The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires

Sources of inspiration

The dialogue between a young man and a semi-divine mentor recalls Fénelon's The Adventures of Telemachus, the most widely read work in eighteenth-century France after the Bible.

The dreamlike atmosphere of the Orient evokes One Thousand and One Nights, first translated into French by Antoine Galland in 1704.

The idea of a journey through space around the Earth was borrowed from Voltaire, whose pseudonym inspired that of Volney. In Micromégas (1752), a giant from the star Sirius and his Saturnian companion observe from space the tiny inhabitants of Earth and their boundless pretensions.

The author of The Ruins also acknowledged his intellectual debt to Condillac, who, together with Voltaire, had introduced the empiricist and sensualist philosophy of John Locke to France. Volney frequented the salon of Baron d'Holbach and that of Madame Helvétius, the widow of Claude Adrien Helvétius, both disciples of Condillac.

Several Enlightenment writers had reflected on the causes of the decline and fall of civilizations, including Montesquieu, the Abbé de Mably (Condillac's brother), and, in Britain, Adam Ferguson and Edward Gibbon.^[1]

The chapters of The Ruins devoted to the history of religions were inspired by the theories of Charles-François Dupuis, who is said to have shared with Volney the manuscript of The Origin of All Religious Worship, then still in preparation.^[2]

Although Volney travelled through Ottoman Egypt and Syria between 1782 and 1785, he never visited Palmyra, the opening setting of The Ruins. Instead, he drew upon the descriptions published by Robert Wood and James Dawkins, the two archaeologists who had rediscovered the site.

The poetics of ruins

Since the Renaissance, ancient ruins had long provided poets with a privileged object of contemplation, from Petrarch to Joachim du Bellay and Jacques Grévin, and later James Thomson, Louis Racine, and Aimé Feutry in the eighteenth century.^[3][b]

The itineraries of every Grand Tour converged on Rome. The remains of the Roman Empire formed an essential stage in the education of Europe's elites, who collected the capricci of Panini and the engravings of Piranesi.^[1]

Diderot, whom Volney met at the salon of Baron d'Holbach, commented on the paintings of Hubert Robert, exhibited at the Salon of 1767:

"We fix our gaze upon the remains of a triumphal arch, a portico, a pyramid, a temple, a palace; then we turn back upon ourselves and anticipate the ravages of time [...]. We alone survive an entire nation that is no more. There you have the first principle of the poetics of ruins. [...] Everything is annihilated, everything perishes, everything passes away. Only the world itself endures."^[4]

In his novel The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One (1771), Louis-Sébastien Mercier imagined the Palace of Versailles lying in ruins. There, the narrator encounters Louis XIV, restored to life by divine justice. Shedding "a torrent of tears", the king finally becomes aware of the suffering that he had inflicted upon his people.

Edward Young, the author of the Night Thoughts, found in cemeteries a privileged setting for philosophical meditation. He also invited his readers to rise above the world and observe it from the heavens:

"Come, my ambitious! let us mount together, and from the Clouds, where Pride delights to dwell, look down on Earth. What seest thou?"

James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian likewise inspired the elegiac tone of the opening chapters of The Ruins. Young and Macpherson, two pioneers of British Romanticism, enjoyed widespread popularity in late eighteenth-century France^[1].

Publication during the French Revolution

Volney began writing The Ruins in 1787, following the publication of his Travels in Egypt and Syria. Elected as a deputy of the Third Estate in 1789, he depicted the creation of the National Constituent Assembly in the central chapter of his book, entitled "The New Age".

The Ruins was published shortly after the Constitution of 1791 came into force. As announced by Le Moniteur Universel on 13 September 1791, the work was offered for sale at the price of five pounds by three Parisian bookseller-publishers. A second, revised edition appeared a few months later.

The Genius of Palmyra

Volney returned in memory to the journey he had made through Ottoman Syria in 1784, during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid I. After three days crossing the desert, he reached the ruins of ancient Palmyra. At dusk, seated upon the shaft of a fallen column, the traveller falls into a profound reverie.

Of the once flourishing and populous city of Palmyra, only its "gloomy skeleton" remained before him. He realized that his native Europe might one day suffer the same fate:

Who knows if on the banks of the Seine, the Thames, the Zuiderzee, where now, in the tumult of so many enjoyments, the heart and the eye suffice not for the multitude of sensations, who knows if some traveller, like myself, shall not one day sit on their silent ruins, and weep in solitude over the ashes of their inhabitants, and the memory of their former greatness.

Absorbed in melancholy,^[5] Volney attributes the death of civilizations to "the justice of heaven fulfilling its decrees" whose designs are beyond human understanding.

Suddenly, as night falls, a spectre appears and addresses him in a grave, resonant voice:

Cease then, mortals, to accuse the decrees of Fate, or the judgments of the Divinity! [...] the source of man's calamities is not in the distant heavens, it is beside him on the earth; it is not concealed in the bosom of the divinity; it dwells within himself, he bears it in his own heart.^[c]

The Genius explains that the history of civilizations is governed by "eternal laws, prior to all codes and all prophets."

Since thy heart, O mortal, with sincerity seeketh truth; since thine eyes can still recognize her through the mist of prejudice, thy prayer shall not be in vain. I will unfold to thy view that truth thou invokest; I will teach thy reason that knowledge thou seekest; I will reveal to thee the science of ages and the wisdom of the tombs.

The Earth Seen from the Heavens

The Genius lays his hand upon Volney's head, and his mind, filled with a "celestial flame", is borne aloft into the air. "Floating in the void", he finds himself in orbit around the Earth. His eyes, sweep across the Northern Hemisphere, from the Atlantic Ocean to Siberia and Malaysia. His gaze falls upon the valley of the Nile, where he discerns the Giza pyramid complex.^[d] He also beholds the ruins of Babylon and Palmyra, where he had stood only moments before.

The Rise and Decline of Civilizations

Throughout history, the Genius explains, the human species has been governed by "self-love, the aversion to pain, and the desire for happiness." Primitive man, "naked in body and in mind", like the other animals, was motivated solely by the instinct for survival and reproduction. In pursuit of these ends, he gradually learned to master his environment through "the repeated experience of diverse accidents."

To overcome their individual weakness and confront the dangers of nature, human beings united into tribes. Wearied by the uncertainties of hunting and gathering, they domesticated animals and invented agriculture. The abundance of harvests enabled them to establish ever larger sedentary communities.

So long as self-love remains in accordance with natural needs, the Genius explains, it encourages mutual assistance and progress. But when men seek limitless pleasures and covet the possessions of others, it becomes "a corrupting poison", giving rise to "a general and disastrous discord." The Genius reveals to the traveller "the twofold source of all the sufferings of human life": ignorance and greed. Ignorance causes human beings to mistake their true interests, while greed leads them to sacrifice the interests of others to their own.

At times, insolent and audacious, the leaders of a nation forged its chains from within itself, and mercenary greed established political despotism; at other times, hypocritical and cunning, they brought down from heaven deceitful powers and a sacrilegious yoke, and credulous greed established religious despotism.

Injustice, he continues, originated within the family through patriarchy and patrilineal descent:

Because the head of the household could exercise absolute authority within his home, he distributed or withheld his property without equality or justice, and paternal despotism laid the foundations of political despotism.^[e]

Conflicts gradually spread to every level of society: "man armed himself against man, family against family, tribe against tribe", until the Earth became "a bloody theatre of discord and brigandage." By departing from the laws of nature, humanity wandered into "a labyrinth of errors and calamities."

Human beings soon realized that greed ultimately turned against itself: "what one man seizes today will be taken from him tomorrow." They therefore devised laws to restrain it. Justice is the condition of a nation's prosperity. Whenever individuals' natural interests – security, the protection of property, and freedom of labour – are frustrated, societies decline. Laws must direct self-love toward the common good.

This equilibrium, however, is fragile. As societies expand,^[f] social relations become more complex, laws prove inadequate and are gradually subverted, and those entrusted with restraining greed succumb to it themselves. No form of government is immune to such corruption: even democracy degenerates when magistrates appropriate the powers entrusted to them.

Society fragments into rival groups seeking to monopolize political power. Laws cease to protect the people, instead justifying slavery and sanctioning hereditary privilege. The aristocracy, controlling taxation and military force, becomes a caste distinct from the mass of the population.

When a civilization remains relatively small, several circumstances may limit these abuses. Threatened by external enemies, rulers have an interest in preserving the loyalty of their people. Internally, traditions of independence and the absence of widespread poverty make tyranny difficult: a despot cannot long impose his authority upon free men who own property and are capable of resisting or emigrating if their rights are violated.^[g] Such conditions foster civic cohesion: every citizen is prepared to bear arms because in doing so he also serves his own interest.^[h]

Yet cities absorb cities, and kingdoms absorb kingdoms, until vast empires emerge. Peoples lose their laws and customs. Eventually, "a single man rules millions of his fellow men against their will or without their consent." The monarch exploits social divisions, governing less by force than by fostering rivalry among his subjects, drawing "his strength from their weakness."

This despotism, together with the corruption that accompanies it, brings about economic decline. Increasing taxation discourages labour. Princes divert wealth toward luxurious expenditure – palaces, tombs, and religious monuments – to the detriment of useful public works. The concentration of landed property ruins small landowners and divides society between "a class of opulent idlers and a multitude of impoverished hirelings." Production declines, and societies lose their vitality, collapsing beneath their own weight.^[6]

Empires, weakened from within, vulnerable to the "accidents of nature", and incapable of withstanding crises, become easy prey for invaders. The societies born of these conquests perpetuate the division between conquerors and conquered, thereby deepening injustice.

This tragic condition also finds expression in religion. Overwhelmed by their misfortunes and unable to explain them, human beings imagine heavenly tyrants in the likeness of those who oppress them on earth. These "gloomy and misanthropic" religions come to glorify suffering, condemn self-love, and turn mankind away from every earthly enjoyment.^[i] Such an "antisocial" morality in turn hastens the decline of civilizations.

The Genius concludes that mankind are "the eternal instruments of their own misfortunes." History demonstrates that societies rise or fall according to whether they observe or violate "the physical laws of the human heart." So long as rulers persist in "the ways of falsehood and tyranny," and peoples remain imprisoned by superstition and ignorance, civilizations are destined for ruin.

The traveller sadly realizes that the lessons of experience are invariably forgotten: each new generation suffers from collective amnesia, and peoples seem condemned to repeat the same mistakes.

The Hope of Human Progress

As he listens to the Genius, the traveller gives way to despair. How can this endless cycle of misery and violence ever be broken? One conqueror merely replaces another, while oppression endures. Confronted with "the perversity of those who govern, and the debasement of the governed", he falls into a nihilistic frame of mind:

What remains for the virtuous man but to mingle his ashes with those of the tombs?

The Genius replies:

Beware of the illusions and paradoxes of the misanthrope. Dissatisfied with the present, he imagines a fictitious perfection in the past, which is only the mask of his sorrow. He praises the dead out of hatred for the living, and beats children with the bones of their fathers.

The greatness of ancient civilizations should not deceive us, he continues. Those societies were perpetually at war and rested upon slavery.

History shows that since the time when mankind lived in the savage state, immense progress has been achieved. Human knowledge has steadily increased, and some peoples have greatly improved their conditions of existence. During the past "three centuries", the Genius declares, progress has accelerated thanks to the invention of printing, "a sacred art, a divine gift", which enables knowledge to be disseminated simultaneously among millions of people and transmitted to future generations.

As enlightenment spreads, each individual will come to recognize his true interests. The power of sovereigns will increasingly be restrained by "public opinion". The weak will discover that unity is their strength.

By the law of imitation, the example of one people will be followed by the others; they will adopt its spirit and its laws. Even despots, seeing that they can no longer preserve their power except through justice and beneficence, will moderate their rule out of necessity and rivalry, and civilization will become universal.^[7]

The Genius foresees the end of war and the emergence of a universal human community. Already, he says, "a cry of liberty, uttered upon distant shores, has echoed across the Old Continent" – an allusion to the American Revolution. At that cry, "a secret murmur against oppression arises within a great nation. [...] A mighty movement is about to begin; a new age is about to dawn! An age of astonishment for the multitude, of surprise and terror for tyrants, of emancipation for a great people, and of hope for the whole Earth!"

The French Revolution

From the heavens, the traveller suddenly beholds immense agitation spreading across France. The entire nation realizes that it is being plundered from within: despite the fertility of its soil, the labour of its people, and peace abroad, the French live in poverty and are crushed beneath the weight of taxation. "What hidden enemy is it, then, that devours us?"

The inhabitants of the kingdom divide into two camps. On one side stands the overwhelming majority, their emaciated bodies clothed in rags. On the other is a minority of priests, nobles, financiers, and government officials, displaying "in the richness of garments embroidered with gold and silver, and in the fullness of their faces, the marks of leisure and abundance." They live without labour, govern society, and appropriate the wealth it produces.

A dialogue begins between the people and the privileged orders. The nobles first seek to justify their position by invoking the glory of their ancestors. Their pretensions are ridiculed by the people, who recall the common origins of many recently ennobled families.

The defenders of the old order then appeal to the king and obedience to the law, but the people reply that the king can be legitimate only insofar as he serves the common good. The privileged finally resort to force, yet the soldiers refuse to fire upon those from whom they themselves have sprung: "We too are the people."

The final refuge of the old order is religion. The clergy invoke faith, obedience, and the need for intermediaries between God and mankind in order to secure salvation in the next world. Each of their arguments is methodically refuted by the people, who declare their services unnecessary.

The privileged lament: "All is lost—the multitude has become enlightened." The people answer: "All is saved, for now that we are enlightened, we shall not abuse our strength. We seek only our rights. We have our grievances, yet we forget them. We were slaves; we might command in our turn. We desire only to be free, and liberty is nothing other than justice."

Raising "an immense throne in the form of a pyramid", the sovereign people resolve to delegate part of their authority to representatives, since the making of laws requires knowledge and leisure that citizens occupied with their work do not possess. These representatives are to reflect the diversity of the nation's interests and enact laws in accordance with "morality and reason."

The people remind them of the strict limits of their mandate: "The power that we confer upon you belongs to us. We entrust it to you as a deposit, not as property nor as an inheritance." The representatives themselves will be the first subject to the laws and, once their office ends, will return to their place among the people, rewarded only by public esteem and gratitude. They adopt equality and liberty as the founding principles of the new political order: all men possess the same rights, and each is "the absolute proprietor of his own person."

The new society then choses its symbols. The people erect an altar bearing a balance, a sword, and a book. They adopt a banner that becomes "the standard of universal justice." Millions of men raise their arms toward heaven and swear an oath to live as free and equal citizens.

Moved to tears by the spectacle, the traveller says to the Genius:

Now let me live, for I can hope.

The General Assembly of the Nations

At France's invitation, envoys from every part of the world gather in a vast amphitheatre. The traveller contemplates this "General Assembly of the Nations" with fascination. He observes the diversity of clothing, physical features, skin colours, and ways of life. These differences arise from historical circumstances and climate, yet all these men possess the same fundamental faculties and belong to a single human species.

The Legislator addresses the assembly. He calls upon the nations to recognize that they all possess the same rights because they have received from nature "the same life and the same organs." Humanity, he declares, ought to form "one society, one great family", governed by "the code of reason."

At first, his speech is greeted with unanimous acclaim. This enthusiasm is soon shattered, however, when the religious leaders intervene, each claiming to possess "the true law" while denouncing all the others as being in error. In order to break this deadlock, the Legislator invites them to defend their respective doctrines before the assembled nations.

Thomas Jefferson's Translation

One year after Volney left the United States, James Lyon published a translation of The Ruins in Philadelphia, without the author's permission. Dissatisfied with the two existing English versions, Volney supervised the preparation of a new translation. Thomas Jefferson, who had been elected President of the United States in 1800, personally translated the first nineteen chapters, while the diplomat Joel Barlow completed the remaining five.^[11]

Jefferson considered himself a Christian and rejected the Christ myth theory advanced at the end of The Ruins. At his own request, his involvement in the translation remained secret. Publicly associating his name with the project would have been politically disastrous, as the Federalist Party already accused him of atheism and denounced his sympathies for the French Revolution.^[o] He even insisted that his manuscript be burned once it had served its purpose.

The translation was published in Paris in 1802. The following year, about one thousand copies crossed the Atlantic, some of them intended for James Madison, Aaron Burr, and other prominent Americans. In gratitude for Jefferson's assistance, Volney presented him with a model of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which Jefferson displayed at his residence in Monticello.

This translation became the standard English version of Volney's book. Of the fifteen American editions published during the nineteenth century, thirteen reproduced the Jefferson–Barlow translation, although Thomas Jefferson's role remained unknown for more than a century, until it was discovered by Gilbert Chinard.

Abraham Lincoln read The Ruins during the 1830s,^[12] while Walt Whitman, whose father admired Volney, was, in his own words, "raised" on the book.^[13]

Volney and English Romanticism

In Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley, the abandoned Creature, after leaving Victor Frankenstein's laboratory, takes refuge in the cottage of a French family. In the evenings, by the fireside, the family's son, Felix, reads The Ruins aloud to Safie, his Arab fiancée, as part of her French lessons.^[14][15] Secretly listening to them, Frankenstein's monster derives from Volney's book his understanding of human history, political institutions, and religious beliefs.^[16][17][p]

Volney's influence is also apparent in the works of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley's husband,^[18] particularly in Queen Mab (1813), Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), The Revolt of Islam (1818), and Prometheus Unbound (1820).

Scholars have also identified echoes of The Ruins in works by Lord Byron, William Blake^[19] Thomas Moore and Thomas Love Peacock.^[20]

Influence on Radical Movements

Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars,^[q] Volney experienced a revival of popularity in England. In 1820, the year of his death, the London bookseller Thomas Tegg claimed to have sold 10,000 copies of The Ruins. Between 1819 and 1835, the work appeared in at least eight editions, in addition to the many extracts published in newspapers and serialized publications. Thomas Jonathan Wooler, for example, quoted it extensively in his newspaper The Black Dwarf throughout the post-war period.

Whereas Volney is generally regarded in France as a moderate liberal, British readers, largely unfamiliar with the political divisions that emerged after the Reign of Terror, viewed him as a leading advocate of popular sovereignty. As E. P. Thompson.^[21] and later Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker^[22] have shown, he was especially widely read among those excluded from political life, including impoverished workers and religious dissenters.

The passage from The Ruins that most deeply moved English readers, and which was most frequently reprinted in newspapers and circulated as a pamphlet, was the central chapter, The New Age, which prophesied that the people, once conscious of their own strength, would rise against the parasitic "idle classes", proclaim their independence, and bring oppression to an end.^[r] It has been suggested that Volney may have inspired William Benbow's proposal for a general strike in 1832.^[23]

Members of the clergy^[24] believed that Volney's subversive influence stemmed from the nature of his readership. They deplored the circulation of The Ruins among the "ignorant", the "young", the "impressionable", and the "lower orders".^[s] William Hails argued that the book deliberately deceived weak minds through a dangerous use of literary artifice.^[25] The Reverend Thomas Broughton likewise complained that the French were infiltrating English culture with pamphlets "published and sold in twopennies numbers, to undermine Christianity and the British Constitution". In his view, Volney was "the champion of the class".^[26]

The freethinker Richard Carlile^[27] declared that the book had "made more deists and atheists than all the other anti-Christian writings that have circulated in this country".^[t] Carlile, owner of London's Blackfriars Rotunda, organized gatherings of freethinkers there, during which extracts from The Ruins were read aloud by Robert Taylor, nicknamed the "Devil's Chaplain". At their height in the early 1830s, the Sunday meetings of the Rotunda radicals attracted as many as 4,000 people.^[28]

Volney's influence on the British radical movement extended into the early Victorian era. Chartists such as James Watson, Feargus O'Connor, and George Julian Harney identified with his ideas.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, new editions of The Ruins continued to appear, albeit at a slower pace. In the 1880s and 1890s, the book was distributed by The Freethought Publishing Company of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh.

France

The Ruins remained one of France's greatest publishing successes for approximately half a century,^[u] before falling into relative obscurity from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

Many refutations were published by clergymen. Volney, suspected of atheism and known for having questioned the historicity of Jesus, was, for example, cited in the Masonic conspiracy theories of the French Revolution advanced by Jacques-François Lefranc and Augustin Barruel.

During Volney's lifetime

In the weeks following its publication, extracts from The Ruins were reproduced in newspapers. Chamfort, writing in the Mercure de France, praised "the profound and vigorous philosophy that inspired this excellent work.".^[29] In the Journal de Paris, the deputy Garat described the book as one of "the most distinguished works to have appeared since the Revolution", adding that "several chapters would have seemed bold only three or four years earlier."

After the dissolution of the National Constituent Assembly, Volney settled in Corsica, where he became acquainted with Napoleon – then a young lieutenant. Napoleon's famous address before the Pyramids of Giza – "Soldiers, from the summit of these pyramids forty centuries look down upon you!" – echoes a passage from the Genius's speech at the beginning of The Ruins: "And you, evidences of twenty centuries, holy temples! venerable tombs!"

During the Reign of Terror, before his imprisonment, Volney published The Natural Law, or the Catechism of the French Citizen. The work was presented as a companion volume to The Ruins, which concludes with the announcement of a code of laws intended for all humanity.^[v] This universal ambition disappeared from the title because of the war opposing the French First Republic to the other European powers.

In 1799, The Ruins, together with The Natural Law as an appendix, was republished by the booksellers Dugour and Durant in Paris.

An entire generation read The Ruins. Its reflections on the history of civilizations and the origin of religions profoundly influenced Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, Nicolas de Bonneville, Maine de Biran, and Claude Fauriel. The solitary traveller's meditation also inspired the first French Romantic writers,^[w] including Étienne Pivert de Senancour^[31] and François-René de Chateaubriand,^[32] who paid tribute to Volney in his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem.

While exiled in London during the Reign of Terror, the young Chateaubriand initially expressed hostility toward Christianity in his Essay on Revolutions,^[33][x] before returning to the Catholic faith after the death of his mother. In 1802, he published The Genius of Christianity, the work of apologetics that established his literary reputation.

Writing about Condorcet's annotated edition of Blaise Pascal's Pensées, Chateaubriand observed: "One seems to behold the ruins of Palmyra, those magnificent remnants of genius and time, where the Arab of the desert has built his miserable hut." In the opening chapter of The Ruins, Volney had described Palmyra as inhabited by "some poor Arabian peasants, who had built their hutts on the area of the temple".

The influence of The Ruins is particularly evident in this passage from René, which concludes The Genius of Christianity: "At times the same sun that had witnessed the founding of those cities set majestically before my eyes upon their ruins; at others the moon, rising in a cloudless sky between two half-broken funerary urns, revealed to me the pale tombs. Often, beneath the rays of that star which nourishes reverie, I imagined I saw the Genius of Memory seated pensively at my side."

Volney, who had quarrelled with Napoleon Bonaparte over the Concordat of 1801, despised the fideism of the "author promoted" by the regime. In his later works, he made several pointed remarks directed at Chateaubriand.^[34] The two writers later served together in the Chamber of Peers under Louis XVIII.

After his death

Victor Hugo wrote an obituary for his journal Le Conservateur littéraire.^[y] Volney's collected works were published in 1822 by the Bossange brothers (the sons of Martin Bossange), just after The Ruins was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by the Catholic Church.^[35] At the beginning of the reign of Charles X of France, the authorities officially prohibited the book's circulation and sale.^[36] Copies nevertheless found their way clandestinely into schools.^[z]

The principal criticisms directed against Volney concerned his materialist explanation of religious belief^[37] and his moral philosophy, founded upon "self-love", which represented the culmination of the sensualism of the Enlightenment.^[aa] The journal Thémis accused him of "deifying selfishness". In 1828, philosopher Jean-Philibert Damiron wrote: "His catechism prevails almost everywhere that the Church's catechism no longer holds sway. It is the catechism of the greater part of those indifferent to religion; in that sense, it has already become the catechism of the majority."^[38][ab]

The message of The Ruins resonated with the political aspirations of the bourgeoisie during the reign of the last Bourbon kings. It notably influenced Le Globe, "the journal of the doctrine of Saint-Simon."

Under the July Monarchy, Volney's writings remained a familiar cultural reference. They are mentioned, for example, in a letter from Honoré de Balzac to Ewelina Hańska written in 1834.^[ac] In Isis (1845), Gérard de Nerval referred to "the magnificent prelude of Volney's Ruins".^[ad]

Jean Gaulmier traced the influence of The Ruins into the 1850s, finding echoes of it in poems by Leconte de Lisle^[39] Charles Baudelaire^[40] and Victor Hugo.

Half a century after the French Revolution, however, the decline of the rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment, the triumph of Romantic sensibility, the Christian revival, and the rise of spiritualist philosophy had relegated The Ruins, both intellectually and stylistically,^[ae] reducing it to the status of a relic of a bygone age.

In 1853, Sainte-Beuve devoted two of his Monday Talks to Volney,^[41] observing that he was by then scarcely read anymore. The "kind of social offence" of which Volney had been guilty explained why his "gloomy books" were destined to fall into oblivion.^[af] Sainte-Beuve was equally severe regarding Volney's literary style, describing it as "tedious" and "pindaric": "It is dull, weary, pompous, monotonous, sonorous and muffled at the same time. Morally, how much more truth – even for the philosopher – there is in two words of Pascal, where the cry of the heart bursts forth! And if it is a question of art, how much more light and melancholy reflection there is in a few pages of Chateaubriand!"

This disappearance from the collective memory can also be observed in political thought. The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, when he met in 1853 with Victor de Persigny (Minister of the Interior under Napoleon III), declared: "Volney, Monsieur le Ministre, is my master. ... Do you wish to make me a senator? I accept."^[42] Yet this leading figure of 1789, once a hero of the republican opposition during the Bourbon Restoration, was gradually distanced by subsequent generations.

During the twentieth century, historians frequently portrayed Volney as a moderate bourgeois. Gaston Martin wrote, for example, that Volney "belonged quite precisely to that upper-middle-class milieu which saw in the convocation of the Estates General of 1789 the opportunity to acquire political influence commensurate with its social power and abilities, but not the complete overthrow of an economic order from which it greatly benefited" (1934). For Georges Gusdorf, he embodied the "retreat in the face of the irruption of the masses onto the stage of history" (1978).^[ag]

Germany

The Ruins was translated in early 1792 by Georg Forster and Meta Forkel-Liebeskind. In Leipzig, the text was seized at the publisher's premises before it could be offered for sale. Forster nevertheless succeeded in rescuing a number of copies from the authorities, and Die Ruinen soon began to circulate.^[ah] In 1794, the work was banned in Berlin, "under penalty of a fine of one hundred ducats for every copy."

Poland

Volney was already known in Poland before the publication of The Ruins. Jan Potocki, for example, had read his Travels in Egypt and Syria (1787) as well as his Considerations on the Present War of the Turks, 1788.^[am]

While the French deputy was completing his new work in Paris, the Great Sejm in Warsaw adopted the Constitution of 3 May 1791, introducing a series of political and social reforms. In The Ruins, however, Volney had written that "in the North ... one sees only degraded serfs, herds of people manipulated by great landowners." In the first revised edition of 1792, he added the following note: "When this was written, the Polish Revolution had not yet taken place. I gladly make amends to the virtuous nobles and the enlightened prince who accomplished it."^[46]

The Constitution of 3 May 1791 proved short-lived. The magnates of the Targowica Confederation, backed by Russian military intervention, secured its abolition in the summer of 1792, leading to the Second Partition of Poland. In its campaign against "Jacobin" ideas, the Grodno Sejm established a list of prohibited books that included The Ruins.^[46]

The affront Volney had inflicted upon Empress Catherine the Great by returning a medal she had awarded him before the French Revolution made him particularly popular among Polish patriots. The Ruins was translated into Polish in 1794, during the Kościuszko Uprising, possibly by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz.^[an] This edition omitted the concluding discourse on religion in order to avoid offending the clergy.^[ao]

Following the defeat of the insurgents at the Battle of Maciejowice and the Third Partition of Poland, General Tadeusz Kościuszko and his secretary Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz were imprisoned by Catherine the Great. Released in 1796, they travelled the following year to the United States, where Kościuszko had distinguished himself during the American Revolutionary War. Under the patronage of Thomas Jefferson, they were elected members of the American Philosophical Society, alongside Volney, who was then residing in Philadelphia. In the spring of 1798, Kościuszko was sent to Paris by Jefferson on a diplomatic mission. Volney, who returned to France shortly thereafter, carried with him a letter from the Vice President to Kościuszko.^[46]

The Ruins exerted a profound influence on Polish culture in the early nineteenth century, both in poetry and in political literature.^[ap] The work enjoyed particular popularity at the universities of Kraków and Vilno.^[46] The philosopher Stanisław Staszic drew inspiration from it when composing his major work, Rod ludzki ("The Human Race"), published in 1820.^[aq]

The image of the solitary wanderer meditating among ruins inspired several Romantic poets,^[ar] foremost among them Adam Mickiewicz in The Crimean Sonnets, particularly The Ruins of the Castle of Balaklava, in which the Pilgrim, standing on the shores of the Black Sea, contemplates the remains of vanished civilizations.

Other examples include Zygmunt Krasiński's Marzyłem wśród ruin ("I Dreamed Among the Ruins") and Jan Paweł Woronicz's Świątynia Sybilli ("The Temple of the Sibyl"), though the latter adopts an opposite Christian and patriotic perspective.

According to Marian Skrzypek, The Ruins continued to be read in Poland into the early twentieth century.^[46] He cites, among others, the novelist Stefan Żeromski and Andrzej Niemojewski, a proponent of the Christ myth theory who relied extensively on the arguments advanced by Dupuis and Volney.

Spain

Seven hundred and fifty copies of The Ruins were clandestinely printed in Madrid in 1797. The Spanish Inquisition prosecuted and convicted the booksellers involved, while the confiscated copies were publicly burned in an auto-da-fé in March 1798.

The Bishop of Salamanca declared that Volney's work was "a tissue of maxims among the most subversive to states, the most contrary to the sovereignty of kings, together with other seductive and detestable doctrines which ought to be erased from the memory of mankind."^[47]

The first Spanish translations appeared in Paris and New York in 1817, followed by a London edition in 1818 under the title Meditaciones sobre las Ruinas. Two years later, José Marchena published his own version at Bordeaux, Las Ruinas o meditación sobre las revoluciones de los imperios. Its publication coincided with the Trienio Liberal, which facilitated the circulation of foreign books in Spain until the restoration of absolutism by the French army commanded by the Duke of Angoulême.^[48]

Following the inclusion of The Ruins on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its prohibition was reaffirmed between 1823 and 1825 by edicts issued by the Archbishop of Toledo, the Bishop of Oviedo, the Archbishop of Valencia, who extended the ban to all of Volney's writings, and the Bishop of Cuenca, who specified that it applied to editions "in every language".

According to a royal decree of 7 January 1826, "a great quantity of obscene, revolutionary, and impious books" continued to be smuggled across the frontier, sometimes concealed under false titles. The Ruins, for example, circulated under the title Life of Saint Michael.^[47]

In his Meditaciones (1832), Félix Amat – titular Archbishop of Palmyra – denounced the materialism of "the impious fable forged by Volney". The Ruins also came under attack in conservative newspapers such as La Censura, which described the work as "pestilential".

Only with the return of the Liberals to power during the First Carlist War did two new Spanish editions appear, both published in Paris in 1836 and 1839. The latter, issued by a bookseller in the Palais-Royal, bore the title Las ruinas de Palmira, the designation by which the work has generally been known in Spanish ever since.

A further translation accompanied the Spanish Revolution of 1854, and two additional editions were published following the Revolution of 1868.^[48]

Under General Francisco Franco's National Catholic dictatorship, Volney's work once again found a dissident readership. As censorship gradually relaxed, Las ruinas de Palmira was published in a Madrid paperback series in 1969, followed by an edition in Barcelona in 1973. Subsequent reprints (1975, 1978, 1979, 1983, and 1985) testify to a renewed interest in the work during this period.^[48]

Elsewhere

From the 1790s onward, the French edition of The Ruins circulated among educated readers throughout continental Europe, reaching as far as Russia. It was translated into several languages, including Dutch (Amsterdam, 1796), Italian (Milan, 1797), and Portuguese (Lisbon, 1822).^[as]

The work was also translated into Arabic around 1817 by Basile Fakhr, a Lebanese resident of Egypt who served as an agent of the French consulate in Damietta.^[49] No copy of this translation has survived.