Early Struggles
The journal was printed in octavo format, usually eight pages long, although occasionally expanding to twelve or sixteen pages. Marat ordinarily published L’Ami du Peuple on a daily basis, but there are several gaps in its publication due to Marat’s several times going into hiding to avoid arrest, during which he did not print his journal. His continual attacks against Jacques Necker, Jean Sylvain Bailly, the comte de Mirabeau, the Paris Commune, the marquis de Lafayette, the National Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, the National Convention, the émigrés, and King Louis XVI himself caused several decrees of outlawry and accusation against him and attempts to suppress his journal. His press was destroyed and copies of L’Ami du peuple confiscated at least twice. On one occasion his printer was arrested and imprisoned, and the plates used to print an especially controversial issue—in which he threatened to tear out the heart of Lafayette, burn the King, and impale the deputies of the Assembly upon their seats—were destroyed.
Marat, with no source of independent income, used much of his own savings to print L’Ami du peuple. In early 1792, after returning from a two month stay in England, he could not afford to continue the journal. With the financial support of his new common-law wife, Simonne Evrard, he was able to renew publication. After the suspension of the monarchy on August 10, 1792, the Committee of Police and Surveillance of the Paris Commune gave Marat four of the royal presses, and the new imprimerie de Marat was set up in the basement of the Convent of the Cordeliers.
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