Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney

Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney was a French philosopher, historian, orientalist, and politician. He is best known for publishing The Ruins: a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires in 1791, a philosophical meditation on the rise and fall of civilizations. As an influential thinker, he was among the earliest proponents of the Christ myth theory and served in the National Constituent Assembly during the French Revolution.

Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney

Constantin-François Chassebœuf de La Giraudais [French: [kɔ̃stɑ̃tɛ̃ fʁɑ̃swa ʃasəbœf də la ʒiʁodɛ]] (3 February 1757 – 25 April 1820), known by his pen name Volney, was a French philosopher, historian, orientalist, and politician.

As a young man, he was a regular at the salon of Madame Helvétius in Paris, where he met Benjamin Franklin during the American Revolutionary War. He first came to prominence in 1787 with the publication of an account of his travels through Ottoman Egypt and Syria. During the French Revolution, he represented the Anjou Third Estate at the Estates General of 1789 before serving in the National Constituent Assembly. In 1791, he published The Ruins, a philosophical meditation on the rise and fall of civilizations that envisioned a future "General Assembly of Nations". He was also among the earliest proponents of the Christ myth theory.

Imprisoned during the Reign of Terror, Volney travelled to the United States in 1795. A friend of Thomas Jefferson, he aroused the suspicions of President John Adams, who regarded him as a foreign agent, prompting his departure from the country in 1798. After returning to France, he supported the Coup of 18 Brumaire and was appointed to the Senate. He advised Napoleon during the early years of the Consulate but distanced himself after the Concordat with the Catholic Church. In 1808, Napoleon created him Count of the Empire. Following the Bourbon Restoration, Louis XVIII appointed him to the Chamber of Peers.

A member of the Académie Française, the American Philosophical Society, the Asiatic Society, and the Celtic Academy, Volney published studies on ancient chronology and comparative linguistics, and devised a system of phonetic transcription that he described as a "universal alphabet".

Early life

Constantin-François Chassebœuf de La Giraudais was born on 3 February 1757 in Craon. His father, Jacques-René Chassebœuf (1727–1796), was a lawyer descended from a family of judicial officers. His mother, Jeanne Gigault (1728–1759), was the daughter of Joseph Gigault (1688–1771), sieur of La Giraudais, an estate near the Candé barony. The Gigault family lived in a manor house and had relations with members of the Parlement of Brittany in Rennes and wealthy merchants in Nantes.

His mother died in the summer of 1759, when he was two years old. Frail from childhood, he was raised by two superstitious governesses, who instilled in him a fear of ghosts. His relationship with his father was cold and distant, and remained so throughout his life. At the age of seven, he was sent to a small religious boarding school in Ancenis. Like many schoolchildren of his time, he was subjected to corporal punishment by his teachers. He grew particularly close to his mother's family, especially his uncle Louis, whose daughter Charlotte (1766–1864) he married half a century later.

At the age of twelve, Constantin-François entered the Oratorian school at Angers, where he received a solid classical education. He also attended the Jesuit college in Rennes. Known as Boisgirais, he developed an early scepticism toward the historical and religious instruction he received. He became interested in the origins of the Bible and resolved to learn Hebrew in order to produce his own translations. His studious and solitary disposition earned him the nickname "the hermit" among his classmates. One of them, François-Yves Besnard, who remained a lifelong friend, later recalled:

Volney was the only one in the household who never took part in our games, although he would willingly remain a silent spectator for hours on end.

Shortly before his eighteenth birthday, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Angers and asked for legal independence, which was granted by a family council convened in Craon. Living on the income inherited from his mother, he left his native province for Paris in the summer of 1775.

Paris and the Enlightenment

Soon after arriving in Paris, his fragile health led him to abandon the study of law in favour of medicine. For the next three years, he pursued practical medical training at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, situated beside Notre-Dame, where he became acquainted with Jean-Claude Delamétherie and Joseph Louis Proust.

In 1777, he met Cabanis at the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Introduced by Turgot to the salon of Baron d'Holbach, Cabanis in turn presented the young Boisgirais to its host. At d'Holbach's gatherings, held on the Rue Royale-Saint-Roch, he encountered such leading figures of the French Enlightenment as Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Buffon. D'Holbach's atheism and materialism, as expounded in his book The System of Nature, profoundly influenced Boisgirais. In particular, the idea that morality should rely on reason and social necessity rather than superstition remained central to his later thought.

Beginning in the spring of 1778, during Voltaire's triumphant and final return to Paris, Cabanis and Boisgirais also became regular visitors to the salon of Madame Helvétius at Auteuil, where they were even accommodated for a time. Widowed since 1771, Madame Helvétius had lost her only son, who, like them, had been born in 1757 but died in infancy. Both young men having lost their mothers in childhood, she came to regard them almost as adopted sons.

Among the regular guests at Auteuil were Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Antoine Lavoisier, Condorcet, and Malesherbes. Boisgirais also met Benjamin Franklin, a close friend of Madame Helvétius. He may have been initiated into the Les Neuf Sœurs Masonic lodge during this period, although no documentary evidence confirms that he was ever a Freemason.

Before completing his medical studies, Boisgirais abandoned medicine to devote himself to Oriental studies. Already proficient in Ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew, he attended the Arabic course taught at the Collège de France in 1780 by Le Roux Deshauterayes, who introduced him to the works of Thomas Erpenius, Johann Heinrich Michaelis, and Carsten Niebuhr, then the principal authorities in Arabic studies. Convinced that genuine knowledge required direct experience, he resolved to travel to the Near East rather than remain a scholar confined to books.

In the summer of 1782, he withdrew to his uncle's home in Anjou, where he undertook a rigorous programme of physical training to prepare himself for the hardships of travel. It was as he set out on his journey that he adopted the pseudonym Volney, a contraction of Voltaire and Ferney, where the philosopher had spent the last years of his life.

Journey to Egypt and Syria

Volney's journey was motivated by more than scholarly interests or a taste for adventure. According to Jean Gaulmier, he was entrusted with a covert intelligence mission by the services of Comte de Vergennes. This hypothesis is supported by the importance he attached to political and military observations in the work published after his return.

Itinerary (1783–1785)

Volney sailed from Marseille aboard a corvette in December 1782 and landed at Alexandria early in 1783. He then travelled up the Nile to Cairo.

After visiting the Giza pyramid complex, where he spent a night sleeping beneath the stars, he travelled to Suez on the shores of the Red Sea in July. On 26 September 1783, he left Cairo and descended the Nile to Damietta, eager to leave Egypt as the country was being ravaged by famine and the plague.

Volney initially travelled mainly by sea, which he considered both safer and faster. He called at the ports of Jaffa, Acre, Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut, before stopping at Larnaca on the island of Cyprus in November. He then landed at Alexandretta, and travelled south through the interior. He spent the turn of the year 1784 in Aleppo, before continuing to Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast.

In the spring, he crossed the still snow-covered Mount Lebanon and reached the monastery of Dhour El Choueir, where he was received by the Chouerite Basilian monks. From there, he made several excursions to Beirut, Antoura, Deir el Qamar, Jabal al-Druze, Damascus, and Baalbek.

In October, Volney took leave of his Basilian hosts and travelled south along the Jordan River to Jerusalem. Passing through Bethlehem and Jericho, he continued to the Dead Sea before returning westward to Jaffa and then south to Gaza in January 1785. There, he spent several weeks among the Huwaytat, a Palestinian tribe whose customs he described in his published account. Finding the austerity of their pastoral way of life uncongenial, he eventually parted from them.

In March 1785, Volney embarked at Acre with the painter Louis-François Cassas, who supplied him with drawings of the ruins of Palmyra – the setting of The Ruins, which Volney himself never saw – and presented him with a drawing of the Great Sphinx of Giza and the pyramids. After a brief stop at Alexandria, he landed at Marseille in April 1785, bringing to an end a journey that had lasted twenty-eight months.

Return to France

Upon his return, Volney went directly to Paris, where he resumed attending the salon of Baron d'Holbach and the Auteuil circle of Madame Helvétius. Preparing to return to America, Benjamin Franklin introduced him to Thomas Jefferson, who was to succeed him as minister of the United States to France.

In June 1785, Volney returned to Craon. The celebrations held in his honour and the curiosity of the local inhabitants, which at first flattered his vanity, soon became tiresome. His affected and disdainful silence offended some of his childhood friends.

He also learned that his young cousin Charlotte Gigault de La Giraudais, with whom he had long been secretly in love, had married a notary from Nantes. Bitterly disappointed, he sold the estates near Candé that he had inherited from his mother and returned in the autumn to the household of Madame Helvétius. It was at Auteuil that he wrote his first major work, drawing on the comments and stylistic advice of his circle of friends.

Travels in Egypt and Syria received royal censorship approval on 1 February 1787.

Following the principles of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie – both of whom had died during his absence – Volney adopted a multidisciplinary approach. For each of the two countries he studied, he first presented a description of its "physical state", encompassing geology, hydrology, meteorology, and epidemiology, followed by a description of its "political state", combining ethnography, political science, psychology, economics, and agronomy.

The attention he devoted to quantitative observation and factual detail, together with the precision and restraint of his style, contrasted sharply with what he called the "storytellers of systematic reveries". He criticized the tendency of travel writers to embellish their accounts, in particular the idealized depictions of Egypt by Claude-Étienne Savary, to which he opposed an austere realism.

Volney presented a disillusioned and pessimistic portrait of the Near East as a region afflicted by poverty, violence, and ignorance. Deviating from Montesquieu's climate theory, he instead emphasized what he regarded as the destructive effects of Ottoman despotism.

According to Volney, theocracy and tyranny condemned individuals to political and intellectual lethargy, reducing them to members of a fearful, anxious, and resigned community. Beneath its description of the contemporary Near East, the work also contained an implicit critique of the Ancien Régime's absolutism and clericalism.

Reflections on ancient Egypt

Although initially overwhelmed by the Great Pyramid of Giza, Volney's fascination soon gave way to disillusionment. He came to regard it as "the pride of useless luxury", the enduring monument of an ancient injustice: "one cannot but grieve to think that, in order to build a vain tomb, an entire nation had to be oppressed for twenty years."

Volney believed that the Great Sphinx of Giza possessed distinctly negro features. He wrote:

What a subject for meditation, to behold the present barbarism and ignorance of the Copts, descended from the union of the profound genius of the ancient Egyptians and the brilliant spirit of the ancient Greeks; to reflect that this race of black men, today our slaves and the object of our contempt, is the very people to whom we owe our arts, our sciences, and even the use of speech. Finally, to imagine that it is among the nations which proclaim themselves the greatest friends of liberty and humanity that the most barbarous slavery has been sanctioned, and that it has even been questioned whether black men possess the same intelligence as white men.

The mummies and engraved heads discovered by the French expedition to Egypt contradicted this idea, and Volney retracted in a late work published in 1814, entitled New researches on ancient History.

The view that the ancient Egyptians were of sub-Saharan African origin is now largely rejected in light of modern genetic research.

Reception and legacy of Travels in Egypt and Syria

The publication of Volney's Travels in Egypt and Syria was a major literary event. His account was compared to the Histories of Herodotus. An English translation appeared in London as early as 1787, followed by editions in several other European languages. Baron Grimm, whom Volney had met at d'Holbach's salon, presented a copy to Catherine the Great.

Ten years later, members of the French expedition to Egypt unanimously praised the accuracy of Volney's descriptions, maintaining that he was the only traveller who had never misled them. The artist Dominique Vivant Denon wrote:

"Everything is there: form, colour, sensation, all rendered with such truth that, rereading these fine pages a few months later, I believed myself once again returning to Alexandria."

His book established Volney's reputation as a young traveller returning from the East endowed with the secrets of ancient wisdom. His work influenced several Romantic writers, including François-René de Chateaubriand, whose Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem (1811), Alphonse de Lamartine, whose Voyage en Orient (1835), and Gérard de Nerval, whose Voyage en Orient (1851), all refer to Volney.

Considerations on the War of the Turks and the Russians

The success of Travels in Egypt and Syria brought Volney into diplomatic circles. He established contacts with the secretary of the French embassy in Venice, the representative of the King of Spain, and, above all, the American minister Thomas Jefferson.

On 26 February 1788, he published his second work, Considerations on the War of the Turks and the Russians, written in response to the outbreak of the Seventh Russo-Turkish War the previous summer. In it, Volney examined the likely consequences of the conflict and the policy he believed France should adopt in order to safeguard its interests.

He argued that the Ottoman Empire was in irreversible decline and that its attempts at reform were doomed by the obscurantism of its ruling elites. By contrast, Russia, still dismissed by many Europeans as a nation of "Asian barbarians", had steadily increased in power since the reign of Peter the Great.

Convinced that Russia's victory was inevitable, Volney advocated French neutrality as the only realistic policy. He rejected Baron de Tott's proposal to conquer Egypt, arguing that such an undertaking would require France to wage simultaneous wars against Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mamluks, an impossible burden for an already heavily indebted kingdom. France's priority, he maintained, should instead be domestic reform.

In June 1788, Catherine the Great sent Volney a gold medal through the intermediary of Baron Grimm. His Considerations were, however, received rather coolly in French diplomatic circles, where Volney was regarded as an indiscreet outsider who underestimated the dangers posed by a Russian partition of the Ottoman Empire.

The French Revolution

By 1787 and 1788, Volney had become part of several Parisian intellectual circles. He frequented the Hôtel de la Monnaie, where Condorcet and his wife Sophie regularly hosted dinners. Through Jean-Claude Delamétherie, he was introduced to the Masonic milieu and became acquainted with Lalande, founder of The Nine Sisters, and Charles François Dupuis, whose astronomical interpretation of myth inspired Volney's Ruins. During this period, he also met Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Guillotin.

He joined the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, shortly after its foundation in February 1788 by Jacques Pierre Brissot and Abbé Grégoire. His abolitionist views, despite his personal fortune being invested in the commercial economy of Nantes, earned him the hostility of a number of leading figures in his native province.

La Sentinelle du Peuple

On 8 August 1788, Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General to meet the following spring. Volney travelled to Rennes, the parliamentary capital of Brittany, intending to take an active part in the political struggle.

The first issue of La Sentinelle du Peuple ("The Sentinel of the People"), a periodical addressed to all members of the Third Estate of Brittany, appeared in November. Volney urged commoners to resist established authority. He demanded equality before taxation, the abolition of the hereditary transmission of public offices, and voting by head rather than by order, which he regarded as essential if the Third Estate was to prevail at the Estates-General. He also openly attacked one of the province's leading noblemen, the Count of Serrant, who had accused him of being a paid agitator.

The exceptionally harsh winter of 1788–1789 intensified both poverty and popular unrest. After the Rennes riot of January 1789, Volney left for Angers, where he stood for election to the Estates-General. The legal proceedings brought against him by the deeply unpopular Parlement of Brittany, which ordered his pamphlets to be publicly burned, contributed to his election on 19 March 1789. He became one of the nine deputies of the Third Estate representing the Bailiwick of Angers, alongside Louis-Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux.

The Estates General

When Volney arrived at Versailles in mid-April 1789, he was among the best-known of the deputies elected by the Third Estate. Owing to his role in the events at Rennes, he was regarded as an ally by the deputies from Brittany led by Jean-Denis Lanjuinais and Isaac Le Chapelier. He took part in the formation of the Club Breton, the precursor of the Jacobins.

The Estates-General opened on 5 May with a speech by Louis XVI. During the following days, disagreement crystallized around the question of voting, the commoners demanding that the Three Estates of the Realm merge into a single assembly. On 17 June, with the deadlock unresolved, the deputies of the Third Estate adopted a motion proposed by Sieyès, declaring that, since they represented the overwhelming majority of the nation, they constituted themselves as the National Assembly. Three days later, during the Tennis Court Oath, they pledged to draft a Constitution. On 27 June, the king ordered the clergy and the nobility to join the Third Estate in a single assembly.

Melancholic and aloof by temperament, Volney quickly grew weary of debates among deputies whom he regarded as vain. He was not a gifted orator, but he exercised considerable influence behind the scenes. According to Jean Gaulmier, he frequently left it to the tribune Mirabeau to give eloquent expression to ideas that had originated with him.

National Constituent Assembly

Volney was one of the thirty members appointed to the Constitutional Committee, established on 7 July 1789. After the Storming of the Bastille, he regretted the time lost in debates over popular unrest, which he believed distracted the Assembly from organizing France's new institutions. His fellow deputies instead devoted themselves to drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Increasingly frustrated by what he regarded as incoherent methods of deliberation, he also suffered from physical exhaustion.

During the debates on Jacques Necker's financial plan, Volney strongly advocated the abolition of the gabelle, the salt tax that was particularly unpopular in his native province. Alongside Mirabeau, he also supported the nationalization of Church property, which he deemed to be the only solution to the kingdom's enormous budget deficit. Arguing that "the State is all the more powerful when it contains a greater number of proprietors," he favoured the broadest possible subdivision and redistribution of the national property.

In October, the National Constituent Assembly moved from Versailles to Paris, meeting in the Salle du Manège adjoining the Tuileries Palace. Elected one of the Assembly's secretaries on 23 November, Volney resumed his visits to the home of Madame Helvétius. He was a frequent guest of the Duke of Liancourt and regularly met with Talleyrand, Alexandre de Lameth, and Louis Marie de Noailles, aristocratic supporters of the Revolution. He also maintained contacts with the entourage of the Duke of Orléans. During this period, Volney observed that many of his wealthy friends lived in constant fear of riots and peasant unrest.

Volney advised Christophe Saliceti, deputy for the Third Estate of Corsica, and argued before the Assembly in favour of the formal incorporation of Corsica into France, which was approved on 30 November 1789.

In May 1790, during the Constituent Assembly's "Declaration of Peace to the World", Volney advocated the abolition of secret diplomacy so that foreign policy would be determined by the representatives of the nation. He further proposed that France should renounce any war "aimed at enlarging its existing territory." Mirabeau's conduct during the debates surprised him. Suspecting that his friend had entered into secret dealings with the king, he warned him: "Take care, Mirabeau! Yesterday the Capitoline Hill, today the Tarpeian Rock!"

Thereafter, Volney attended the Assembly less regularly, devoting himself instead to writing The Ruins. Increasingly disillusioned with the course of the French Revolution, he regarded the civic cult of the fatherland promoted during the Fête de la Fédération as the prelude to a new form of oppression. Following the death of Mirabeau, he appeared in the Assembly only as a silent observer.

Dispute with Baron Grimm

On 5 December 1791, Le Moniteur universel published a short letter from Volney addressed to "Baron Grimm, Chargé d'Affaires to Her Majesty the Empress of Russia." Regretting Catherine the Great's support for the émigré princes gathering their forces at Koblenz, Volney requested that Grimm return to the Empress the gold medal she had awarded him in 1788 for his Considerations on the War of the Turks and the Russians. He declared that he could not believe the Empress, so greatly admired by the French philosophers, would knowingly "embrace the cause of the unjust and absurd champions of the superstitious and tyrannical barbarism of past centuries."

On 1 January 1792, a vehement reply to Volney's letter was published at Koblenz under Grimm's name. Mocking Volney's vanity and claiming that he had obtained his "little medal" only after repeated solicitations, the pamphleteer defended the émigrés and accused Volney of venality, repeatedly referring to his alleged annual pension of six thousand livres drawn from the royal treasury.

The satire also targeted Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, accusing him of having caused the death of Mirabeau, and ridiculed the entire Auteuil circle, dismissing it as "the lodge of the most ridiculous fools on earth." Volney himself was even blamed for "several fires in Anjou" and "several dozen murders."

The pamphlet attracted relatively little attention, whereas Volney's letter – by publicly distancing himself from one of the Revolution's declared enemies – strengthened his reputation as a patriot.

Misadventure in Corsica

In February 1792, Volney landed at Bastia with Christophe Saliceti in order to conduct agricultural experiments in Corsica. At Corte, he met Lieutenant Napoleon Bonaparte, who accompanied him to Ajaccio, where he introduced Volney to his mother, Letizia Bonaparte.

On 1 May, Volney purchased La Confina, a 550-hectare estate outside Ajaccio, making him the largest landowner in the surrounding area. The property, nicknamed the "Little Indies", cost him 100,000 livres, payable in twelve annual instalments.

Deeply influenced by physiocracy and opposed to overseas colonial expansion, Volney hoped to demonstrate that tropical crops – including oranges, date palms, sugarcane, coffee, cotton, and indigo – could be successfully cultivated in the Mediterranean climate.

His stay in Corsica was also motivated by political ambitions. Soon after his arrival, he concluded that political life on the island was characterized by electoral violence, patronage, family alliances, and corruption. He sought election to the departmental executive, hoping subsequently to enter the National Convention alongside Christophe Saliceti, supported by a newspaper modelled on La Sentinelle du Peuple.

Volney expected the support of Pasquale Paoli, whose cause he had defended before the National Constituent Assembly, but the elderly Corsican leader disapproved of the events of August 1792 and distanced himself from the new French Republic. According to Volney, Paoli intended "to drive out the French with the help of the English, then drive out the English with the Corsicans, and finally subdue the Corsicans through his own party and family."

Paoli worked to discredit Volney by portraying him as both a spy and a heretic. These accusations endangered his personal safety and the future of his estate. Fearing for his life, he fled Corsica in February 1793. Paoli subsequently ordered the "Little Indies" estate to be sold at public auction.

The Reign of Terror

When Volney returned to Paris, one month after the execution of Louis XVI, he found the atmosphere profoundly transformed. France was at war with the First Coalition, while the National Convention was increasingly divided between the Montagnards and the Girondins.

Having incurred substantial debts to finance his Corsican estate, he was unable to pay the first instalment due on the property. Through the intervention of his friend Dominique Joseph Garat, then Minister of the Interior, he obtained a six-month extension on 21 April.

The defection of General Charles François Dumouriez to the Austrian side cast suspicion upon all those associated with the Duke of Orléans. Volney's name was drawn into the affair. In order to protect him, Garat entrusted him with an official observation mission in western France. He was in Nantes in May and Rennes in June, and was therefore absent from Paris during the Insurrection of 31 May – 2 June 1793, which led to the arrest of the Girondin deputies.

The Natural Law, or Catechism of the French Citizen

At the beginning of September 1793, while in Brittany, Volney published a short work entitled La Loi naturelle, ou Catéchisme du citoyen français (The Natural Law, or Catechism of the French Citizen), intended to summarize and popularize the ideas developed in The Ruins. He sought to establish a universal system of morality, governed by principles as rigorous and demonstrable as those of physics and geometry.

This deist and rationalist profession of faith opened with the following definition:

What is the natural law? It is the eternal, immutable, and necessary law by which God governs the universe, and which He himself presents to the senses and the reason of mankind as a common and equal rule, guiding all people, without distinction of nation or sect, toward perfection and happiness.

Imprisonment

Returning to Paris after the enactment of the Law of Suspects, Volney saw arrests multiplying around him and attempted to secure his own safety. On 18 October, the Executive Council proposed that he undertake a study mission to the United States, where his friendship with Thomas Jefferson was expected to be of service to the French Republic.

While preparing for his departure, Volney was arrested on 16 November 1793 by order of the Committee of General Security. The official reason for his imprisonment was his failure to repay the debts he had incurred in Corsica. The extension he had obtained in the spring for the first instalment on his estate had expired, and Garat – dismissed from office and under attack from the Montagnards – was no longer in a position to protect him.

Initially confined in La Force Prison, Volney was transferred on 24 January 1794 to the Belhomme Prison on medical grounds. On 21 February, shortly after his thirty-seventh birthday, he was moved by order of citizen Froidure to the Coignard Prison, a transfer that probably saved him from the guillotine. He was released on 16 September 1794, several weeks after the fall of Robespierre.

The École normale

In October 1794, Volney travelled to the Alpes-Maritimes in order to recover his health, which had been seriously weakened by his imprisonment in Paris. At Nice, he met once again Napoleon Bonaparte, who had recently been promoted to the rank of brigadier general. During a dinner conversation, Bonaparte outlined his plan for the conquest of Italy, more than a year before the beginning of his victorious campaign.

The government soon recalled him to Paris. Ten writers were commissioned by the Committee of Public Instruction to prepare textbooks for use in the new primary schools. Volney was assigned the task of writing a manual explaining the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the Constitution of 1793, although the work was never completed.

Volney was also consulted by André-François Miot de Mélito, Commissioner for External Relations, in his capacity as a specialist on the Ottoman Empire. He published two short works intended for the use of French diplomacy: a Simplification des langues orientales, presenting a method for learning Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish through the Latin alphabet, and Questions de statistique à l'usage des voyageurs, a questionnaire intended to guide a worldwide programme of empirical observation.

When the École normale was established to train teachers who would then be dispersed throughout France, Volney was appointed professor of history. On 20 January 1795, the day the school opened at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in the Jardin des Plantes, he delivered his inaugural lecture.

He began by defining the distinctive nature of history in comparison with the natural sciences. He then considered its moral purpose, its usefulness for the progress of humanity, and the dangers it might also present.

His six lectures outlined a method for reconstructing the past rationally, in the manner of an investigator. He gave priority to immutable written sources over oral traditions, in which "all the whims and voluntary or involuntary aberrations of the understanding unfold." He advocated an interdisciplinary approach, maintaining that geography, economics, linguistics, and the study of religion should all contribute to historical knowledge, while emphasizing the importance of apparently minor details, which often revealed more than the great political events themselves.

These lectures reveal that Volney had abandoned the hope, expressed in The Ruins, that humanity might one day escape the recurring cycle of "calamities and errors" in which civilizations were trapped. The destiny of the human species now appeared to him devoid of any intrinsic meaning.

The École normale closed in May 1795 after only five months of operation. Volney then resumed preparations for his journey to the United States, which had been interrupted by his arrest in 1793. During the weeks preceding his departure, he received a visit from Napoleon Bonaparte. Uncertain about his own future, Bonaparte sought Volney's advice regarding the Ottoman Empire, where he was considering offering his services. Volney discouraged the plan, telling him that France offered the best opportunity for his talents to be recognized.

Achievements

• Commander of the Legion of Honour