Under an improved system of education children will be brought up to a vegetable regimen, as being the most natural to man … I have seen an instance of it in a young Englishman aged fifteen … He was of a most interesting figure, of the most robust health, and of the most sweet disposition … His father, Mr Pigott, told me that he had brought him up entirely upon the Pythagorean regimen, the good effects of which he had known by his own experience. He had formed a project of … establishing in English America a society of dietary reformers … Would that this educational scheme, worthy of the best and happiest times of Antiquity might succeed!19
Pigott’s hopes of establishing a vegetarian community in America were clearly dreamed in collaboration with Valady, and even Saint-Pierre wrote of his own desire to ‘establish a happy colony’ in America.20 Valady’s American dreams had been fired by his friend, Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, the French consul in New York, whose Letters from an American Farmer (1782–4) inspired generations with its bucolic images of the log-cabin rural life and America’s ‘melting pot’ society.21
In the passion of his recent conversion under Pigott, Valady wrote to his sister the Comtesse de Freissinet La Guépie in the summer of 1788, explaining in stunning rhetoric his new Rousseauist vegetarian convictions. All the evils that man encountered, he told his sister, all illnesses and weaknesses ‘which make nothing but a scene of sadness of his whole life’ were due to ‘his improper and anti-natural’ habit of eating flesh. Records of a healthy vegetarian Golden Age existed in ‘all the nations which have covered and inhabited this earth’, and all ills ‘come from the corruption of our humours, which is produced entirely by the use of meat and its pernicious effects’.22 If men relinquished meat-eating, he insisted, their health would improve infinitely, they could extend their life threefold and would ‘taste the happiness destined to their species’. But people were so accustomed to poisoning themselves that their nature had been suffocated, and they no longer even felt the horror that should accompany eating animals. So much so, predicted Valady, that if someone rose up against the error, he would be treated like a madman:
How will such a one be received – in this age of wild luxury, where all the vices mount with undisguised effrontery, this real age of iron – who will raise his voice to say to men that they ought not to feed on flesh, that it is criminal to take life from God’s creatures in order to devour them and that all the ills which they suffer here on earth are the just punishment of their voracious cruelty … I am convinced that I would render the most considerable service to men if I could … return them to the path of their all beneficent mother, nature.
To turn back the effects of this terrible social malaise one would have to start early, with the new generation of children: it was on them that the future happiness of the human race depended. Valady felt that his vegetarian insights which he gleaned from Pigott could even improve on the educational scheme set out in Rousseau’s Émile, and he planned to write a commentary on this work.23
His sister was bringing up her own children, and he warned that meat was particularly pernicious for the weak organs of the young. In England and Scotland, he said, ‘one sees the most beautiful children of the world, because, even though the parents eat a lot of meat, they feed them entirely on vegetables and milk’. The children of vegetarian parents, he averred, were immune to smallpox, measles and toothache and always had ‘a soft, animated humour’, because ‘It is an irrevocable fact that the nature of our food determines our humours and our moral dispositions.’24
Pigott first converted Valady to vegetarianism, but an earlier account, The History of Robespierre (1794), attributed Valady’s conversion to another member of Brissot’s gang of collaborators, John Oswald:
Among his friends, he counted an Englishman* (Oswald), who was eccentric in his mode of thinking, and who had adopted the dietetic principles of the Bramins. So much had Oswald prevailed with him against the custom of eating portions of a corpse, that Valady, for a considerable time, abstained from animal food. These sentiments, and others, which he had imbibed from books, induced him to write a system of philosophy, so romantic and chimerical, that some attributed it to a derangement of mind.25
It is perfectly plausible that Oswald was involved in inspiring Valady’s vegetarianism; many of their ideas and rhetorical phrases are similar, and Valady had certainly been well primed in Rousseauist ideals of radical simplicity before he met Pigott. Since Oswald was working alongside Pigott, Lanthenas and Brissot – writing in the same journals and campaigning for the export of revolution to Britain – it seems probable that Oswald and Valady at least encountered each other.26
It appears that Pigott, Oswald and Valady – along with Saint-Pierre – knew each other and formed an important, highly conspicuous if loosely united attempt to build a vegetarian republic. Their idealism touched many prominent figures, particularly those close to Brissot, the most powerful leader in the early years of the Revolution. Even Alphonse de Lamartine, author of the multi-volume hagiography the History of the Girondins, and inheritor of Brissot’s political legacy, was himself a follower of Saint-Pierre’s vegetarian creed. The philosophy of the revolutionary vegetarians had its roots in Rousseau and Saint-Pierre who were – more than anyone else – the central figures of revolutionary culture. Brissot himself admired vegetarianism and cultivated the image of simplicity in self-conscious emulation of Benjamin Franklin. Through Franklin and Brissot, the puritanical philosophy of Thomas Tryon converged with Rousseauism in the era of the French Revolution. There was a tradition of radical vegetarianism stretching from the English Civil War of the 1640s through to the revolutionary 1780s and ‘90s. In periods of war, food shortages accentuated the need to economise on food and the luxury of meat was associated with the predatory injustice of ruling classes. Radical vegetarians sought to enfranchise animals within the wider circles of democratic fraternity. Even those who regarded meat-eating as a necessary evil, like the revolutionary statesmen Ludot and Coupé, called for legislation to force people to ‘strive to render life pleasant to all that breathes’, while other revolutionaries instituted a festival in honour of domestic animals, ‘the companions of man’.27 Radical vegetarianism was not an isolated extreme; it was a flourishing branch on the main trunk of revolutionary philosophy.
Such was the result of Valady’s fateful summer of 1787. Taken to Geneva by a concerned but conventional uncle, Valady was now even thicker with the radicals than he had been before. Until equality and tranquillity were established in France, he wrote to Breck in February 1788, he would dedicate himself to the ‘destruction of that fatal and wretched order of beings called kings’.28
In the same month he helped Brissot found the infamous Société des Amis des Noirs, or the Blacks, modelled on similar English societies run by David Williams and Granville Sharpe, ostensibly campaigning for the abolition of the slave trade, but simultaneously operating as a secret circle of revolutionary activism. Among its members were many of the most prominent revolutionaries of the coming years, including Constantin Volney, the Girondist republican, atheist, Napoleonic empire-building Orientalist, who, like Valady, argued that the tender human heart was naturally sensible to animal suffering. ‘The habit of shedding blood, or even seeing it shed, corrupts all sentiment of humanity,’ Volney concluded in his Voyages, and only vegetarian peoples had ‘preserv’d a humane and sensible heart’ which shrank from human and animal slaughter.29
Valady was one of the Blacks’ most enthusiastic members, and with his persuasive enthusiasm he swelled its numbers by bringing in the Marquis de Pastoret, Pierre-Paul-Sylvain Lucas de Blaire, the Marquis de Pampelune, and at one meeting in May he introduced a number of his friends and comrades in the Gardes Françaises: d’Arnaud, d’Aubusson, the Comte de Dampierre, the Marquis de Mons, the Comtes Coustard de St-Lô and d’Avaux, and Louis-Sébastien Mercier. At this meeting Brissot also brought his own friends, among whom was Robert Pigott, explaining the meaning of his nickname ‘Black Pigott�
��.30
Valady also added Saint-Pierre to the membership list, but Saint-Pierre curtly turned down the offer and sent an article to Brissot claiming that although he approved of the principles of the meeting, he wasn’t well enough, lived too far away, preferred solitude, and did not in principle join confederations. Brissot, embarrassed by the rejection, felt let down: Saint-Pierre had, with Rousseau, taught a generation to love nature, liberty and virtue, but now would not exert himself to advance their progress.31
When Brissot travelled to America to further the aims of the society – also with idyllic notions of settling there – he wrote letters of introduction to Lafayette so that Valady could join him later. Valady became an assistant to Lafayette who in turn gave Valady letters of recommendation to George Washington, Henry Knox and General Mifflius. (Lafayette’s other aide, Chastel de Boinville, married Harriet Collins who later formed a nudist vegetarian community with Percy Bysshe Shelley.)32
Valady never did join Brissot in America, and instead hung around at his house irritating Brissot’s wife. She wrote to Brissot and her brother warning them that association with Valady could ‘be dangerous or at least onerous’. She thought his ‘pythagorean’ diet was motivated ‘more from singularity than austerity’ and that his claims for its healthiness did not add up, as he would be ‘eating all day even though he insists that vegetables are very nutritious’. She complained that Valady said he didn’t want to create difficulties but he was always asking for vegetable food that one did not have in the house, and would be astonished if one did not have milk at all times of the day. He believed ‘that everything ought to be communal’ and did not know ‘the boundaries at which one ought to stop’.33 It seems possible that Valady had offended Madame Brissot by proffering his notorious conviction that sharing between communal brethren ought to extend to their wives.
In pursuit of his dreams, Valady once again ditched his post in the Gardes Françaises which had, in Valady’s eyes, become an instrument of ‘injustice and despotism’.34 He returned to England where, according to the Biographical Anecdotes of the Founders of the French Republic, ‘one of his first cares, on arriving in the capital, was to visit a gentleman of eminence in the literary world, and to propose to him the station of chief of the Pythagorean sect. Followers, he assured him, he could not fail to find in every quarter of the globe.’35 Who this potential leader of a global vegetarian sect was, is not stated: it could have been John Oswald, or any of the other British vegetarians – David Williams, James Graham, John Stewart or Joseph Ritson. In any case, the gentleman turned down Valady’s optimistic offer and ‘Upon his refusal, Valadi intimated some intention of assuming the honourable post himself.’ The unnamed man suggested that if Valady was to become a true Pythagorean, he should learn Greek and advised him to travel to Edinburgh and study there.
In the autumn Valady returned from Edinburgh to London, but by this time his father had succeeded in making his financial affairs extremely complicated, and again Valady forestalled his journey to America.36 He had still not departed by winter when he came across the most prominent resuscitator of Pythagorean philosophy in London, Thomas Taylor, who had just started translating Platonic and Pythagorean texts and had recently published The History of the Restoration of the Platonic Theology, which focused on the vegetarian Neoplatonists.37 Most of Taylor’s contemporaries surmised that Taylor actually believed in a polytheistic universe, and it was rumoured that he poured libations and even sacrificed sheep and cattle to the statues of pagan gods.38 Dubbed ‘the modern Pletho’, ‘the apostle of paganism’, ‘the gentile priest of England’, and ‘the great apostle of the Heathen gods’, Taylor attracted the attention of Valady, who had also relinquished Christianity.39 Valady realised that the Rousseauist return to nature could be united with the Pythagorean idea of natural harmony and Golden Age vegetarianism. The moment Valady heard of Taylor, he wrote him this extraordinary letter of introduction:
O Thomas Taylor! mayst thou welcome a brother Pythagorean … My good fortune was, that I met, eighteen months ago, an English gentleman of the name of Pigott, who is a Pythagorean Philosopher, and who easily converted me to the diet and manners agreeable to that most rich and beneficent Deity – Mother Earth; and to that heaven inspired change I owe perfect health and tranquillity of mind … I would more cheerfully depart from my present habitation on this Themis-forsaken earth, than defile myself evermore with animal food, stolen either on earth, in air or water.
I met with thy works but two days past. O divine man! a prodigy in this iron age!40
The following day Valady threw himself at Taylor’s feet demanding to remain in the household as a disciple. After some reluctance, Taylor relented and Valady moved in.41
But it was an ill-fated match. Taylor was indeed a renowned animal-lover, and many suspected that he believed his many pet animals were inhabited with human souls. This is how he is represented in Disraeli’s novel Vaurien, and for this reason he was compared in Fraser’s Magazine (1875) to Percy Bysshe Shelley and to John Fransham, another ‘pagan’ who ‘was greatly in advance of his age in advocating humanity to the lower animals’. Some even suggested that Taylor was vegetarian – William Blake called him ‘Sipsop the Pythagorean’ – and modern scholars have assumed he was. Taylor did translate the ancient vegetarian works: Porphyry’s Abstinence from Animal Food (which he said ‘is remarkable for the purity of life which it inculcates’), Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras (the author of which he eulogised for having ‘imitated in his diet the frugal simplicity of the most ancient times’), and parts of Plutarch’s essays on animal sagacity (which he considered ‘ingenious’).42 Whether Taylor intended it or not, his works had a lasting impact on the future of vegetarianism: Mary and Percy Shelley avidly read his works; he influenced the poetry – and perhaps the reverence for animals – of William Blake and John Flaxman; Ralph Waldo Emerson became Taylor’s disciple; and he inspired Thomas M. Johnson, American editor of the Platonist, whose associate, Bronson Alcott, became a founder member of the Vegetarian Society and planned to deploy Taylor’s works in establishing a ‘Second Eden’.43
But Taylor himself had a torn conscience over the vegetarian diet: intellectually he knew it was right, but in practice he did not keep to it. He agreed with Porphyry that it was the best diet for a man of pure spirit and philosophy, but he insisted that it was not appropriate ‘to those who lead an active life’. In an apologetic note, Taylor explained that he ‘has been obliged to mingle the active with the contemplative life’ and therefore that he ‘has also found it expedient to make use of a fleshy diet. Nothing, however, but an imperious necessity, from causes which it would be superfluous to detail at present, could have induced him to adopt animal, instead of vegetable nutriment.’44
Valady must have been disappointed with his new tutor, who did not even follow the diet instigated by the founder of his philosophy – and certainly Taylor was no less exasperated by his disciple. A few years after their meeting, Taylor anonymously published the satirical Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792), which mockingly claimed that if everyone accepted that animals were equal to humans, one could expect ‘that beautiful period be realized … when ‘‘Man walk’d with beast joint tenant of the shade.’’’45 As a marginalised, dissenting member of society himself, Taylor had become friends with radicals such as Paine, Thomas Brand Hollis and Mary Wollstonecraft. But he did not share their egalitarian idealism. The title of his work was clearly sending up Paine’s Rights of Man (1790–1) and Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); both authors had also advocated kindness to animals.46 The logical conclusion of their politics he laughingly suggested was that ‘government may be entirely subverted, subordination abolished, and all things every where, and in every respect, be common to all’.47 He had obviously found Valady’s extension of radical politics to the rights of animals preposterous, and he jestingly used the same ancient vegetarian arguments that Oswald had included in his Cry of Nature (1791), a
s well as those in Herman Daggett’s The Rights of Animals (1792).48 He probably also had in mind his associate, the vegetarian John Stewart, when he commented ironically that since ‘it is an ancient opinion, that all things are endued with sense … there is some reason to hope, that this Essay will soon be followed by treatises on the rights of vegetables and minerals’, ‘and even the most apparently contemptible clod of earth’. Although Taylor was mocking his friends’ extremism, there was a sincere element to his writing. It was the idea of attributing equal rights to animals that he found so risible, but he nevertheless believed, with Plato, that respect for the many rungs in the great Chain of Being was the best mechanism for hierarchical harmony.49
It was not long before Valady realised his mistake, and he seriously stretched Taylor’s indulgence when he suggested that since ‘a community of possessions in every thing was perfectly Pythagoric’, should not a man also share his wife with his friends?50 Taylor was not amused by the hint and the restless Valady resolved to move on once again. Hearing of the growing political tumults in France, he prepared to return home and take part in the Revolution. ‘I came here Diogenes,’ he told Taylor on departing, ‘and I return Alexander.’51
At the beginning of 1789, Valady was back in France and in June he arrived in Paris when rumours were spreading that the King was about to disband the National Assembly forcefully (the monarchy’s earlier gesture towards democratic reform). Discontent was growing among the soldiers of the Gardes Françaises, many of whom were drawn from the same social classes as the mobs they were increasingly being mobilised to put down, and some had been punished for refusing to fire on the people. The King’s employment of the Swiss Guards and the Gardes du Corps to protect his person fuelled more acute suspicion and resentment.
Valady seized his chance and, according to several contemporary reports, became a key player in precipitating the Revolution. ‘In one point, he may be considered as the chief promoter of the vicissitudes which have caracterized the eventful history of France,’ said one impartial source. He returned to his former regiment and spread the spirit of sedition. The Secret History of the French Revolution (1797) by François Xavier Pages related that Valady, ‘one of the most zealous apostles of liberty, perhaps also paid by Orleans,* went from barrack to barrack to enlighten the soldiers with regard to the real duties of men, and what they owed to their country and to humanity.’ Thomas Carlyle, in his narrative reconstruction The French Revolution (1837), wrote that thanks to ‘Valadi the Pythagorean’, the Gardes Françaises promised not to march against the National Assembly or against the people.52 The anxious officers commanded the troops to remain closed in their barracks, but on 25 and 26 June whole battalions defected and joined the people gathering at the Palais Royal. There they were met with applause and refreshments and joined in the chanting of ‘Long Live the Third Estate’. It was the knowledge that the Gardes Françaises would not stop them – and might even help – that gave the people confidence to storm the Bastille.
The Bloodless Revolution Page 41
