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1890 Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires: and the Law of Nature. This book was published for the first time in 1793, under the title of the French Citizen's Catechism. Sample of contents: Journey; Reverie; Apparition; Exposition; Conditi.
Volney was once as influential as Tom Paine, and the author of one of the most popular works of the French Revolutionary era. The Ruins of Empires makes an argument for popular sovereignty, couched in the alluring and accessible form of an Oriental dream-tale. A favourite of both Thomas Jefferson, who translated it, and the young Abraham Lincoln, the Ruins advances a scheme of radical, utopian politics premised upon the deconstruction of all the world's religions. It was widely celebrated by radicals in Britain and America, and exercised an enormous influence on poets from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Walt Whitman for its indictments of tyranny and priestcraft. Volney instead advocates a return to natural precepts shorn of superstition, set out in his sequel, the Catechism of Natural Law. These days Volney enjoys a high profile in African-American Studies as a proponent of Black Egyptianism.
This is the first modern edition of The Ruins in English, making the work available to students, scholars and the wider reading public interested in eighteenth-century literature, travel writings, religious ideas and political thought. This edition is preceded by the editor’s introduction that covers the entire career of Volney and analyses the work from a historical perspective. The Ruins, first published in 1791, was translated into English, German, and Dutch within ten years. Volney’s writing provides an invaluable window into the historical anxieties of intellectuals at the beginning of the French Revolution. The Ruins is an exemplary Enlightenment work on history, religion and revolutions, a work of stunning erudition born within the context of anxieties built into the eighteenth-century view of the history of European ‘civilization’. It testifies to the eighteenth-century European intellectuals’ historical concerns about their society’s future during emerging modernity. This book will serve to be a handy and important primary source reading for upper-year courses on the French Revolution, history of orientalism and the Enlightenment.
One of the most common scenes in Augustan and Romantic literature is that of a writer confronting some emblem of change and loss, most often the remains of a vanished civilization or a desolate natural landscape. Ruins and Empire traces the ruin sentiment from its earliest classical and Renaissance expressions through English literature to its establishment as a dominant theme of early American art.