The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism, and: L'Abbé Grégoire apologète de la République (review)

Aspects of the life and works of Henri Grégoire are quite well known to specialists in the history of the French Revolution, eighteenth-century theology or, more recently, post-colonial literary theory. But, as these two monographs by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall and Josiane Boulad-Ayoub show, connecting all the aspects amounts to something like a map of French intellectual, religious and political life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was born in 1750 in the parish of Emberménil in Lorraine and first became known for an Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des Juifs that was awarded a prize by the Royal Society of Metz in 1788. He was elected to the French Estates-General in 1789 and became bishop of Blois under the aegis of the civil constitution of the French clergy in 1791. Unlike many of his clerical contemporaries, however, he did not give up on the new regime after the establishment of the first French republic in 1792. Instead, he was elected to the republican Convention where he was to acquire his most lasting, although not entirely justified, reputation as the regicide bishop of Blois. In 1801, he published Les Ruines de Port-Royal, the work that was largely responsible for generating the aura of Jansenism that has hung over his religious and moral allegiances ever since. It was followed, in 1808, by his De la littérature des nègres, the most famous of a series of arguments in favour of the moral, civil and political rights of an astonishingly wide variety of different groups of people that Grégoire was to pursue up to his death in 1831.The religious, moral, economic and political components of Grégoire's thought have been pieced together very fully in Sepinwall's thoroughly researched and clearly written intellectual and political biography which is sure to remain authoritative for many years to come. Boulad-Ayoub's monograph is rather more commemorative (although almost half of it consists of a fascinating series of extracts from seven of Grégoire's major works), but both historians emphasize that the key to understanding Grégoire's life and works is to be found in the partly theological, but partly political, concept of regeneration. Neither, however, quite succeeds in identifying all the ramifications of the concept and, in particular, its precise bearing on Grégoire's sustained interest in the moral and material circumstances of Jews, slaves, blacks, women and, more generally, the colonized, impoverished, exploited or oppressed. It is clear, as Sepinwall indicates, that the concept had little to do with Jansenism, with its neo-Augustinian preoccupation with divine or efficacious grace. Instead, it was a feature of the theology that Grégoire encountered by way of his friendship with the Alsatian Protestants Jérémie-Jacques and Jean-Frédéric Oberlin. There, as several of the Oberlin brothers' own biographers have shown, the idea of regeneration was connected to a set of claims about what might be called the advantages of backwardness, or the idea encapsulated in Jean-Frédéric Oberlin's crisp slogan et plus bas, et plus haut (meaning roughly, the further you fall, the higher you rise). It is not hard to see how the idea could have had particular significance when thinking, as Grégoire did, about the history of the various groups of people whose circumstances and interests he supported all his life. As Boulad-Ayoub notes (p. 28, n. 1), one reason for Grégoire's rather unusual interest in encouraging the people of Haiti to support the Greeks in their struggle against the Turks after 1820 was that, as...