The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (review)

A key figure of the French Revolution, the Abbé Grégoire became a leading advocate for the emancipation of Jews, Blacks and other oppressed minorities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was a progressive minded priest who espoused the ideals of the French Revolution, was elected representative to the Estates General in 1789 and later to the Convention. He became a leader of the French Constitutional Church and was elected bishop of Blois. His attempt to reconcile revolutionary principles and Christian ideals placed him out of the political and intellectual mainstream after 1791. Under Napoleon's reign, he was appointed a member of the imperial Senate but stood in strident opposition to the new regime and particularly to the restoration of slavery in 1802. After the Bourbon monarchy came back in power in 1814, Grégoire was treated like an outcast by the government and by the Church who could not forgive his participation in the French Revolution. Writing became his only way to influence the outside world until his death in 1831.

No major work in English on the Abbé Grégoire had been published since the 1971 classic The Abbé Grégoire, 1787–1831: The Odyssey of an Egalitarian by Ruth Necheles. A new study of the famous bishop that takes into account new scholarship on the French Revolution and new approaches to biography was certainly needed. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Associate Professor of History at California State University/San Marcos, took up the challenge and the result is an excellent biography. The work is centered on Grégoire's ideas and intellectual activities, not on his personal life whose prosaic simplicity would not provide substance for a book.

Sepinwall begins with a Prologue in which she describes in detail the path that led her to become interested in Grégoire and in writing a new biography. She divides the study of the bishop's life into three major segments: Grégoire's formative years until 1789; Grégoire during the French Revolution from 1789 to 1801, when he became a public figure at the forefront of political action; and Grégoire from 1801 up to his death, a period of political regression during which he was increasingly sidelined by hostile regimes. Each part is segmented into three chapters that also follow a chronological order.

The course of Grégoire's life is well known and the author's goal is not to unearth new documents or revelations. Her original contribution is a new approach to Grégoire that is not centered on the man as an iconic figure but on how his ideas and his actions were shaped by the changing historical context around him and how he related to that context. Sepinwall revisits Grégoire's beliefs and explores in great detail the concept of regeneration that is at the core of these beliefs. She is more interested than previous biographers in defining the limits of Grégoire's universalism. Where did his belief in equality and freedom begin and end? The reader is reminded that Grégoire, like most abolitionists of his generation, did not support a total and immediate freeing of the slave population, but a gradual one. Sepinwall also gives us an interesting analysis of Grégoire's view of women, showing that the "friend of men of all colors" (as he liked to call himself) was a somewhat misogynous individual who believed that the female sex was by nature perverted and could not be regenerated. She highlights important but lesser-known aspects of Grégoire's thought such as his belief that mixed marriages between whites and former black slaves was the best way to "regenerate" the black race: a new kind of humanity, freed from past prejudice, would rise up from such unions. She also highlights on several occasions the fact that Grégoire himself was...