Volney

Volney, CONSTANTIN FRANÇOIS CHASSEBŒUF, COMTE DE, was born at Craon in Mayenne, 3d February 1757. He lost his mother at two, and his youth was solitary, taciturn, and joyless, his health feeble. He studied at Paris medicine, history, and the oriental languages, adopted the name of Volney for that of Chassebœuf, and travelled in Egypt and Syria (1783-87), publishing his Voyage (2 vols. 1787), one of the most exact and valuable works of the kind ever published, all personal details being eliminated 'to economise the time of readers'—a circumstance unique in the literature of its class. Volney was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1789. A Liberal in politics and religion alike and a fast friend of real liberty, he was too honest and outspoken for the times, and was thrown into prison, from which he was freed only after the downfall of Robespierre. His reputation chiefly rests on his famous work, Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les Révolutions des Empires (1791), a characteristic philosophe's essay on the philosophy of history. He filled the chair of History in the short-lived École Normale, and lived in the United States (1795-98), collecting the materials for his Tableau du Climat et du Sol (2 vols. 1803). In his absence he had been elected to the Institute, and soon after he was admitted to the Academy. Napoleon gave him a seat in the senate, and made him Count, and Commander of the Legion of Honour; Louis XVIII. made him a peer. Almost his latest writing, Histoire de Samuel, Inventeur du Sacre des Rois (1819), shows all his anti-religious bias, and his acuteness of mind, and at the same time all those 18th-century limitations of which he was happily unconscious. Volney died at Paris, 25th April 1820. His Œuvres Complètes fill 8 vols. (1821). See E. Berger's Étude (1852), and Sainte-Beuve in Causeries du Lundi, vol. vii.