Anacharsis Cloots

Anacharsis Cloots, engraving by Levachez

Johann Baptist Hermann Maria Baron de Cloots (French: Jean Baptiste Baron de Cloots du Val-de-Grâce ), called Anacharsis Cloots (born June 24, 1755 at Schloss Gnadenthal in Donsbrüggen near Kleve ; † March 24, 1794 in Paris ) a writer, politician and revolutionary of the French Revolution . He was nicknamed the "speaker of the human race" (orateur du genre humain) and was a prominent advocate of the universal validity of human rights.

Life

youth

Cloots was a son of the Dutch-Prussian nobleman Thomas Franziskus de Cloots (also: Clootz), who had left the Protestant Netherlands as a Catholic . His father sent him to church schools in Brussels and Mons as well as to the Paris Collège du Plessis , where, in addition to strictly Catholic teachings, he also got to know the enlightenment ideas of his uncle Abbé Cornelius de Pauw , a diplomat, geographer and philosopher at the court of Frederick the Great . He then went to the military academy in Berlin , but after his father's death he broke off the military career he had begun and settled in Paris at the age of twenty; there he made contact with the intellectual salons and became personally acquainted with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire . In increasing opposition to the church and monarchy, he wrote such writings as the drama Voltaire triomphant ou les prêtres déçus (The triumphant Voltaire or the disappointed priests) or the 1785 reform catalog Voeux d'un Gallophile (wishes of a French friend) .

Ascent

In order to avoid legal prosecution, he already published the work La Certitude des preuves du mahométisme (London 1780, in response to Nicolas Sylvestre Bergier's Certitude des preuves du christianisme of 1767) under the pseudonym Ali-GurBer . During the 1780s he went on extensive educational tours across Europe promoting his views. After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, he returned to Paris. He gave up his title of nobility and his Christian first name and from then on called himself Anacharsis after the natural philosopher of the sixth century BC, whom a novel by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy had popularized. He wrote for newspapers such as La Chronique de Paris , Le Patriote français , Les Annales patriotiques or Les Révolutions de France and became known for his public speeches. On July 19, 1790, Cloots entered the Paris National Assembly , accompanied by 36 citizens who were dressed as a "deputation of the human race" ( ambassade du genre humain ) from a theater fund and were supposed to testify that the world of the declaration of human and civil rights from 26 August 1789 will make allegiance. They were hired by Cloots for 12 francs each. Since that spectacle, Cloots has been one of the most prominent political figures in Paris. From then on he called himself the "speaker of the human race" ( orateur du genre humain ); In 1791 he published the work L'Orateur du genre humain, ou Dépêches du Prussien Cloots au Prussien Herzberg (The orator of the human race or communications of the Prussian Cloots to the Prussian Herzberg) .

politics

Cloots received French citizenship in August 1792 and was elected to the National Convention as a member of the Oise department in September . In the conflict between the French Republic and the monarchies of Europe, he was a decisive representative of the warring party, provided money for military armaments himself and, in 1793, demanded the execution of the deposed King Louis XVI. As early as 1792, one of his works was entitled La république universelle ou adresse aux tyrranicides - l'an quatre de la rédemption (The world republic or acclamation to the slayer of tyrants - In the year 4 of redemption) . With his revolutionary utopias for the establishment of a world republic, Cloots came more and more clearly into fundamental contradiction with the majority of the revolutionaries; his views finally brought him close to the splinter faction of the Hébertists , whose cult of reason he also represented. That Cloots renounced all religion on August 10, 1792 or August 27, 1792 and declared himself to be the "personal enemy of Jesus " is an unproven and often repeated false claim. A high point of his political career was the ceremony he helped organize on November 10, 1793 in the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral , which had been transformed into a “temple of reason and freedom”.

execution

At the end of 1793, the open attacks on Cloots began as part of the “Great Terror” . On December 12, 1793, the revolutionary leader Maximilien de Robespierre , who even suspected Cloots of espionage on behalf of the Prussian king, reached his expulsion from the Jacobin Club . Cloots' defensive text Appel au genre humain (Call to the human race) had no effect, his political and religious radicalism, his wealth and his origins were his undoing. On December 26, 1793, he was also expelled from the convention as a foreigner; after his arrest on December 27, 1793, he was imprisoned in the Paris Saint-Lazare prison. Cloots was handed over to the Revolutionary Tribunal along with the Hébertists on March 21, 1794 , which sentenced him to death in a four-day show trial . On March 24, 1794 (4th Germinal of the year II according to the revolutionary calendar) he died under the guillotine .

Anacharsis Cloots received a late honor from Joseph Beuys , who revered him as a free spirit and cosmopolitan and called himself "JosephAnacharsis Clootsbeuys" at times.

swell

• Jean Baptiste, Baron de Cloots du Val-de-Grâce. Anacharsis Cloots: Oeuvres . 3 vols. Munich and Paris 1980 (reprint).
• Anacharsis Cloots: Écrits révolutionnaires. 1790-1794 . ed. v. Michèle Duval. Paris 1979.

literature

• Georges Avenel: Anacharsis Cloots. L'orateur du genre humain. Paris! France! Univers! . Paris 1976 (repr. Of 1865).
• Selma Stern: Anacharsis Cloots, the speaker of the human race. A contribution to the history of the Germans in the French Revolution . Berlin 1914
• Bernd Schminnes: Anacharsis Cloots - The speaker of the human race. From baron to visionary revolutionary . In: Bernd Schminnes (ed.): Anacharsis Cloots - The speaker of the human race . Kleve 1988 (exhibition catalog), pp. 9–38.
• Roland Mortier: Anacharsis Cloots ou l'utopie foudroyée . Paris 1995.
• François Labbé: Anacharsis Cloots. Le Prussien Francophile . Paris 1999.
• Francis Cheneval: Cosmopolitan Republicanism - explained using the example of Anacharsis Cloots . In: Journal for Philosophical Research . Issue 3, 2004.
• Emanuel readers :  Cloots, Johann Baptist v. In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1876, pp. 337-339.
• Jürgen Storost: Anacharsis Cloots. On the universality of French in the 18th century . In: Jürgen Storost: In memoriam Vladimiro Macchi . Romanistischer Verlag, Bonn 2008, pages 214–227.
• Heiner Jestrabek: The outcome of the siècle des Lumières, the century of the Enlightenment. Anacharsis Cloots, the "speaker for all humanity". Freedom tree edition Spinoza, Reutlingen 2016 . ISBN 978-3-922589-61-7 .
• Bernd Schminnes: "If a slave exists in any part [of the earth] ... my freedom is not complete ..." Anacharsis Cloots and the universal validity of human rights . Duisburg 2017 (Xanten lectures on the history of the Lower Rhine, Institute for Lower Rhine Cultural History and Regional Development at the University of Duisburg-Essen, H. 59)

Web links

Wikisource: Anacharsis Cloots  - Sources and full texts

Commons : Anacharsis Cloots  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Lars Schneider: Cloots short biography
• On the name Anacharsis ; and its meanings in the history of philosophy and literature
• Anacharsis Cloots on the universality of French in the 18th century. Vox Romanica 64 (2005): 110-120

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. Bernd Schminnes: "If a slave exists in any part [of the earth] ... my freedom is not complete ..." Anacharsis Cloots and the universal validity of human rights . Duisburg 2017, pp. 60–79
2. ↑ See Guido de Werd : Foreword, in: Bernd Schminnes (Ed.): Anacharsis Cloots. The orator of the human race. Boss, Kleve 1988, p. 7.