Born near
Kleve, at the castle of
Gnadenthal [
de], he belonged to a noble Prussian family of Dutch Protestant origin.[5] The young Cloots, heir to a great fortune, was sent to Paris at age eleven to complete his education, and became attracted to the theories of his uncle the abbéCornelius de Pauw (1739–1799), philosophe, geographer and diplomat at the court of
Frederick II of Prussia. His father placed him in the
military academy of
Berlin, but he withdrew at the age of twenty and travelled through Europe, preaching his revolutionary philosophy and spending his money as a
man of pleasure.[6]
Revolution
On the breaking out of the Revolution, Cloots returned in 1789 to Paris, thinking the opportunity favorable for establishing his dream of a universal family of nations. On 19 June 1790 he appeared at the bar of the
National Constituent Assembly at the head of thirty-six foreigners, and, in the name of this embassy of the human race, declared that the world adhered to the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. After this, he was known as the orator of the human race, by which title he called himself, dropping that of baron, and substituting for his baptismal names the pseudonym of
Anacharsis, from
Jean-Jacques Barthélemy's famous philosophical romance Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece.[6]
In the same month he had the rights of French citizenship conferred on him; and, having in September been elected a member of the
National Convention, he voted in favor of
capital punishment for
KingLouis XVI, justifying it in the name of the human race, and was an active partisan of the war of
propaganda.[6]
Execution
Excluded at the insistence of
Maximilien Robespierre from the
Jacobin Club, he remained a foreigner in many eyes. When the
Committee of Public Safety levelled accusations of treason against the
Hébertists, they also implicated Cloots to give substance to their charge of a foreign plot. Although his innocence was manifest, he was condemned and subsequently
guillotined on 24 March 1794.[8] He incongruously followed
Vincent,
Ronsin,
Momoro and the rest of the Hébertist leadership to the scaffold, in front of the largest crowd ever assembled for a public execution.[9] Their death was a sort of carnival, a pleasant spectacle according to
Michelet's witnesses.
Thought
Cloots was an original political thinker who crafted his own interpretation of the meaning of the French Revolution. He was a proponent of the world state, and he sought to promote a more broad-minded and internationalist understanding of the Revolution's potential. He imagined the institutions of the world state along the lines of those of the French
Revolutionary Republic. Cloots's thought was expressed in several works, most importantly in his Bases constitutionnelles de la République du genre humain.[10]
Works
La Certitude des preuves du mahométisme (
London, 1780), published under the pseudonym of Ali-GurBer, in answer to
Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier's Certitude des preuves du christianisme
L'Orateur du genre humain, ou Dépêches du Prussien Cloots au Prussien Herzberg (Paris, 1791)
La République universelle ou adresse aux tyrannicides (1792).
Adresse d'un Prussien à un Anglais (Paris, 1790), 52 p.
[1]
Bases constitutionnelles de la République du genre humain (Paris, 1793), 48 p.
[2]
Voltaire triomphant ou les prêtres déçus (178?), 30 p. Attributed to Cloots.
[3]
Discours prononcé à la barre de l'Assemblée nationale par M. de Cloots, du Val-de-Grâce,... à la séance du 19 juin 1790 (1790), 4 p.
[4]
References
Notes
^Doyle, William (1989);
The Oxford History of the French Revolution; Clarendon Press. See p. 160: "... Anacharsis Clootz, a wealthy Prussian nobleman, who had left France in 1785 vowing never to return until the Bastille had fallen."
^Siegfried Weichlein, "Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism, Nationalism", Unity and Diversity in European Culture C. 1800, ed.
Tim Blanning and
Hagen Schulze (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96.
^Siegfried Weichlein, "
Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism, Nationalism", Unity and Diversity in European Culture C. 1800, ed. Tim Blanning and Hagen Schulze (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 97.
^Doyle, 1989; p. 270. |"To substantiate the charge of a foreign plot, a clutch of colorful aliens perished with them too, including Clootz, who bade farewell to his beloved human race in front of the biggest crowd ever to surround the guillotine."
Avenel, Georges (1865), Anacharsis Cloots, l'orateur du genre humain, 2 vols., Paris: reprint Editions Champ Libre, 1976
H. Baulig's articles in La Révolution française, tome 41 (1901)
Labbé, François (1999), Anarchasis Cloots, le Prussien francophile. Un philosophe au service de la Révolution française et universelle, Paris, L'Harmattan, coll. l'Allemagne d'ier et d'aujourd'hui, 546 p.
Book review by Annie Duprat, «Anarchasis Cloots, le Prussien francophile. Un philosophe au service de la Révolution française et universelle», in Annales historiques de la Révolution française, Numéro 324, [En ligne], mis en ligne le : 10 avril 2006. URL :
[5]. Consulté le 21 octobre 2006.
Mortier, Roland (1995), Anacharsis Cloots ou L'utopie foudroyée, Paris: Stock, 350 p.