Constantin François de Chassebœuf,çoisdeChassebœ comte de Volney (3 February 175725 April 1820) was a French philosopher, abolitionist, writer, orientalist, and politician. He was at first surnamed Boisgirais after his father's estate, but afterwards assumed the name of Volney (which he had created as a contraction of Voltaire and Ferney).
Life
Early life and the French Revolution
Volney was born at Craon, Anjou (today in Mayenne), of a noble family. His great-grandfather, son of a royal bailiff, was himself a notary and had a surgeon brother. His grandfather, François Chasseboeuf, lawyer, public prosecutor of the inhabitants acted as mayor; he took the title in 1741 . He lost his mother, Jeanne Gigault, daughter of the Sieur de la Giraudaie ( Candé ) at the age of two and was brought up far from his father, Jacques-René Chasseboeuf, seneschal of the priory of Saint-Clément de Craon – who died as a judge - district president, on April 25th, 1796 at 68 years old, with whom he never got along. His father remarried to Marie-Renée Humfray, who took care of the orphan. Initially interested in law and medicine, he went on to study classical languages at the University of Paris, and his Mémoire sur la Chronologie d'Hérodote (on Herodotus) rose to the attention of the Académie des Inscriptions and of the group around Claude Adrien Helvétius. Soon after, he befriended Pierre Jean George Cabanis, the Marquis de Condorcet, the Baron d'Holbach, and Benjamin Franklin.
He embarked on a journey to the East in late 1782 and reached Egypt, where he spent nearly seven months. He then lived for nearly two years in Greater Syria, in what today is Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, in order to learn Arabic. In 1785 he returned to France, where he spent the next two years compiling his notes and writing his Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (1787) and Considérations sur la guerre des Turcs et de la Russie (1788).
He was a member both of the Estates-General and of the National Constituent Assembly after the outbreak of the French Revolution. In 1791 his essay on the philosophy of history appeared, Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires. It conveys a vision predicting the union of all religions through the recognition of the common truths underlying them all.
Volney tried to put his politico-economic theories into practice in Corsica, where in 1792 he bought an estate and made an attempt to cultivate colonial produce. He was imprisoned during the Jacobin Club triumph, but escaped the guillotine. He spent some time as a professor of history at the newly founded École Normale.
Volney was a deist.
Negro Egypt
He testified in particular to the Africanity of the ancient Egyptians. In describing the Sphinx, he attributed to its features and a head characterized as being Negro:
“But coming back to Egypt, the fact that it returns to history offers many reflections to philosophy. What a subject for meditation, to see the current barbarism and ignorance of the Copts (mestizo descended from the Greeks and the Egyptians), resulting from the alliance of the deep genius of the Egyptians and the brilliant spirit of the Greeks; to think that this race of black men, today our slave and the object of our contempt, is the very one to whom we owe our arts, our sciences and even the use of speech. Finally, to imagine that it is in the midst of peoples who call themselves the most friends of freedom and humanity that the most barbaric of slaveries has been sanctioned and questioned whether black men have an intelligence of species of white men!"
His story, the Voyage to Egypt and Syria had earned its author the suffrage of Empress Catherine II of Russia, who sent him a gold medal as a token of her satisfaction; it was in 1787.
Later life
In 1795 he undertook a journey to the United States, where he was accused (1797) by John Adams' administration of being a French spy sent to prepare for the reoccupation of Louisiana by France and then to the West Indies. Consequently, he returned to France. The results of his travels took form in his Tableau du climat et du sol des États-Unis (1803).
He was not a partisan of Napoleon Bonaparte, but, being a moderate Liberal, was impressed into service by the First French Empire, and Napoleon made him a count and put him into the senate. After the Bourbon Restoration he was made a Peer of France by Louis XVIII in 1814, upon recognition of his hostility towards the Empire. Chassebœuf became a member of the Académie française in 1795. In his later years he helped to found oriental studies in France, learning Sanskrit from the British linguist Alexander Hamilton, whom he had helped to protect during the Napoleonic era.