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This chapter begins its journey in Lorraine, four decades before the Revolution, where a child named Baptiste Henry was born to modest artisans named Bastien Grégoire and Marguerite Thiébaut. Aided by scholarships and endowed with unusual intelligence, young Henri exhausted every opportunity he received for schooling and soon asked his teachers to place him in a religious seminary. Henri, however, was not only an aspiring cleric but also an ambitious provincial intellectual. Even while training in the church, Henri Grégoire vied for notoriety in the provincial academies and societies that were so important to late eighteenth-century intellectual life; an extrovert, his search for good conversation also led him to make myriad friends. Though previous biographies have overlooked this, he was to he particularly influenced by a quasi-Masonic group called the Société des Philantropes of Strasbourg.

In modern-day France, the involvement of Catholics such as Henri Grégoire in the Revolution has appeared puzzling at best, traitorous at worst. Because of the violent dechristianization of the later Revolution, which saw churches vandalized and royalist priests deported or executed, religion and Revolution have often been seen as sworn enemies. Many secular revolutionaries would not have objected to this depiction; for them, the Church was as much of an obstacle to progress as the monarchy. Moreover, when they used regeneration, they saw it not as a Christian term but as an anti-Christian one. When Grégoire discovered that others did not share his passion for the Revolution, however, his attacks on them became more fierce. While never one of the most blood-thirsty revolutionaries, he would play an integral role in the National Convention—something he would later try to downplay.

Henri Grégoire's involvement with Haiti during the Restoration has much to teach about his vision of regeneration for the world during these years. Grégoire's Haitian involvement also yields a fascinating glimpse into the complexities of abolitionists' relationships with those they wanted to help. Grégoire was more progressive than his contemporaries in many ways. Even as his compatriots attacked him for his “Negrophilia” and treated Haiti as an outlaw nation, he applauded Haitian independence and thirsted for reports on the progress of civilization in Haiti. Although the abbé supported non-European peoples' efforts to resist colonialism, however, parts of his work helped provide ideological support for that colonialism and reinforced their international subservience. Grégoire's relationship with Haiti also sheds light on the legacy of the Revolution itself, by further demonstrating the links between revolutionary universalism and the nineteenth-century idea of the white man's burden.

In 1782, Henri Grégoire was named curé (parish priest) of Emberménil, as successor to his old mentor—something truly momentous for someone in his circumstances. Though he could have remained an important man in Emberménil until his death, Grégoire was to set his sights higher. Though Grégoire's activities in the 1780s are far less famous than his later actions, tracing them is important for several reasons. First, examining his practical attempts to improve his parish helps understand the roots of his ideas of regeneration and universalism. This chapter shows in particular his early interest in spreading enlightenment to groups he felt had been denied knowledge; in traveling as a means for learning about different cultures; and in using Johann Caspar Lavater's ideas on physiognomy to understand moral behavior and discusses the origins of his controversial stances on the Church during the Revolution.

This chapter contrasts La Chanson de Roland's successful canonization as France's national epic with the Byzantine epic Digenes Akrites, which seemed destined to serve the same function for Modern Greece when it was rediscovered in 1868. However, Digenes’ manuscript problems became embroiled in contentious and crippling debates between demoticists and purists. The epic suffered further from Henri Grégoire's erudite but naive attempt to ground it in historical fact and from his failure to link the poem to the current political climate. By contrast, Gaston Paris, France's pre‐eminent late nineteenth‐century medievalist, secured Roland's spot at the head of the French literary canon by appealing to nationalist sentiment and establishing a powerful analogy between the France of the poetic Charlemagne and the nineteenth‐century French nation. A close examination of each scholar's methods reveals the cultural and intellectual climate necessary to produce a national epic.

The Americas held a special fascination for Henri Grégoire; in contrast to Europe, they represented for him a world of uncorrupted possibilities. Grégoire particularly admired the United States, which had sparked the modern republican trend; he also supported would-be republicans throughout Latin America. Grégoire's pan-American engagements highlight the existence of an Atlantic republican network in the early nineteenth century, as republicans around the Atlantic eagerly sought relationships with each other. Despite their eagerness, however, this network was fragile and sometimes contentious. Views of republicanism were not always the same, and Grégoire would discover that American republicans were not always as interested in corresponding with him as he was with them. His disagreements with them often centered on two matters: slavery and religion—particularly as Catholicism became even more central to his political program. Gregoire's dealings with Thomas Jefferson would he emblematic of his simultaneous admiration for and frustration with American republicans.

In focusing on the way Henri Grégoire used the term regeneration on the eve of the Revolution, this chapter glimpses some of the contradictions in this paradigm as he would use it throughout his life. For Grégoire, whose usage of the word was seminal, regeneration was not merely a political action, but also a physical and moral one. Building on meanings of the word in Christianity's theology as well as in the Enlightenment, the new usage suggested that groups like the Jews who were seen as degenerated needed special help in all of these areas before they could be fully included in the social body. Understanding Grégoire's reshaping of the word is especially important since regeneration would become the dominant paradigm for the treatment of difference in modern France and its empire.

This chapter explains that since regeneration had come to mean a complete repudiation of the past to many revolutionaries, Henri Grégoire found himself struggling to portray the national agenda differently: as a cleansing of corrupted traditions, a connecting of the best of the past with that of the present. Grégoire's new vision of regeneration was not a radical reconceptualization; after all, the root of the word was regeneration, creating something again. Even as he lessened his parliamentary involvement during the Thermidorian Convention and the Directory, Grégoire remained enormously busy in other spheres. In his efforts to root innovation in a usable past and thus avoid the mistakes of the Terror, he looked particularly in three directions: creating a science of society, reestablishing a republican Church, and reorienting the French colonial system. His efforts would help refound republicanism, while ensuring the future of imperialism of France.

Henri Grégoire remained an activist in world of politics until his death, despite occasional frustrations. In addition to New World republicanism, he used his money and pen to support the rights of Catholics in Ireland, republicans in Europe, and enslaved Africans throughout the world. Rather than defining his interest in oppressed groups as simply humanitarian, this chapter tries to situate it within his ongoing defense of Catholicism against attacks by philosophes, Protestants, and other non-believers. While Grégoire's Christianity was certainly a motivating factor in his defense of the oppressed, the equation was also reversed: his discussions of the oppressed served precisely to demonstrate Christianity's superiority. Before the Revolution, Grégoire had been clear that defending Catholicism was one of his main goals in writing about Jews. Although he had avoided such language during the Revolution, it now returned and expanded, as marginal groups of all kinds became vehicles for him to laud Catholicism.

This chapter discusses several fascinations about gender, the history of the Jews, colonialism, and postcolonialism. It includes issues such as why revolutions erupt, what role religious truth claims play in political and cultural life, and how ideas transform as they are diffused throughout society. Its association with Keith Michael Baker, a renowned scholar of eighteenth-century France, reaffirmed its desire to specialize in that field. The chapter goes on to discuss the abbé Henri Grégoire, a famous white French priest. For anyone studying the French Revolution or modern Jewish history, an examination of the part played by abbé is inescapable. A priest from Lorraine, he wrote a famous essay on Jews in 1788, urging that they be “regenerated” physically, morally, and politically, in order to be integrated fully into French society. The following year he came to Paris for the Estates-General and become involved in the Revolution, where he was the figure credited with effecting Jewish emancipation.

The close association of the Académie with the monarchy had been an asset during the National Assembly, but under the republic it was a heavy liability. As the one-year anniversary of the overthrow of Louis XVI approached, the National Convention urgently sought to suppress the Académie, which it did on August 8, 1793, taking the edited manuscript copy of the dictionary into its custody. Although it had abolished the body, the Convention wished to see a new edition of the dictionary appear, so after a public call for one did not produce any results, it commissioned Jean-Joseph Smits and Claude-François Maradan to bring it to completion. Its importance was heightened by a change in language policy in which the Convention sought to eradicate patois and make French the exclusive language of the republic.

Chapter 6 focuses on the mystical atmosphere created by the Holy Alliance (1815) and on the hopes invested on Tsar Alexander I’s allegedly liberal and constitutional venture in the years around the Congress of Vienna. It shows how deeply anti-revolutionary European liberalism was at this time and argues that no matter how conservative, Kapodistrias’s political outlook fell within—and not outside—the spectrum of liberal politics as these were understood in Europe in the post-Napoleonic period. By focusing on the Holy Alliance’s application of a political theology based on the principle of ‘Christian fraternity’, the chapter shows, in addition, how, in this circle of Ionian and Phanariot intellectuals, visions of Pan-Christian utopian ecumenism were combined with the emerging idea of the nation.