Counter-Revolution and Cosmopolitan Spirituality: Anquetil Duperron’s Translation of the Upanishads

Abstract

Smith analyzes the impact of the French Revolution on the work of eighteenth-century France’s most eminent scholar of Asian religions, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron. Considered by scholars to be a cosmopolitan liberal and “enlightened” figure, Anquetil in fact was an opponent of the French Revolution. He offered readers of his pioneering translation of the Sanskrit Upanishads (a set of texts central to South Asian religious traditions) as a weapon against the Revolution and the Enlightenment. Synthesizing Christian theology, Neo-Platonism, Kabbalah, and the Upanishads, Anquetil appealed to non-European traditions in his criticism of Enlightenment thought and established a pattern later used by mystics and right-wing intellectuals such as Rene Guenon and Julius Evola.