Chapter 3 Anthony Benezet the Huguenot: A Family Odyssey across the 18th-Century Refuge*

Bertrand Van Ruymbeke*

The title of this chapter is deliberately assertive. There is no doubt that Anthony Benezet was a Huguenot. That is, he was born a Huguenot and he was raised as a Huguenot. But my point is that he does not seem to have been perceived as such even by French historians of French Protestantism.1 The idea of this contribution therefore derives from a simple observation, with two embedded questions. Benezet is not mentioned, or briefly at best, in studies of the Refuge, as the Huguenot diaspora is known to French historians. The ques- tions are: why, and what does it imply in our perception of Benezet? I would add that this chapter focuses on Benezet’s familial and religious backgrounds, mostly those of Jean-Étienne, his father, because it was his decision to flee , to settle in , and to convert to Quakerism that determined Benezet’s life and work itinerary as well as many of his choices.

Profile of an Absence

There are no articles devoted to Anthony Benezet or his work in the Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, the publishing voice of the

* I wish to thank Marie-Jeanne Rossignol for her collaboration on this Benezet volume and conference; Ann Upton, special collection librarian at Haverford College, for her warm wel- come and assistance; David van der Linden and Elisabeth Heijmans, for helping me gather transcriptions and photographs of archival documents in Rotterdam and Leiden; Lionel Laborie, for guiding me to Jean-Étienne Benezet’s letters to Prosper Marchand; Bernard Douzil and Jean-Paul Chabrol, for sharing offprints of their work; and Owen Stanwood and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, for their comments on this chapter. 1 Conversely, Anthony Benezet and his writings have been the object of fine recent studies and critical editions. See, for instance, Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven: 2012); Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (, PA, 2009); Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank (eds.), and Abolition (Champaign, IL 2014); and David L. Crosby (ed.), The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet, 1754–1783: an Annotated Critical Edition (Baton Rouge, LA, 2014).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004315662_005 Anthony Benezet the Huguenot 35 prestigious French Huguenot Society founded in Paris in 1852. In her anniver- sary (1685–1985) survey of the Huguenot diaspora, Le Refuge protestant, Myriam Yardeni does not mention him either.2 However, during his lifetime there was interest in France in his work. The Société des Amis des Noirs several times mentioned the wish to have a French translation made of his Short Account of Guinea but nothing came out of it.3 Benezet was, as is well known, also a correspondent of l’abbé Raynal and the marquis de Chastellux, two important figures of the in France. Well aware of his French Protestant background and familial identity, Benezet maintained ties to the Huguenot community at Saint-Quentin where he was born. In July 1781 he asked to “get intelligence by letter from my kindred as St. Quentin, in Picardie, the place of my nativity” and gave him “a Packet for M. Debrissac, my near kinsman, one of the principal traders there [. . .] requesting thy kind assistance in the conveyance to its destination.”4 Half a century later, ’s biography was published in England in 1816, the following year in Philadelphia and translated into French in 1824. Vaux’s work appeared in the context of the debate regarding the banning of the slave trade in the wake of the 1815 Congress of Vienna and the terrible story of the wreck of the ship La Méduse off the coast of Mauritania, which symbolized the return of the French to Senegal after it was returned to France by Great Britain. This event was artistically immortalized in French memory by Géricault’s painting Le Radeau de la Méduse (1819), in which the painter places three black men as a denunciation of the slave trade.5 To write a biography of Anthony Benezet at that moment was a timely reminder of his indefatigable

2 Myriam Yardeni, Le refuge protestant (Paris, 1985). 3 Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot (eds.), La Société des Amis des Noirs, 1788–1799: Contribution à l’histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris, 1998). See also the contributions to this volume by Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (ch.10) and Randy J. Sparks (ch.11). A translation of this seminal text into French is being prepared under the coordination of Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, Elodie Peyrol-Kléber, and me, to be published by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle. 4 The full letter is in Irv A. Brendlinger (ed.), To be Silent . . . Would Be Criminal. The Antislavery Influence and Writings of Anthony Benezet (Lanham, MD, 2007), p. 67. As Benezet stressed, Isaac De Brissac was an important Huguenot mercantile figure in Saint-Quentin. In his gar- den, many were buried. See Didier Boisson’s contribution to this volume (ch.2). The Benezets were related by marriage to the de Brissacs. Jacques Pannier, Antoine Bénézet (de Saint-Quentin). Un Quaker français en Amérique (Toulouse, 1925), pp. 4–5. 5 Roberts Vaux, Memoirs of the Life of Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia, PA, 1817). The French version, indicated as being “abridged from the original,” was published in London. R. Vaux, Mémoires sur la vie d’Antoine Bénézet (London, 1824).