Lyricist in Britain; Empiricist in France

Abstract

In the decade following the outbreak of the French Revolution Constantin-François Volney was one of the most translated French writers. His 1791 Les Ruines: ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires was a major influence on British radical thought, undergoing three translations, one with the help of Thomas Jefferson, and multiple editions by 1800.¹ The chapter ‘Le nouveau siècle’ in particular was frequently reprinted in British radical journals, along with his 1793 Law of Nature or Catechism for the French Citizen. Yet, as Alexander Cook has argued, Volney’s influence has generally been downplayed, partly because of a prevailing tendency to emphasise the indigenous roots of British radicalism that steer away from the perceived excesses of the French Revolution.² As Cook notes, this also reflects a division of labour between literary scholars and intellectual historians. The former have tended to emphasise the lyrical and romantic poetics of the ruin motif; the latter Volney’s anticlerical and atheistic interpretation of religion as the expression of an underlying solar myth.