La Certitude des preuves du Mahométisme, ou Réfutation de l'Examen critique des Apologistes de la Religion Mahométane

First editions of two works by Baron Jean-Baptiste de Cloots, known as Anacharsis Cloots.

Contemporary half green basane bindings, green paper boards, smooth spines decorated with gilt fillets and dotted rolls, red basane title-labels, yellow edges. Bindings rubbed, some scuffing and losses, a few light corner creases. The "Lettres d'un jeune philosophe à un jeune théologien," a text intended to close La Certitude des preuves du Mahométisme, is bound in the first volume after the first part of the work. It is followed by the "Supplément à la certitude des preuves du mahométisme," and, also in the first volume, by another work by Cloots, the Lettre sur les juifs à un ecclésiastique de mes amis.

Rare copies of Anacharsis Cloots's earliest revolutionary writings, denouncing Christianity by confronting it with Islam and Judaism, in uniform contemporary bindings.

A native of Prussia, Baron Jean-Baptiste de Cloots (1755-1794), an immensely wealthy Francophile, settled in France in 1789 to promote the new ideas of the age, including the militant atheism he sets out in the present two works.

His first work, La Certitude des preuves du Mahométisme, is a parody of La Certitude des preuves du christianisme, published by Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier in 1767. A Catholic theologian from Lorraine (1718-1790), Bergier was appointed canon of Notre-Dame de Paris in 1769 and became one of the most persistent opponents of the philosophes, turning in turn on Rousseau, Voltaire, and Baron d'Holbach. In his text, Cloots defends Holbach against these attacks and sets out to demonstrate that the arguments Bergier used to establish Christianity as the one true religion could equally well be invoked in favour of Islam. Published under the pseudonym Ali Gier-Ber, with a false London imprint, the work belongs to the tradition of clandestine philosophical literature, then commonly printed outside France, under a pseudonym or anonymously, to escape the prosecution that royal censorship imposed on antireligious writings.

The work is bound together with Cloots's second piece: the Lettre sur les Juifs, à un ecclésiastique de mes amis, read at the public session of the Musée de Paris on 21 November 1782. This work develops much the same theme:

"In responding to the arguments drawn from the present state of the Jewish Nation, one refutes at once the Christian, the Muslim, and the Jew himself. All three claim to see therein proofs that support their respective faiths: all three rely on Prophecies, and all three are unreasonable."

By systematically turning the same apologetic procedures against each of the three revealed religions, Cloots sketches out, more than a decade before the Revolution, a critique of religious particularism that seems to foreshadow his later political thought: the rejection of any exclusive claim to truth. He would develop these ideas further in the "Bases constitutionnelles" of his République du genre humain (1793).

A Prussian thinker fervently devoted to the cause of the French Revolution - elected deputy to the Convention in September 1792, where he voted for the death of Louis XVI - Cloots nevertheless became a victim of the Terror. Naturalised a French citizen as early as August 1792 in recognition of his revolutionary commitment, he was nonetheless expelled from the Jacobin Club on account of his foreign origin, before being implicated, alongside the Hébertist leaders, in the accusation of a "foreign plot" fabricated by the Committee of Public Safety. Condemned to death, he was guillotined in March 1794.

These two volumes preserve the memory of one of the most singular figures of the French Revolution, guillotined at the height of the Terror in the wake of the Hébertist trial.