Guillaume-Thomas Raynal

Guillaume-Thomas Raynal , known as the abbot Raynal , born with Lapanouse de Sévérac in Rouergue, the April 12th 1713 and died in Passy the March 6th 1796, is a writer and thinker French.

Biography

Guillaume-Thomas Raynal embraces, after long studies at the Jésuite S, the priesthood in 1733 more per desire of social advancement that by real conviction. In 1746, it is named with the church Saint-Sulpice with Paris where, to improve his ordinary, it is also Précepteur in big families. He does not hesitate either to make himself guilty of Simonie by selling sermons to fellow-members less inspired than him, but he starts a scandal when it is discovered that he agreed to bury Protestants by making them pass for Catholique S against sounding and stumbling currency. Raynal will be besides extremely related throughout its life to the Protestants.

He flees Saint-Sulpice and starts to attend the living rooms, like that of Claudine de Tencin or Marie-Therese Geoffrin, where he makes known himself as apostle of freedom. He constitutes a small fortune by printing itself his works of which he also ensures the flow. He also writes works of order for the large ones of the time like, for example the duke of Choiseul, which will be worth to him to be named, for rendered services, director of the Mercure de France in 1750.

Having made at the head appear an engraving of its portrait of the third edition of sound History of the two Indies which is equivalent to a recognition of the work like writing by him, it is then obliged to flee in 1781. It leaves France for the Suisse where it makes set up a monument with the glory of freedom. From there, it passes to the court of Frederic II of Prussia then to that of Catherine II of Russia without ceasing taking care of the republication of its work. Authorized to return in France in 1784, but prohibited of stay to Paris, it settles with Toulon, then with Marseilles and becomes founder of academic prices and benevolence which will prolong the success of its work in the large European academies. In 1789, it calls upon, to refuse to sit at the General states, its great age which will not prevent it, two years to later denounce excesses and the violent turn taken by the Révolution, with these revolutionists who saw in him a founding father, in his Lettre with the National Assembly addressed the May 31st 1791: “… I spoke to the kings about their duties, suffer that today I speak to the people about his errors. ” Its prestige and its popularity are such as the revolutionists thus tancés will not dare to make him undergo the same fate as with Condorcet. Instead of sending it to the guillotine, they will prefer to disparage its intervention by showing it of senility.

Elected official member of the Institute of France in 1795, a few months before his death, it will pretext of his great age to refuse this promotion.

Its work

It starts to publish its first texts in New arts persons , (1747 - 1755) who will be used as introduction to the review Correspondance literary, philosophical and critical , carried out with Grimm and Diderot, as well as works of policy and history on ordering of the government like the Histoire of Stadhoudérat (1747) and the Histoire of the Parliament of England (1748).

It publishes many works Historiques or Philosophiques of less importance to the exit, in 1770, of the first anonymous edition of sound philosophical and political Histoire of the establishments and the trade of Europeans in the two Indies , true encyclopedia of the anticolonialism at the 18th century. It is about one of these “philosophical voyages” to the mode at the time, slightly documented but pretext with reflections on the “natural law” and corrosive denunciations of the Despotisme and the clergy as well as Colonialisme. He does not hesitate to resort to the collaboration of other writers such as D' Holbach or Diderot with which one owes the more successful passages and which will sometimes advantageously make it compare with Voltaire or Rousseau.

Prohibited in 1772, the Histoire of the two Indies will be again published by the Raynal abbot in a new edition in 1774 which is immediately put at the Index by the clergy. It is in 1780 that it publishes its third edition of the Histoire of the two Indies , even more virulent than the two preceding ones and than it acknowledges implicitly like him. Condemned by the Parliament of Paris, the work is burned by the torturer in public place, which ensures a considerable success to him.

The Histoire of the two Indies was also the occasion of the apologetic Lettre of the Raynal abbot to Mr Grimm (1781) of Diderot. In this letter that Diderot sent forever, it violently shows Grimm, which had criticized Raynal to have revealed its identity in its third edition of the Histoire of the two Indies , to be sold with large: “I do not recognize you any more; you became, without you to perhaps doubt it, one the most hidden of, but one of the most dangerous antiphilosophes. You live with us, but you hate us. ” Diderot, whose share of paternity in the work was undoubtedly not foreign with its indignation, was not however wrong: the Revolution which has occurred, Grimm will hasten to leave France and to disparage the Revolution.

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