Anacharsis Cloots

“Dammit, fat man, I will ask questions and I won't hide. Now tell me what the four sorts of creatures are. I'm not stupid. That's only the permanent impression I leave.” “Oh, the four sorts of creatures that surround the Castle are the Pythons, the Toads, the Badgers and the Unfledged Falcons.” “Oh what botching! Unbotch it, Bagley. Where do you get your drivel?” “I have it anciently from my own ancient person and position. And beyond that, there are hints of it in the unguarded passages of Anacharsis Clootz, who was one of us. Some of it's from the beautiful things of a lady named Teresa Cepeda, born a little after Columbus died. He only discovered continents; she discovered the Castle itself. Hers also was a Spanish venture and it will be weighed in the final balance. Did you know that nations as well as persons will be judged at the final judgment? She will be judged for Spain.” — Fourth Mansions (1969)

Clootz appears like the angel of the Revolution, the seal of the alliance between France and the nations. The greatest figure of the French Revolution was a German. Man of Vast Utopias and limitless horizons, this apostle of universal fraternity was the first to pass over the Rhine with the olive branch of peace. — G. Tridon, Les Hébertistes (1864)

Anacharsis Cloots is a puzzle in Fourth Mansions.

The historical figure was Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grâce, Baron de Cloots (1755–1794). He was a Prussian nobleman, born at the castle of Gnadenthal near Cleves, heir to a large fortune, and descended from a Dutch noble line. In that sense, he is a patrician, a patrick.

Cloots was sent to Paris at eleven and was influenced by the radical philosophy of his uncle, the Abbé Cornelius de Pauw. By his twenties, he had left the Prussian military academy and had begun wandering Europe, preaching a revolutionary universalism. He dropped his title and took the name “Anacharsis” after the Scythian philosopher in a now-barely remembered philosophical romance by Barthélemy. It was later mocked by Flaubert in Madame Bovary as epitomizing the old-fashioned. At some point around this time, Cloots styled himself “Orator of the Human Race.”

Cloots’s most famous moment was theatrical and stagy. On June 19, 1790 (the date most commonly given), he appeared before the French National (Constituent) Assembly, and trailing him was a delegation of about three dozen foreigners dressed in national costumes, an “embassy of the human race.” Cloots announced that the peoples of the world adhered to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

That image, of humanity assembled in revolutionary France, is what brings Cloots into American literature: Herman Melville loved it. He mentions Cloots (as a shorthand for a global “deputation” of mankind) in Moby-Dick, The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd:

They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever come back. — Moby-Dick, Ch. 27

Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man. — The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, Ch. II

These were made up of such an assortment of tribes and complexions as would have well fitted them to be marched up by Anacharsis Cloots before the bar of the first French Assembly as Representatives of the Human Race. At each spontaneous tribute rendered by the wayfarers to this black pagod of a fellow—the tribute of a pause and stare, and less frequent an exclamation,—the motley retinue showed that they took that sort of pride in the evoker of it which the Assyrian priests doubtless showed for their grand sculptured Bull when the faithful prostrated themselves. — Billy Budd, Sailor, Ch. 1

In 1792, two years after the moment in history for which he is remembered, Cloots became a French citizen. He was then elected to the National Convention, and he voted for the execution of Louis XVI in the name of the human race. His major work, Bases constitutionnelles de la République du genre humain (1793), argues for a world state modeled on the French Republic. That, of course, sounds like something Lafferty would have hated. Interestingly, one of the best-known things about Cloots is apparently a lie, namely that Cloots declared himself an enemy of Jesus Christ.

The Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol 13 (1894)

It was a fake quote from 1814 that even made it into the Encyclopedia Britannica, as shown by Frank Ejby Poulsen in The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots: A Proponent of Cosmopolitan Republicanism in the French Revolution (2023).

Cloots's end followed quickly. Robespierre ejected him from the Jacobin Club because he distrusted Cloots as a foreigner, and Cloots was then swept into the accusations against the Hébertists. By this point, his contrarian nature and his willingness to criticize the theists in the Jacobin Club and Robespierre alienated potential allies. He made a fatal mistake by not defending himself immediately. He was guillotined on March 24, 1794.

On the face of it, Cloots is one of the last people one would suspect of being a Badger, those men who often sound like progressives but who are out to obstruct. Yet Bertigrew Bagley says, “Anacharsis Cloots, who was one of us,” as if nothing required explanation. It is one of the most puzzling moments in Lafferty. My suspicion is that it has more to do with Lafferty's reading of Melville and Melville's interest in Cloots as a figure than with Cloots. It is possibly related to what Bagley says about brotherhood:

“Then you'll wonder (Lord how you'll wonder!) how many of them there really are. How wide is that preternatural brotherhood? There've been a hundred points where mankind was frustrated from real clarification and grace. At each of those points you will find one of those evil men. Who directs them? And why do they obstruct while they mouth progress and enlightenment?” “You believe in preternatural brotherhoods, do you, Bagley?” “Belonging to one myself, certainly I do.”

This does not feel like the whole story. Belloc, who wrote books both about the French Revolution and Robespierre, has nothing to say. It has puzzled me from the first time I read Fourth Mansions. What was Lafferty's fictional Cloots obstructing as he mouthed progress? The French Revolution itself, presumably, but how? It seems unlikely that Lafferty read Cloots in French, which is what leads me to weigh Melville here. Lafferty sometimes likes to fabricate passages by sources, though it is usually possible to understand what he is up to. This is the only instance I know of in which he rehabilitates one of his natural political bugaboos.