About Jean-Paul Marat: Politician and journalist during the French Revolution (1743 - 1793) |...

On September 12, 1789, Jean-Paul Marat published the first issue of his radical newspaper Le Publiciste parisien, later called L'Ami du peuple (The Friend of the People) in Paris. An excerpt from the article:

"On 12 September 1789, Marat began his own newspaper, entitled Publiciste parisien, before changing its name four days later to L'Ami du peuple ("The People's friend"). From this position, he often attacked the most influential and powerful groups in Paris, including the Commune, the Constituent Assembly, the ministers, and the Châtelet, (the ancien regime legislative body). In January 1790, he moved to the radical Cordeliers section, then under the leadership of the lawyer Danton, was nearly arrested for his aggressive attacks against Jacques Necker, Louis XVI's popular Finance Minister, and was forced to flee to London. In May, he returned to Paris to continue publication of L'Ami du peuple and briefly ran a second newspaper in June 1790 called "Le Junius français" named after the notorious English polemicist Junius. Marat faced the problem of counterfeiters distributing falsified versions of L'Ami du peuple, which led him to call for police intervention, which resulted in the suppression of the fraudulent issues, leaving Marat the continuing sole author of L'Ami de peuple."