"Peuplade estimable": late-eighteenth-century radical critics of religion and the Ghebres

The images of Zoroaster and of his modern followers, the Ghebres (or Parsis), were used recurrently during the Enlightenment for critical purposes and essentially against religious fanaticism. This paper focuses on the image of the Ghebres in the last generation of the Enlightenment, that of revolutionary intellectuals who made the Ghebres into a case for the deconstruction of religion itself: Volney, who in his Ruines represents the Ghebres as displaying the typical contentious attitude of the religious, regardless of the fact that they were a persecuted group; Charles-François Dupuis and Sylvain Maréchal, both radical critics of religion and associates of Jerôme Lalande, atheistic astronomer and authoritative Freemason. Maréchal shows his interest from 1788, in his Notice on Persia in the Costumes civils actuels de tous les peuples, to 1800, when he lists this «peuplade» in his Dictionnaire des athées, citing as source Dupuis’ s monumental work Origine de tous les cultes, where the Ghebres provide evidence on the sources of religious opinions.