CLONMEL, a municipal borough and the county town of Co. Tipperary, Ireland, in the east parliamentary division, 112 m. S.W. from Dublin on a branch from Thurles of the Great Southern & Western railway, which makes a junction here with the Waterford and Limerick line of the same company. Pop. (1901) 10,167. Clonmel is built on both sides of the Suir, and also occupies Moore and Long Islands, which are connected with the mainland by three bridges. The principal buildings are the parish church, two Roman Catholic churches, a Franciscan friary, two convents, an endowed school dating from 1685, and the various county buildings. The beauty of the environs, and especially of the river, deserves mention; and their charm is enhanced by the neighbouring Galtee, Knockmealdown and other mountains, among which Slievenaman (2364 ft.) is conspicuous. A woollen manufacture was established in 1667, and was extensively carried on until the close of the 18th century. The town contains breweries, flour-mills and tanneries, and has a considerable export trade in grain, cattle, butter and provisions. It stands at the head of navigation for barges on the Suir. It was the centre of a system, established by Charles Bianconi (1786-1875) in 1815 and subsequently, for the conveyance of travellers on light cars, extending over a great part of Leinster, Munster and Connaught. It is governed by a mayor and corporation, which, though retained under the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898, has practically the status of an urban district council. By the same act a part of the town formerly situated in county Waterford was added to county Tipperary. It was a parliamentary borough, returning one member, until 1885; having returned two members to the Irish parliament until the union.
The name, Cluain mealla, signifies the Vale of Honey. In 1269 the place was chosen as the seat of a Franciscan friary by Otho de Grandison, the first English possessor of the district; and it frequently comes into notice in the following centuries. In 1641 it declared for the Roman Catholic party, and in 1650 it was gallantly defended by Hugh O’Neill against the English under Cromwell. Compelled at last to capitulate, it was completely dismantled, and was never again fortified. Remains of the wall are seen in the churchyard, and the West Gate still stands in the main street.
CLOOTS, JEAN BAPTISTE DU VAL DE GRÂCE, Baron von (1755-1794), better known as Anacharsis Cloots, a noteworthy figure in the French Revolution, was born near Cleves, at the castle of Gnadenthal. He belonged to a noble Prussian family of Dutch origin. The young Cloots, heir to a great fortune, was sent at eleven years of age to Paris to complete his education. There he imbibed the theories of his uncle the Abbé Cornelius de Pauw (1739-1799), philosopher, geographer and diplomatist at the court of Frederick the Great. His father placed him in the military academy at Berlin, but he left it at the age of twenty and traversed Europe, preaching his revolutionary philosophy as an apostle, and spending his money as a man of pleasure. On the breaking out of the Revolution he returned in 1789 to Paris, thinking the opportunity favourable for establishing his dream of a universal family of nations. On the 19th of June 1790 he appeared at the bar of the Assembly at the head of thirty-six foreigners; and, in the name of this “embassy of the human race,” declared that the world adhered to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. After this he was known as “the orator of the human race,” by which title he called himself, dropping that of baron, and substituting for his baptismal names the pseudonym of Anacharsis, from the famous philosophical romance of the Abbé Jean Jacques Barthélemy. In 1792 he placed 12,000 livres at the disposal of the Republic—“for the arming of forty or fifty fighters in the sacred cause of man against tyrants.” The 10th of August impelled him to a still higher flight; he declared himself the personal enemy of Jesus Christ, and abjured all revealed religions. In the same month he had the rights of citizenship conferred on him; and, having in September been elected a member of the Convention, he voted the king’s death in the name of the human race, and was an active partisan of the war of propaganda. Excluded at the instance of Robespierre from the Jacobin Club, he was soon afterwards implicated in an accusation levelled against the Hébertists. His innocence was manifest, but he was condemned, and guillotined on the 24th of March 1794.
Cloots’ main works are: La Certitude des preuves du mahométisme (London, 1780), published under the pseudonym of Ali-Gur-Ber, in answer to Bergier’s Certitude des preuves du christianisme; L’Orateur du genre humain, ou Dépêches du Prussien Cloots au Prussien Herzberg (Paris, 1791), and La République universelle (1792).
The biography of Cloots by G. Avenel (2 vols., Paris, 1865) is too eulogistic. See the three articles by H. Baulig in La Révolution française, t. 41 (1901).
CLOQUET, a city of Carlton county, Minnesota, U.S.A., on the St Louis river, 28 m. W. by S. of Duluth. Pop. (1890) 2530; (1900) 3072; (1905, state census) 6117, of whom 2755 were foreign-born (716 Swedes, 689 Finns, 685 Canadians, 334 Norwegians); (1910) 7031. Cloquet is served by the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, the Duluth & North-Eastern, and (for freight only) the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul railways. The river furnishes good water-power, and the city has various manufactures, including lumber, paper, wood pulp, match blocks and boxes. The first mill was built in 1878, and the village was named from the French word claquet (sound of the mill). Cloquet was incorporated as a village in 1883 and was chartered as a city in 1903.