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Article Excerpt
Cosmopolitans, as French philosopher Denis Diderot put it in his encyclopedia of 1751, are "strangers no where in the world." (1) By the time Diderot wrote, the term had become a commonplace. Since then, the cosmopolitan has remained largely that--a term. As a result, the history of cosmopolitan language, the history of the idea, has been carefully and cogently written. Excellent accounts now exist of writers and philosophers, largely from the early modern period, who wrote idealistically and learnedly about the cosmopolitan. (2) We know very little, however, about cosmopolitan practices, about actual behavior that might legitimately warrant the label, in any historical period, including our own. As long as wars have their day-to-day histories, and their antithesis remains an idea in search of an instantiation, the critics and defamers of the cosmopolitan will continue to point to its vapidity, its pie-in-the-sky, no-one-ever-went-to-war-under-the-flag-of-the-cosmopolite irrelevance.
Writing such a history of lived practices and habitudes requires sources, finding actual institutions or events that might legitimately be interrogated to reveal behavior reasonably described as cosmopolitan. For the period of the eighteenth century, when the cosmopolitan was used widely as a compliment, one way of proceeding might be to start off by sampling the behavior of those who did not value it. In early-modern Europe, an authoritarian--specifically clerical--vision of the way traditional society should behave existed. Take the Papal territory of Avignon, for example. The Roman Catholic Inquisition gave Avignon the distinction of being the only French-speaking city policed by an inquisition. The city's inquisitional archives, lost up until 1677 and then mercifully complete up to 1790 (when the French revolutionaries took over the city), tell a tale of bizarre phobias and cruelties, along with a carefully cultivated pursuit of absolutist political goals, all in the service of the church. Indeed the Avignon authorities established a more prosecutorial atmosphere than their rather sluggish counterparts in Spain, Venice, and Naples. (3)
The Avignon interrogations and letters back to Rome reveal what clerical anti-cosmopolites found most dangerous. Papal authorities fumed at Jews who refused to stay in appointed hotels (or who stayed too long) or whose windows and doors looked out on Christian holy places. The tardy could be arrested; the doors and windows boarded up. When Christian children baptized Jewish infants in their care, authorities removed the child to an orphanage to be raised Catholic. We know about one such child in Avignon because the records of the Inquisition, reveal its effort to sue the father so that he would pay for the care and feeding of his legally abducted child. In Amsterdam in the same period, Jewish minors who wanted to convert to Christianity against the wishes of their parents were forbidden to do so. The mixing of religions so concerned the good fathers in Avignon, too, that they were prepared to spy on George I and his summering entourage, lest this "Anglican sect" infect the gullible. The mixing of social classes also brought down the wrath of Papal authorities, as did any hint of heresy. (The freemasons had their lodges raided and goods confiscated into the 1780s.) The archives of the Inquisition signal that any inquiry into Western cosmopolitanism before 1800 must focus not simply on the tenacity of national, ethnic, or regional identities, but also on the force of religion, on a complex set of loyalties that might make people stay among their own kind and avoid strangers or foreigners--or any sort of difference.
Other institutions were far less forbidding than the Inquisition and more capable of bearing the label cosmopolitan. Commentators have often associated early-modern European science and its academies with cosmopolitan impulses. Scientists crossed national and confessional borders and willingly participated as observers...
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