Guillaume-Thomas Raynal

French historian and philosopher

• Born: April 12, 1713
• Birthplace: Saint-Geniez, France
• Died: March 6, 1796
• Place of death: Passay, France

As the animating force behind one of the most influential works of scholarship of the eighteenth century, Raynal helped to define Enlightenment-era critiques of political, economic, and social institutions. His history of European settlements, trade, and commerce in the East and West Indies was encyclopedic in its discussion of European establishments in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as their consequences.

Early Life

The early life of Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (gee-yohm-toh-mah ray-nahl) is not well documented beyond the identities of his parents, Guillaume Raynal, a merchant, and Catherine de Girels, whose father was a government official. Educated in the Jesuit order, he taught humanities and theology at Jesuit centers in Toulouse and was on the verge of taking his final vows when he left the order and ventured to Paris in 1747. His brief association there with the parish of Saint-Sulpice ended because of his questionable ecclesiastical practices, so Raynal made political contacts and pursued his career in letters.

Several popular historical works, including histories of the Dutch stadtholders and the English parliament, brought him attention and financial reward, and in 1750 he became editor of the influential journal Mercure de France. Raynal’s emerging reputation made him popular in Parisian social circles, won him the support of Voltaire and other intellectuals, and earned him membership in Berlin’s Academy of Sciences and Letters and in the Royal Society of London.

Life’s Work

Guillaume-Thomas Raynal was the primary author of Histoire philosophique et politique, des établissemens et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1772-1774; Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the europeans in the East and West Indies, 1777), a multivolume exploration of European expansion and imperialism in the East Indies and the West Indies, as Asia and the Americas, respectively, were known at the time. One of the several most popular and influential works of the eighteenth century, this collaborative venture appeared in three major editions and countless printings between 1770 and 1781. Like Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie: Ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (1751-1772; Encyclopedia, 1965), many of whose contributors also collaborated on the Histoire, the Histoire was a laboratory of Enlightenment ideas and concerns, with an agenda of opposing tyranny and ignorance. The Histoire, however, was more thematic in comparing the experiences of European nations in the pursuit of global commerce both in Asia and the New World. Raynal focused on the methods by which colonies and trading stations were established, the impact of colonialism on indigenous cultures, and the effects of imperialism on European countries. He championed eighteenth century ethnocentric perspectives that celebrated Europe’s ascendancy and the benefits of European culture for indigenous societies. Although he gave considerable hearing to the debate about the virtues of “primitive” culture versus civilization and he expressed humanitarian concerns about various societies, the perspective of the Histoire was clearly Eurocentric.

The Jesuit-trained Raynal embraced progressive Enlightenment ideals, even though the various editions of the Histoire and several of his minor works betrayed many shifts and inconsistencies in his positions. He shared the popular ideology of the French economists known as the Physiocrats in advocating free trade, the elimination of commercial monopolies, and the advantages of free labor over slavery. Indeed, while Raynal came to represent a gradual approach to emancipation, the Histoire was viewed by contemporaries as an oracle of the antislavery movement. Raynal championed cultivation in Africa as a way of eliminating slavery in the Caribbean. After Montesquieu’s De l’ésprit des loix (1748; The Spirit of the Laws, 1750), Raynal’s Histoire was considered by many the most relevant discussion of slavery and abolition.

Raynal warned that the alternative to amelioration of the condition of blacks in the colonies would be a slave uprising that would lead to reprisals and destruction. Yet Raynal’s increasingly radical solution to slavery did not continue long past his third edition. By 1785, the voices of Denis Diderot and others were no longer speaking in the pages of the Histoire; Raynal had submitted to the influence of Victor-Pierre Malouet, an associate and colonial official. In an essay he wrote about the administration of Saint-Domingue, Raynal’s program better reflected his own attitude toward blacks, whom he had come to believe were happier as slave laborers than as victims of their own barbaric and hostile society in Africa. Caribbean agricultural products could be cultivated only by blacks, and until they could produce among themselves an intellectual such as Montesquieu, blacks were closer to humanity as slaves than as inhabitants in their own lands.

While he was generally sympathetic to the Jesuits, some of Raynal’s harshest criticisms were leveled at the claims of religious systems, such as the Catholic Church’s doctrine of papal infallibility, which he felt had led to intolerance and fanaticism. A foe of the extremes of political absolutism and popular government, he seemed to have preferred some form of constitutional monarchy. As much as any single literary production, Raynal’s Histoire influenced the advocates of reform and even revolution on both sides of the Atlantic, but the work was not without criticism. Thomas Paine questioned Raynal’s understanding of conditions in colonial North America and suggested that some of Raynal’s words were drawn from Paine’s Common Sense (1776). Also, in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson took issue with Raynal’s claim that America had yet to produce a notable poet, mathematician, artist, or scientist.

The monarchy’s reaction to the publication of the Histoire was increasingly severe. The second edition was condemned by the King’s Council, and the edition of 1780, with its challenges to monarchy much influenced by Diderot, was burned by the public executioner. Forced to flee, Raynal spent his exile from 1781 to 1784 in Prussia and Switzerland. Still forbidden to return to Paris, he spent the next years in Rouergue, Montpellier, Toulon, and Marseille, where he was elected to the Estates-General in 1789. Refusing this honor, he ended his exile from Paris in 1791, using the opportunity to criticize the French Revolution’s excesses and popular tyranny and offer, in vain, a plea for moderation. In 1795, shortly before his death, he was elected to the Institute of France.

Significance

Through his literary roles, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal was a magnetic fixture in the Enlightenment world of letters and political maneuvering, but it was through his Histoire that he became one of the most influential figures of the eighteenth century. In its own day the Histoire was as important a critique of the Old Regime as Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social: Ou, Principes du droit politique (1762; A Treatise on the Social Contract: Or, The Principles of Politic Law, 1764; better known as The Social Contract). Raynal’s work was timely because it crystallized the debates about Europe’s imperial activity and promulgated an ideology that was in step with contemporary economic notions. Contemporaries praised Raynal as a leading antislavery advocate, and the Histoire was indeed a key treatise in the abolitionist movement in spite of Raynal’s later ruminations about blacks. All in all, Raynal gave his age a mirror with which to see its progress and its contradictions.

Bibliography

Canizares-Esquerra, Jorge. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. This study enlists Raynal in the transatlantic cultural exchange that attempted to interpret the New World and shows how the Histoire contributed to this dialogue.

Duchet, Michele. Anthropology and History in the Century of Enlightenment. Paris: François Maspero, 1971. An important work that discusses Raynal’s role in the development of a colonial ideology that undercut European imperialism and slavery.

Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500-c. 1800. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. This comparative study considers Raynal’s Histoire one of the last major works to develop a theory of empire.

Seeber, Edward. Anti-Slavery Opinion in France During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937. Although dated, this is still a worthy survey of Raynal’s position in the antislavery debate of the eighteenth century.

Wolpe, Hans. Raynal and His War Machine. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957. One of the few analytical monographs on Raynal, this study also traces changes in the several major editions of the Histoire.