RAYNAL, GUILLAUME-THOMAS, ABB DE

born April 12, 1713, Saint-Geniez, Fr. died March 6, 1796, Chaillot French writer and propagandist who helped set the intellectual climate for the French Revolution. Raynal was educated by the Jesuits and as a young man joined the order, but after going to Paris to work for the church he gave up religious life in favour of writing. He established himself as a writer with two historical works, one on the Netherlands (1747) and the other on the English Parliament (1748), both of them hackwork but popular and widely read. From 1750 to 1754 he edited the government-supported literary periodical Mercure de France, winning literary respectability and a place in society. Raynal's most important work was a six-volume history of the European colonies in India and America, published in 1770. It was both anticlerical and antiroyalist in tone. The philosopher and encyclopaedist Denis Diderot is credited with writing many of the better passages, as well as the more radical historical interpretations. The work was extremely popular, going through 30 editions between 1772 and 1789, its radical tone becoming more pronounced in the later editions. In 1774 the history was placed on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books, and in 1781 the authorities ordered Raynal into exile and decreed that his history be burned. He was allowed to return to France, but not to Paris, in 1784. His banishment from Paris was finally rescinded in 1790. Although he had been elected to the States General in 1789, early in the French Revolution Raynal refused to serve because he opposed violence. He later renounced radicalism and prepared a message that was read to the National Assembly (successor to the States General) in May 1791, calling for a constitutional monarchy modelled on the English system. His property was later confiscated by the National Assembly, and he died in poverty.