ABSTRACT

I first began thinking about this essay, and about the meaning of ‘cosmopolitanism’, after seeing the show Magiciens de la Terre in Paris in 1989, an attempt, as I saw it, not simply to ‘globalize’ art, but also to denationalize it on a global scale at a time in which nationalist revivalism was burgeoning throughout the world, a development exacerbated still further since 1989. In the context of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, it reminded me, not of the nationalism which increasingly gave energy to the Revolution and finally transmuted into Bonapartism, but of the cosmopolitanism of Anacharsis Cloots, who in 1790 assembled an embassy of thirty-six assorted foreigners, as many as he could find in Paris to represent the ‘oppressed nations of the universe’, to pay their respects at the bar of the National Assembly, to congratulate it on ‘restoring primitive equality among men’, and to call for the overthrow of tyranny around the world, wherever peoples were ‘sighing for liberty’. 1 Each wore his national costume—German, Dutch, Swiss…Indian, Turkish, Persian, encircled by the tricolour sash. Cloots was active in establishing the cult of universal reason, with its concomitants liberty and equality, and was the author of a heated tract on The Universal Republic. By 1793, he was already coming under attack for his ‘Prussian’ birth, despite the fact that, now nearing 40, he had lived in Paris since the age of 21 and had even been made an honorary citizen, along with Tom Paine and other ‘citizens of the world’. In March 1794 he was arrested and thrown into jail (just three months after Paine). He was charged with involvement in ‘a foreign plot’ and subsequently guillotined. National identity had caught up with him at last.