Constantin-François Chassebœuf

Constantin-François Chassebœuf, Count Volney (Craon, 1757 – Paris, 1820), was a French writer, philosopher, orientalist and politician. Heir to the rationalism of Helvétius and Condorcet, he combined the study of ancient civilisations with a critique of religion and political inequality, which makes him a notable figure of revolutionary thought.

He first studied law and then medicine, and in Paris he frequented the salons of Madame Helvétius at Auteuil and of Baron d'Holbach, where he met Cabanis, Condorcet, Diderot and Benjamin Franklin. These friendships strengthened his materialism and atheism. After studying Arabic, he travelled through Egypt, Syria and Palestine between 1782 and 1785, and later published an account of the journey in 1788. Around that time he had adopted the pen name Volney, a blend of Voltaire and Ferney.

During the Revolution he was elected to represent the Third Estate at the Estates General of 1789 and served as secretary of the National Constituent Assembly. In 1791 he published The Ruins, a meditation on the rise and fall of empires that imagines a general assembly of free and equal nations. Its tolerant atheism and its defence of liberty led to its place on the Catholic Church's Index of prohibited books. During the Terror he was imprisoned, and in 1795 he travelled to the United States, where he befriended Thomas Jefferson and aroused the suspicions of John Adams.

He returned to France and initially supported Napoleon, who made him a count, though he distanced himself after the Concordat. Under Louis XVIII he sat in the Chamber of Peers without abandoning his liberal convictions. His scholarly work includes a study of Herodotus's chronology (1781), New Researches on Ancient History (1814) and writings on Hebrew. His influence was felt in the historical criticism of religion and in nineteenth-century progressive thought, and he was also one of the earliest proponents of the Christ myth theory.