 After Jean-Paul Marat was assassinated, Leclerc assumed his mantle.Leclerc was the son of a civil engineer, and as a young man went to Martinique from which he was expelled for revolutionary propaganda in 1791.He returned to metropolitan France and joined the 1st battalion of Morbihan in which he served until February 1792, when he left for Paris to defend seventeen grenadiers accused, in Martinique, of being revolutionaries.