Henri Grégoire

Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire (4 December 1750 – 28 May 1831), often referred to as the Abbé Grégoire, was a French Catholic priest, constitutional bishop of Blois and a revolutionary leader. He was an ardent slavery abolitionist and supporter of universal suffrage. He was a founding member of the Bureau des longitudes, the Institut de France, and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers.

Quotes

Assuredly no one of us would ever propose to retain in France the fatal race of kings; we all know but too well that dynasties have never been anything else than rapacious tribes who lived on nothing, but human flesh. It is necessary completely to reassure the friends of liberty. We must destroy this talisman, whose magic power is still sufficient to stupefy many a man. I move accordingly that you sanction by a solemn law the abolition of royalty.
- From the debate during the first session of the National Convention (20 September 1792), translated by James Harvey Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. 2 (1904), p. 448

Kings are in the moral order what monsters are in the physical. Courts are the workshops of crimes, the lair of tyrants. The history of kings is the martyrology of nations.
- From the debate during the first session of the National Convention (21 September 1792), translated by Robinson (1904), p. 449
- Herbert A. L. Fisher, The Republican Tradition in Europe (The Harvard University Lowell Lectures, 1910), translates:
  Kings are in morality what monsters are in the world of nature.

The more denuded a man is of virtues, the more he seeks to surround himself with frivolous distinctions. [...] But since pride unfortunately is the most tenacious of passions, the reign of prejudice has been prolonged, for man seems not to be able to attain truth until he has exhausted all of error's possibilities.
- Letter to the Citizens of Colour and Free Negroes of Saint-Domingue (8 June 1791), translated by Mitchell Abidor for marxists.org (2006)

The Abbé Grégoire, Victor Schoelcher and all those who spoke out and still speak out, who campaigned for human rights without distinction of race and against discrimination, these were my guides in life. They stand forever as representatives of the West's great outpouring of magnanimity and solidarity, an essential contribution to the advancement of the ideas of practical universality and human values, ideas without which the world of today would not be able to see its way forward. I am forever a brother to them, at one with them in their combat and in their hopes.
- Aimé Césaire, Interview published in The UNESCO courier (1997)

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Henri Grégoire