the various patois as limiting to the ability of French citizens to practice their individual rights. However, his work was still influenced by the rising sense of French linguistic superiority that had been started by Bertrand Barère with Rapport du Comité de salut public sur les idiomes (1794). Due to this he classified, Corsican and Alsatian as "highly degenerate" (très-dégénérés) forms respectively of Italian and German, while Occitan was decomposed into a variety of syntactically loose local remnants of the language of troubadours, mutually unintelligible, and should be abandoned in favour of the language of the capital. This began a process, expanded dramatically by the policies of Jules Ferry a century later, that led to increasing disuse of the regional parlances of France. Advocate of equality Racial equality In October 1789, Grégoire took a great interest in abolitionism, after meeting Julien Raimond, a free coloured planter from Saint-Domingue, who was trying to win admission to the Constituent Assembly as the representative of his group. Grégoire published numerous pamphlets, and later books, on the subject of racial equality. Grégoire also became an influential member of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, although this group and many others like it were seen as radical at the time. As a member of the National Assembly, Grégoire supported seemingly opposing views, such as the eradication of slavery in France but also maintaining his position as a member of the Clergy, who were known (in majority) to want to keep slavery within France and its colonies. It was on Grégoire's motion in May 1791 that the Constituent Assembly passed its first law admitting some wealthy free men of colour in the French colonies to the same rights as whites. Later he was recognized for his work De la littérature des Nègres on the literature of Black writers as it showed readers that the Blacks are equal in every way to whites, including intellectually. In 1810, the work was published in New York in an English translation by the Irish republican exile in Paris, David Bailie Warden. Jewish equality Grégoire was considered a friend of the Jewish people. He argued that in the French society, the supposed degeneracy of Jews was not inherent, but rather a result of their circumstances. He blamed the condition of the Jews on the way they had been treated, their persecution by Christians, and the "ridiculous" teachings of their