Radical Enlightenment: The Strange Power of Constantin de Volney’s Les Ruines, ou, révolutions des empires (1791)
摘要
Introduction: Les Ruines' Strange PowerIn Constantin-François Chassebeuf de Volney's Les Ruines, ou, révolutions des empires (1791; English translation 1792) a narrator wanders through ancient ruins and comes across a 'Genius' who takes him into outer space, presenting him with a vision of all the peoples of the world rejecting religion in favor of 'the principles of individual happiness and of public prosperity'. 1For contemporary readers, Les Ruines is an obscure, even strange work.In Th e Gothic Sublime (1994), Vijay Mishra labels it 'odd', adding that it is '[o]ne of the disturbing books of the revolutionary period'. 2 And a 2008 blogger described it as 'one of the strangest in the genre, and a good example of just how bizarre Revolution-era books could be'. 3 In large part, Les Ruines consists of long-winded descriptions of massive ruined landscapes and bombastic philosophical disputation.Moreover, it is a bewildering collision of diff erent genres: medieval dream vision; radical tract; atheist or deist polemic; travel-report; science-fi ction novel; universal history.While it addresses the implications of the 1789 French Revolution, it is set in Palmyra, Lebanon in 1784.And, for 'a key text of "revolutionary atheism''', 4 it is surprisingly evangelical in tone.As I will explain, particularly jarring is Volney's use of ruins -an eighteenthcentury icon of mortality and civilizational decline -as a symbol of revolutionary utopianism.Nonetheless, when the fi rst English translation of the French original was published in 1792, it was a literary phenomenon.According to Robert Irwin, 'everybody read this book.It