Open Access

Edoardo Tortarolo

• The notion of the barbarian has been crucial in the development of the intellectual shifts spurred on by thinkers who shaped the culture of the Enlightenment. Asking what a barbarian might be had quite different meanings in the early 16th and in the late 18th century. An anthropological approach to the very different populations that had come to be known in Europe since the 16th century as well as the secularization of the historical vision contributed to the emergence of a more objectified connotation of barbarism. Among others, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Gibbon, Voltaire, d’Holbach commented extensively on barbarism as characterizing different stages in human civilization. Volney (Constantin-François de Chassebeuf, 1757-1820), who travelled to Egypt and Syria in the early 1780s, was familiar with the French works of the Enlightenment and applied their concepts of barbarism to the observation of the different Muslim populations he encountered. Later, after experiencing the turmoil of the French Revolution, he became interested in the United States. During his stay in America from 1795 to 1798, he investigated the American Indians who represented a different form of barbarism. Volney stands out as a thinker who knew the classics of the Enlightenment and who creatively compared theoretical speculations with his first-hand empirical observations.