Anacharsis Cloots
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“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), chapter III
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. His birth supplies at least a joke about his being 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. During the Revolution, he dropped his title and took the name “Anacharsis” from Barthélemy’s once-famous philosophical romance, Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece. Its hero is a young Scythian descended from the ancient philosopher of the same name. An old volume turns up among Charles Bovary’s school reading in Madame Bovary.
Cloots’s most famous moment was theatrical and stagy. On June 19, 1790, 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. He became known as the “Orator of the Human Race.”
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, chapter 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, chapter 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, chapter 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.
One of the best-known claims about Cloots is apparently false: that he declared himself the “personal enemy of Jesus Christ.”
The apocryphal attribution made it into the Encyclopædia Britannica, as Frank Ejby Poulsen explains in The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots: A Proponent of Cosmopolitan Republicanism in the French Revolution (2023). Following Roland Mortier, Poulsen notes that the declaration cannot be found in Cloots’s writings. He suggests that a description of Cloots in Riouffé’s memoirs helped establish the later legend.
Cloots’s hostility to revealed religion was real enough, however. In his speech of November 17, 1793, he proclaimed that there was “no other God but nature, no other sovereign than the human race: the people-God.” This sounds much closer to the Harvesters’ ambition to outgrow God than to the patricks’ hope of being called by Him.
Robespierre had Cloots expelled from the Jacobin Club, distrusting him as a foreigner, and Cloots was then swept into the accusations against the Hébertists. His attacks on religious belief had also alienated potential allies. 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. Bagley’s patricks preserve an old empire and speak of Christendom as still living. Yet he says, “Anacharsis Clootz, who was one of us,” as if nothing required explanation. The emphasis is Lafferty’s. My suspicion is that the reference has more to do with Melville’s use of Cloots as a figure of assembled humanity than with Cloots’s political program.
There is a distinction to make here. Shortly before naming Cloots, Bagley says:
“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.” Fourth Mansions, chapter III
Bagley is speaking of the returning toads when he accuses these men of obstructing progress. His own brotherhood is different. The badgers defend the possibility of an advance that the toads repeatedly frustrate. As Croll says later, “We’ve stood for the open way even when it was stagnant; we won’t accept the closed way even when it’s in movement.” Bagley’s claim therefore does not make Cloots a secret opponent of the Revolution. It gives him a place among the defenders of that open way.
This is still strange, but membership among the patricks does not settle anyone’s standing before God. They remain exterior creatures, excluded from the Castle. Their faithful service has not brought the call they await. At the end, Freddy receives that call and gathers the strengths of all four companies within himself. Lafferty can give Cloots a place among the badgers without approving his theology.
The ending also gives the Melville connection something more to rest on. Freddy gathers within himself patricks from New York and Nairobi, Moscow and Lhasa, Batangas and Tongareva, Yerevan and Dublin. He becomes Emperor while remaining Everyman and Everylout. That gathering recalls Melville’s deputations of mankind, in which distinct peoples belong to a common company. I suspect that Cloots’s wish to represent the whole human race supplies part of his claim to be a patrick, even though his account of what unites that race would have been unacceptable to Lafferty.
The “unguarded passages” remain a puzzle. Lafferty names no work and quotes no passage from Cloots. Bagley’s assertion is all we have. The word “unguarded” may suggest that Cloots disclosed something his own philosophy could not properly explain. It may also belong to Bagley’s mixture of extraordinary learning and doubtful history. My suspicion still falls on Melville, but I cannot yet identify the source, if one exists, that would explain why Lafferty gives this revolutionary atheist a place among the Castle's keepers.
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