Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grâce, baron de Cloots (24 June 1755 – 24 March 1794), better known as Anacharsis Cloots (also spelled Clootz), was a Prussian nobleman who was a significant figure in the French Revolution. Perhaps the first to advocate a world parliament, long before Albert Camus and Albert Einstein, he was a world federalist and an internationalist anarchist. He was nicknamed "orator of mankind", "citizen of humanity" and "a personal enemy of God". American author Herman Melville refers to an "Anacharsis Clootz delegation" as a representation of global humanity in both Moby-Dick (1851), The Confidence-Man, and later in Billy Budd.
Biography
Early life
Born near Kleve, at the castle of Gnadenthal [de], he belonged to a noble Prussian family of Dutch Protestant origin. The young Cloots, heir to a great fortune, was sent to Paris at age eleven to complete his education, and became attracted to the theories of his uncle the abbé Cornelius de Pauw (1739–1799), philosophe, geographer and diplomat at the court of Frederick II of Prussia. His father placed him in the military academy of Berlin, but he withdrew at the age of twenty and travelled through Europe, preaching his revolutionary philosophy and spending his money as a man of pleasure.
Revolution
On the breaking out of the Revolution, Cloots returned in 1789 to Paris, thinking the opportunity favorable for establishing his dream of a universal family of nations. On 19 June 1790 he appeared at the bar of the National Constituent Assembly at the head of thirty-six foreigners, and, in the name of this embassy of the human race, declared that the world adhered to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. After this, he was known as the orator of the human race, by which title he called himself, dropping that of baron, and substituting for his baptismal names the pseudonym of Anacharsis, from Jean-Jacques Barthélemy's famous philosophical romance Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece.
In 1792 he placed 12,000 livres at the disposal of the French Republic for the arming of forty or fifty fighters in the cause of man against tyranny (see French Revolutionary Wars). After the riots of 10 August he became an even more prominent supporter of new ideas, and declared himself "the personal enemy of Jesus Christ", abjuring all revealed religions.
Convention
In the same month he had the rights of French citizenship conferred on him; and, having in September been elected a member of the National Convention, he voted in favor of capital punishment for King Louis XVI, justifying it in the name of the human race, and was an active partisan of the war of propaganda.
Execution
Excluded at the insistence of Maximilien Robespierre from the Jacobin Club, he remained a foreigner in many eyes. When the Committee of Public Safety levelled accusations of treason against the Hébertists, they also implicated Cloots to give substance to their charge of a foreign plot. Although his innocence was manifest, he was condemned and subsequently guillotined on 24 March 1794. He incongruously followed Vincent, Ronsin, Momoro and the rest of the Hébertist leadership to the scaffold, in front of the largest crowd ever assembled for a public execution. Their death was a sort of carnival, a pleasant spectacle according to Michelet's witnesses.
Thought
Cloots was an original political thinker who crafted his own interpretation of the meaning of the French Revolution. He was a proponent of the world state, and he sought to promote a more broad-minded and internationalist understanding of the Revolution's potential. He imagined the institutions of the world state along the lines of those of the French Revolutionary Republic. Cloots's thought was expressed in several works, most importantly in his Bases constitutionnelles de la République du genre humain.
Works
- La Certitude des preuves du mahométisme (London, 1780), published under the pseudonym of Ali-GurBer, in answer to Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier's Certitude des preuves du christianisme
- L'Orateur du genre humain, ou Dépêches du Prussien Cloots au Prussien Herzberg (Paris, 1791)
- La République universelle ou adresse aux tyrannicides (1792).
- Adresse d'un Prussien à un Anglais (Paris, 1790), 52 p.
- Bases constitutionnelles de la République du genre humain (Paris, 1793), 48 p.
- Voltaire triomphant ou les prêtres déçus (178?), 30 p. Attributed to Cloots.
- Discours prononcé à la barre de l'Assemblée nationale par M. de Cloots, du Val-de-Grâce,... à la séance du 19 juin 1790 (1790), 4 p.
Notes
- Doyle, William (1989); The Oxford History of the French Revolution; Clarendon Press. See p. 160: "... Anacharsis Clootz, a wealthy Prussian nobleman, who had left France in 1785 vowing never to return until the Bastille had fallen."
- Bevilacqua, Alexander (2012). "Conceiving the Republic of Mankind: The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots". History of European Ideas. 38 (4): 550–569. doi:10.1080/01916599.2011.648772. ISSN 0191-6599. S2CID 145177201.
- Poulsen, Frank Ejby (2018). A cosmopolitan republican in the French revolution : the political thought of Anacharsis Cloots (Thesis). European University Institute. doi:10.2870/772327.
- Siegfried Weichlein, "Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism, Nationalism", Unity and Diversity in European Culture C. 1800, ed. Tim Blanning and Hagen Schulze (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96.
- Poulsen (2023), p. 41.
- Chapter 27 "Knights and Squires," Moby Dick (1851); Melville, Herman (2017). Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0810111134.
- Galtier, J. (1989). Protestants en révolution. Entrée libre (in French). Labor et Fides. p. 74. ISBN 978-2-8309-0590-8. Retrieved 2023-03-02.
- ^ Chisholm 1911.
- Fremont-Barnes, Gregory, Encyclopedia of the Age of Political Revolutions and New Ideologies, 1760–1815, p. 329, Greenwood Pub. Group 2007
- Siegfried Weichlein, "Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism, Nationalism", Unity and Diversity in European Culture C. 1800, ed. Tim Blanning and Hagen Schulze (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 97.
- Doyle, 1989; p. 270. |"To substantiate the charge of a foreign plot, a clutch of colorful aliens perished with them too, including Clootz, who bade farewell to his beloved human race in front of the biggest crowd ever to surround the guillotine."
- Bevilacqua, Alexander (2012). "Conceiving the Republic of Mankind: The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots". History of European Ideas. 38 (4): 550–569. doi:10.1080/01916599.2011.648772.
References and further reading
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Cloots, De Grâce". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 556. In turn, it cites as references:
- Avenel, Georges (1865), Anacharsis Cloots, l'orateur du genre humain, 2 vols., Paris: reprint Editions Champ Libre, 1976
- H. Baulig's articles in La Révolution française, tome 41 (1901)
- Labbé, François (1999), Anarchasis Cloots, le Prussien francophile. Un philosophe au service de la Révolution française et universelle, Paris, L'Harmattan, coll. l'Allemagne d'ier et d'aujourd'hui, 546 p.
- Mortier, Roland (1995), Anacharsis Cloots ou L'utopie foudroyée, Paris: Stock, 350 p.
- Poulsen, Frank Ejby (2023), The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots: A Proponent of Cosmopolitan Republicanism in the French Revolution, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, doi:10.1515/9783110782547-003.
External links
- "Anarcharsis Cloots Archive," Marxists Internet Archive
- 1755 births
- 1794 deaths
- People from Kleve
- Naturalized citizens of France
- French atheism activists
- Deputies to the French National Convention
- French essayists
- Barons of the Holy Roman Empire
- French religious writers
- French people of Dutch descent
- People from the Duchy of Cleves
- People executed by guillotine during the French Revolution
- German emigrants to France
- Executed Dutch people
- Executed people from North Rhine-Westphalia
- 18th-century French writers
- 18th-century French male writers
- French male essayists
- 18th-century essayists
- 18th-century atheists
- Proto-anarchists