Constantin-François Chassebœuf

Constantin François Chasseboeuf Boisgirais, Comte de Volney ( born February 3, 1757 Craon, Anjou, † April 25, 1820 in Paris) was a French traveler, Orientalist and philosopher of history.

The descendant of a noble family of rural studied medicine in Paris and philosophy. He was also a guest in the salons of Baron Holbach and Helvetius Madame, where he made ​​the acquaintance of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Diderot, D' Alembert and Benjamin Franklin, with the latter he remained connected writing. In 1782 he undertook a journey of several years in the Ottoman Empire, which led him to Syria, Palestine and Egypt. In the French Revolution, he was a member of the National Assembly. His main work was published in 1791 after the French Revolution: The ruins, or Reflections on the Revolutions of Empires ( The ruins, meditations sur les revolutions of empires; translation of 1791 ). The core rate falls in the preface: Your Ruins legtet by their prince dust vermengtet with slaves dust, witness to the sacred tenet of equality.

In 1803 he founded the Prix Volney for comparative linguistics, which has since been awarded by the Institut de France Académie des Inscriptions on the proposal of Belles- Lettres et.

Works

• Mémoire sur la chronology d' Hérodote, 1781
• Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784 & 1785, Paris 1785, 1787
• Considérations sur la guerre actuelle the Turcs, Londres 1788 German: About the current war against the Turks, Printing and Publishing Friedrich Gotthold Jacobäer, Leipzig 1788

• German: Ruins and Reflections on the Revolutions of Empires and the Natural Law, translated by Dorothea Forkel and Georg Forster, Vieweg, Berlin 1792; reissued by Günther Mensching, syndicate, Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 3-8108-0033-3