Self-fashioning and rhetoric in the French revolution: Anacharsis Cloots, orator of the human race

This article analyses what Anacharsis Cloots (1755–1794) meant
when he chose the name Anacharsis and called himself ‘Orator of
the human race’. It argues that it was an act of self-fashioning by
a foreigner in the French Revolution trying to find his place by
representing other foreign populations in the new nation of free
and equal citizens. Cloots, therefore, saw the Revolution as a
performance on the global stage. Cloots chose Anacharsis as first
name as an act of rejection against Christianity, but also because
Anacharsis was a philosopher of Ancient Greece he identified
with. Cloots chose the function of orator against ‘feudalism’
because, in the Roman republic, Cicero described the orator as a
hero—a philosopher pondering the truth and convincing his
audience with rhetorical skills. The orator is delivering universal
truths and that is also why Cloots chose to publish pamphlets
rather than treatises, in line with the rhetoric of the
Enlightenment and the rhetoric of the Revolution. His political
thought should therefore be considered seriously as the work of a
political philosopher.