So what we're going to be discussing is, is David's painting a beautiful lie or is it a profound aesthetic truth born out of violence?

Yeah, of course.

So Marat was a French revolutionist, and he was really famous because he had a little journal in which the newspaper would be called The Friend of the People, and what he would do is he would preach for violence against the old order or violence against the royals, and basically advocated for the poor people to rise up and basically take over the royals using violence.

And so he encouraged this a lot through his writings, and some ideas in his newspapers were actually just the belief that the government should protect the people, and he also thought that a bunch of the royals were corrupt and that they were doing a bunch of corrupt practices to keep power.

He also believed that really in order to be governed, the people had to say that you were allowed to govern them, and those were just a couple of ideas from his newspaper.

And to be honest, a lot of people found him to be kind of this Messiah figure for the French Revolution, in which people looked up to him and they looked up to the fact that he was willing to do so much for the cause and put whatever it took on the line, but his opponents saw him as this bloodthirsty guy who just encouraged so much violence, and that made him really dangerous.

And he actually suffered from a disease, a chronic skin condition that would cause severe itching, painful sores, and he would have to spend most of his time in the bath.

Okay