To Benjamin Franklin from the Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal, 5 April 1780
From the Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal3
AL: American Philosophical Society
a paris rue neuve st Roch le 5 avril [1780]4
L’abbé Raynal a eté plusieurs fois a passy pour avoir l’honneur de voir monsieur le docteur, sans pouvoir le joindre. Il le supplie de vouloir bien recevoir ses hommages, et de lui renvoyer ses livres et ses papiers. L’amerique est devenue si interessante pour toutes les nations quon ne peut instruire trop tot le public de ce qui la regarde.
Addressed: A Monsieur / Monsieur le docteur franklin / a passy
3. The abbé (XX, 447n) had last written in February, 1779: XXVIII, 459.
4. A plausible date (although it might have been written a year earlier) since the work to which Raynal alludes in this letter, the third edition of his Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, was announced for publication in the spring of 1780: Friedrich Melchior Grimm et al., Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, Maurice Tourneaux, ed. (16 vols., Paris, 1877–82), XII, 347–8. An enlarged and bolder version of a six-volume edition that he had first published anonymously in Amsterdam in 1770, it did not appear until the very end of 1780, due to a delay caused by the engravers of the illustrations and maps. Raynal worked on the manuscript into the summer and visited his Genevan publishers that fall: Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, XV, 208; Grimm, Correspondance, XII, 442; Anatole Feugère, Un précurseur de la Révolution. L’abbé Raynal (1713–1796). Documents inédits (Angoulême, 1922), pp. 265–6, 273.