Guillaume Thomas Raynal

Abbe Raynal
Portrait of William Thomas Raynal adorning the third edition of the History of the Indies .
Activity (s)	Writer
Birth	Lapanouse 1713
Deaths	Passy 1796
Writing language	French

Guillaume Thomas Franois Raynal, born in Lapanouse on 12 April 1713 and died at Passy on 6 March 1796 , is a writer , a thinker and a priest French.

Raynal embraces, after long studies in the Jesuits , the priesthood in 1733 over a desire for social advancement by real conviction. In 1746 he was appointed to the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris , where, to improve his usual, he is also tutor in large families. He does not hesitate to sell to fellow sermons less inspired than he, and triggered a scandal when it discovers that it has accepted the burial of Protestants by passing for Catholics against hard cash. The Abbe Raynal is also very intimate throughout his life to the Protestants.

He fled Saint-Sulpice and began to frequent the salons of Stphane HERTIA then Marie-Therese Geoffrin. He made it known as an apostle of freedom. It is a small fortune by printing his own works he also ensures the flow. He also writes articles for major control of the time as, for example, the Duke of Choiseul , which earned him being named, for services rendered, director of the Mercure de France in 1750. The same year he became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Berlin.

Engraving of his portrait at the top of the third edition of the philosophical and political history and institutions of the European trade in both India From there he proceeded to the court of Frederick II of Prussia and then to that of Catherine II of Russia without stopping ensure the new edition of his book. Allowed to return to France in 1784 , but allowed to return to Paris , he moved to Toulon , then at Marseilles and became the founder of academic awards and charities that will extend the success of his work in major European academies. He refuses to sit at the Estates General in 1789 citing his age. This does not prevent him, two years later to denounce the excesses and the violent turn taken by the Revolution to those revolutionaries who saw him as a founding father. In his letter to the National Assembly dated 31 May 1791 he wrote: "... I talked to the kings of their duties, suffer today I speak to people from their mistakes." His prestige and popularity are such that the revolutionary and scolded dare not make him suffer the same fate as Condorcet. Instead of sending to the guillotine, they prefer to denigrate his remarks by accusing him of senility.

Approached to serve as a member of the Institut de France in 1795 , just months before his death, he pretended to his great age to refuse this promotion.

His work

Portrait of William Thomas Raynal decorated with a map of Virginia

He began publishing his first literary texts in the News, ( one thousand seven hundred forty-seven - in 1755 ) which serve as an introduction to the magazine Correspondence literary, philosophical and critical , performed with Grimm and Diderot. Following the works of politics and history published by order of government as the History of Stadhoudrat ( 1747 ) and the Parliamentary History of England ( 1748 ).

He published numerous books historical or philosophical minor until the release in 1770 , the anonymous first edition of his History of philosophical and political institutions and the European trade in both India encyclopaedia of anti-colonialism in ^eighteenth century. This is one of those "philosophical travels" in vogue at the time, but poorly documented pretext for reflections on "natural law" and biting denunciations of despotism , of clericalism and of colonialism. He does not hesitate to use the collaboration of other writers such as d'Holbach and Diderot, to whom we owe the most successful passages and which will sometimes compare favorably with Voltaire and Rousseau.

Banned in 1772 , the History of the Indies will again be published by the Abbe Raynal in a new edition in 1774 which is immediately put on the Index by the clergy. It was in 1780 he published his third edition of the History of the Indies , even more virulent than the previous two and he implicitly admits as by making him carve his portrait frontispiece (see above). Condemned by the Parliament of Paris , the book is burned by the hangman in public place, which gives it a considerable success.

The History of the Indies was also the occasion of the apologetic letter to the Abbe Raynal Mr. Grimm ( 1781 ) of Diderot. In that letter never sent Diderot, he accused violently Grimm (who had criticized Raynal for revealing his identity in its third edition of the History of the Indies ) to have sold to major: "I do not recognize you more, you have become, without doubt, perhaps, one of the most hidden, but one of the most dangerous anti-philosophical. You live with us, but you hate us. " Diderot, whose share of paternity in the book was probably not unrelated to his indignation, however, was not wrong: the Revolution occurred, Grimm hasten to leave France and to denigrate the Revolution.

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