Anacharsis Cloots

[4] American author Herman Melville refers to an "Anacharsis Clootz delegation" as a representation of global humanity in both Moby-Dick (1851), The Confidence-Man, and later in Billy Budd.

[7] The young Cloots, heir to a great fortune, was sent to Paris at age eleven to complete his education, and became attracted to the theories of his uncle the abbé Cornelius de Pauw (1739–1799), philosophe, geographer and diplomat at the court of Frederick II of Prussia.

His father placed him in the military academy of Berlin, but he withdrew at the age of twenty and travelled through Europe, preaching his revolutionary philosophy and spending his money as a man of pleasure.

[8] In the same month he had the rights of French citizenship conferred on him; and, having in September been elected a member of the National Convention, he voted in favor of capital punishment for King Louis XVI, justifying it in the name of the human race, and was an active partisan of the war of propaganda.

When the Committee of Public Safety levelled accusations of treason against the Hébertists, they also implicated Cloots to give substance to their charge of a foreign plot.