Early life 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 25, 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).
The French Revolution He was heavily influenced by the ideas of Helvetius and Holbach but had little regard for Rousseau. During 1788 he was scathing on the British constitutional set up calling on the French to ignore existing models. The process of election to the Estates General produced a turbulent debate in Brittany over whether the Estates General should accept equality of taxation and Volney mobilized opposition to the defenders of privaledge with his paper "La sentinell du peuple". 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. He escaped the
guillotine because just before officials were sent to fetch him he had been transferred to another prison. He spent some time as a
professor of history at the newly founded
École Normale.
Later life (1825) (division 41), Paris In 1795 he undertook a journey to the United States, where he was accused in 1797 by
John Adams' administration of being a French
spy, sent to prepare for the reoccupation of
Louisiana by France. He returned to France as a consequence of the Adams administration's accusations. The results of his travels took form in his
Tableau du climat et du sol des États-Unis (1803). but sometime during Volney's stay in the United States, he and
Thomas Jefferson entered into a secret arrangement whereby Jefferson agreed to make a new English translation of the work. Volney visited
Monticello for two weeks during June 1796. The two men also met on several occasions at the
American Philosophical Society, of which Volney had been made a member in 1797. Jefferson was President of APS at the time and sponsored Volney's induction into the organization. These meetings provided the two men with ample opportunity to conceive and discuss the
translation project. Jefferson, then serving as
Vice President under
John Adams, appreciated the book's central theme – that empires rise if government allows
enlightened self-interest to flourish. This theme, Jefferson believed, represented an excellent summary of the Enlightenment-based principles upon which the U.S. was founded. However, Jefferson insisted that his translation be published only for certain readers, due to the book's controversial religious content. Jefferson was preparing to make a bid for the Presidency of the United States in 1800; he was worried his
Federalist opponents would attack him as an atheist, if it were known he translated Volney's supposedly heretical book. According to the evidence discovered by the French researcher
Gilbert Chinard (1881-1972), Jefferson translated the invocation plus the first 20 chapters of the 1802 Paris edition of Volney's
Ruins. These first 20 chapters represent a review of human history from the point of view of a post-Enlightenment philosopher. Presumably, Jefferson then became too occupied with the
1800 Presidential campaign and did not have time to finish the last four chapters of the book. In these chapters Volney describes "General Assembly of Nations," a fictionalized world convention wherein each religion defends its version of "the truth" according to its particular holy book. Since no religion is able to scientifically "prove" its most basic assertions, Volney concludes the book with a call for an absolute
separation of church and state: From this we conclude, that, to live in harmony and peace...we must trace a line of distinction between those (assertions) that are capable of verification, and those that are not; (we must) separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities... Since Jefferson did not have time to complete the
translation project, the last four chapters were translated by
Joel Barlow, an American land speculator and poet living in Paris. Barlow's name then became associated with the entire translation, further obscuring Jefferson's role in the project.
Christ myth theory Volney and
Charles-François Dupuis were the first modern writers to advocate the
Christ myth theory, the view that
Jesus had no historical existence. Volney and Dupuis argued that Christianity was an amalgamation of various ancient
mythologies and that Jesus was a mythical character. However, in his version of the Christ Myth theory, Volney allowed for an obscure historical figure whose life was integrated into a solar mythology.
Thomas Jefferson and
Benjamin Franklin were supporters of this theory.
In Egypt and Syria In describing
the Sphinx, he attributed its features and head to be characterized as being
Negro. He further commented that "...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." However, once viewing the mummified remains and more engraved heads, Constantin de Volney would backtrack considerably on his initial position, abandoning his ideas. More exposure, experience and study had allowed him to correct many previous errors in thought. 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.
A Late Marriage Remaining single until 1810, he later married a cousin, Mademoiselle Gigault, with whom he would live "in polite agreement." Since his marriage, he gave up his house on Rue de la
Catherine de La Rochefoucauld. He then acquired a hotel located on the
Rue de Vaugirard, remarkable above all for the pleasantness of a very extensive garden. He remained gruff and sullen to the rest of the world. ==Selected publications==