotte Corday talked her way in by promising news of fugitive Girondin deputies. She made no attempt to flee afterwards and went to the guillotine four days later.
Q 02Which chronic ailment kept Jean-Paul Marat soaking in a medicinal bath for much of the day in 1793?
A skin disease
A skin disease that itched and blistered drove him into the tub, where he wrote and received visitors. A 2020 DNA study of a bloodstained page from the murder scene suggested a fungal infection.
Q 03Which painter, who also organised Jean-Paul Marat's funeral, created the famous 1793 canvas The Death of Marat?
Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David was a friend and fellow deputy, and he lit the dead man like a Christian martyr. The picture then sat in obscurity for half a century until Baudelaire hailed it as a masterpiece in 1846.
Q 04Which newspaper did Jean-Paul Marat launch in 1789, a title that soon became his own nickname?
L'Ami du peuple
L'Ami du peuple means The Friend of the People, and it ran to nearly 700 issues. When no printer would touch his fiercest attacks, Marat set up a press of his own and carried on.
Q 05In which present-day country was Jean-Paul Marat, a leading voice of the French Revolution, born in 1743?
Switzerland
Switzerland is home to Boudry, the small town where he was born with the surname Mara. He added the final t later to make the name look French.
Q 06Jean-Paul Marat's work on light, rejected by the Paris Academy, challenged the colour theory of which English scientist?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton held that a prism splits white light, while Marat argued the colours arise at the edges of the opening. Marat still went on to publish a French translation of his rival's Opticks.
Q 07Which American envoy in Paris attended some of Jean-Paul Marat's experiments and reportedly praised his skill?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was invited again and again to a nobleman's residence for the demonstrations. A mutual acquaintance later recalled that the optical ones impressed him most.
Q 08Jean-Paul Marat's remains were placed in 1794 in which Paris hall of honour, only to be removed within months?
The Panthéon
The Panthéon received him as a martyr of the Revolution, fourteen months after his death. In the backlash that followed the Terror his cult collapsed, and he was taken out again the following February.
Q 09Jean-Paul Marat was killed on 13 July 1793, the eve of which anniversary from the French Revolution's first summer?
The storming of the Bastille
The storming of the Bastille was four years old the next day, 14 July. His killer had first hoped to strike in front of the whole Convention, but he was too ill to attend its sessions.
Q 10Which notorious writer delivered a 1793 tribute to Jean-Paul Marat and later shared a famous play's title with him?
The Marquis de Sade
The Marquis de Sade spoke for his Paris section at a ceremony honouring Marat as a martyr of liberty. Peter Weiss's 1964 play imagines him staging the murder with asylum inmates.
Q 11Which nickname for Maximilien Robespierre did Jean-Paul Marat help popularise by using it in print from 1791?
The Incorruptible
The Incorruptible stuck to Robespierre for good, yet the two men held only one private meeting. Marat came away deciding that his ally lacked the vision and audacity of a statesman.
Q 12Which famous philosopher published a mocking review of Jean-Paul Marat's 1770s treatise on the soul and the body?
Voltaire
Voltaire answered with ridicule because the book had criticised him first. Marat never forgot the slight and was still bringing up the quarrel in the middle of the Revolution.
Q 13Jean-Paul Marat sat in the National Convention with which radical faction, the bitter rivals of the Girondins?
Q 21The Death of Marat, the famous 1793 painting of Jean-Paul Marat in his bath, hangs in a museum in which city?
Brussels
Brussels holds the original in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the country where its painter lived out his exile. The version in the Louvre is a replica made by his studio.
Q 22Which university awarded Jean-Paul Marat a medical degree in 1775, while he was practising in London?
St Andrews
St Andrews, in Scotland, made him a doctor of medicine on the recommendation of two practitioners. Within two years he was physician to the bodyguard of the French king's youngest brother.
Q 23Which French scientist demanded a correction after Jean-Paul Marat claimed the Academy had approved his fire research?
Antoine Lavoisier
The Montagnards
The Montagnards took their name, the Mountain, from the highest benches of the hall, where they sat. When their rivals fell in June 1793, Marat helped decide which deputies were arrested.
Q 14What weapon, bought in Paris that same morning, did Jean-Paul Marat's killer hide in her clothing?
A kitchen knife
A kitchen knife from a cutler's shop at the Palais-Royal was all she carried, and one thrust to the chest was enough. Asked about her aim, she put it down to luck, not practice.
Q 15Jean-Paul Marat's killer held him responsible for which 1792 wave of killings in the prisons of Paris?
The September Massacres
The September Massacres began two weeks after Marat's paper urged citizens to go armed to a prison and seize the traitors held there. He then signed a circular calling the killings acts of justice.
Q 16Jean-Paul Marat's younger brother taught French at an elite Russian school where which future national poet was a pupil?
Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin was among his pupils at the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo. The brother had settled in Saint Petersburg in 1784, five years before the Revolution began.
Q 17Which hilltop district of Paris was renamed in Jean-Paul Marat's honour in November 1793, months after his murder?
Montmartre
Montmartre became Mont-Marat, and the street where he had lived and died was renamed rue Marat. Busts, portraits and medallions of him spread across the city in the same months.
Q 18Which 20th-century state named a battleship after Jean-Paul Marat and turned his surname into a popular boys' name?
The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union honoured him as a defender of the poor and working people. A dreadnought took his name in 1921, after its crew had joined the Kronstadt rebellion, and carried it until 1943.
Q 19Which 2014 video game set in revolutionary Paris includes a side mission built around Jean-Paul Marat's murder?
Assassin's Creed Unity
Assassin's Creed Unity names the side mission after the killing itself. The game's main story runs through Paris from 1789 to 1794, the very years of Marat's fame.
Q 20In April 1793 Jean-Paul Marat became the first deputy tried by which newly created court, where a jury cleared him?
The Revolutionary Tribunal
The Revolutionary Tribunal was only six weeks old when his Girondin enemies sent him before it. He defended himself without a lawyer, and the crowd carried him back to the Convention in triumph.
Antoine Lavoisier objected because the Academy's report had praised the experiments without endorsing the conclusions. Marat had set out to show that fire is a fluid, not a material element.
Q 24The hanging arm in the famous 1793 painting of Jean-Paul Marat's death is often compared to which Michelangelo work?
The Pietà
The Pietà shows the dead Christ with the same trailing arm. The painter wanted the sacred aura of the Church to pass to the new Republic, so he gave its martyr a soft, glowing light.
Q 25How is watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet said to have disguised Jean-Paul Marat to walk him past a hostile crowd?
As an old woman
As an old woman on Breguet's arm, Marat is said to have left the house unmolested. He repaid the favour in 1793 by arranging a safe-conduct when his friend was marked for the guillotine.
Q 26At 17, Jean-Paul Marat applied to join a French expedition to Siberia to observe which astronomical event?
A transit of Venus
A transit of Venus drew the astronomer Chappe d'Auteroche all the way to Tobolsk. Marat was turned down, and went on to train in medicine in Paris without taking a formal qualification there.
Q 27Jean-Paul Marat reportedly wore a cloth around his head soaked in which liquid to ease his chronic illness?
Vinegar
Vinegar soaked the cloth he wound round his head like a turban, and the famous painting of his death still shows it. The treatment went with the medicinal baths he took as the condition worsened.
Q 28In the 1795 backlash against Jean-Paul Marat, his bust was paraded through Paris and then thrown where?
Into a sewer
Into a sewer went the bust, to jeers that here was the monument he deserved. Other busts of him were torn from their pedestals across the city in the same weeks.
Q 29Jean-Paul Marat was once physician to the bodyguard of the Comte d'Artois, who later reigned as which French king?
Charles X
Charles X took the throne in 1824, long after the doctor from his household had turned revolutionary. Marat held the court post for nearly six years, then resigned to pursue his experiments.
Q 30The woman who killed Jean-Paul Marat travelled to Paris from which Norman city, a refuge for fugitive Girondin deputies?
Caen
Caen sheltered deputies expelled from the Convention in June 1793, and she had attended their meetings there. Offering to name them was how she talked her way into Marat's home.