At the beginning of the French Revolution, Volney represented commoners of Anjou in the Estates General and took part in the National Constituent Assembly.

Initially interested in law and medicine, he went on to study classical languages at the University of Paris, and his Mémoire sur la Chronologie d'Hérodote (on Herodotus) rose to the attention of the Académie des Inscriptions and of the group around Claude Adrien Helvétius.

[2] Volney tried to put his politico-economic theories into practice in Corsica, where in 1792 he bought an estate and made an attempt to cultivate colonial produce.

[3][4] In 1795 he undertook a journey to the United States, where he was accused (1797) by John Adams' administration of being a French spy sent to prepare for the reoccupation of Louisiana by France and then to the West Indies.

[7] Jefferson, then serving as Vice President under John Adams, appreciated the book's central theme – that empires rise if government allows enlightened self-interest to flourish.

Jefferson was preparing to make a bid for the Presidency of the United States in 1800; he was worried his Federalist opponents would attack him as an atheist, if it were known he translated Volney's supposedly heretical book.

[citation needed] According to the evidence discovered by the French researcher Gilbert Chinard (1881-1972), Jefferson translated the invocation plus the first 20 chapters of the 1802 Paris edition of Volney's Ruins.

In these chapters Volney describes "General Assembly of Nations," a fictionalized world convention wherein each religion defends its version of "the truth" according to its particular holy book.

Since no religion is able to scientifically "prove" its most basic assertions, Volney concludes the book with a call for an absolute separation of church and state: From this we conclude, that, to live in harmony and peace...we must trace a line of distinction between those (assertions) that are capable of verification, and those that are not; (we must) separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities...[10]Since Jefferson did not have time to complete the translation project, the last four chapters were translated by Joel Barlow, an American land speculator and poet living in Paris.

[11] Volney and Charles-François Dupuis were the first modern writers to advocate the Christ myth theory, the view that Jesus had no historical existence.

[14][15] However, in his version of the Christ Myth theory, Volney allowed for an obscure historical figure whose life was integrated into a solar mythology.

"[19] However, once viewing the mummified remains and more engraved heads, Constantin de Volney would backtrack considerably on his initial position, abandoning his ideas.

[20] His story, the Voyage to Egypt and Syria had earned its author the suffrage of Empress Catherine II of Russia, who sent him a gold medal as a token of her satisfaction; it was in 1787.