C.-F. Volney

Constantin-François Chassebœuf, comte de Volney (1757–1820), was born at Craon in Anjou and took the pen name Volney (a contraction of Voltaire and Ferney, Voltaire's estate) as a young writer in Paris. A journey through Egypt and Syria in 1783–85 gave him the material for his first book, Travels in Egypt and Syria (1787); The Ruins, or Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1791) followed, surveying the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to argue that all religions share a common origin and that reason and natural law, not revelation, should govern society. Elected to the Estates-General in 1789, he was later imprisoned during the Terror, taught history at the new École Normale, and travelled in the United States, where he was briefly suspected of espionage and expelled under the Alien Act. He was made a count and a peer of France under the Restoration and died in Paris.