Abbe Guillaume-Thomas Raynal attained a fame equivalent to that of Montesquieu, Voltaire or Rousseau with his book Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des européens dans les deux Indes, even to the point that in 1789 he was considered one of the fathers of the French Revolution. His History of the Indies gained fame thanks to its censorship and a number of editions were published in Amsterdam, Geneva, Nantes and The Hague between 1770 and 1774. As one would expect, the book was also about the Inquisition. In this case Raynal did not criticize the deaths or the use of torture, instead he stated that thanks to the Inquisition Spain had not suffered religious wars. He thought that in order to return Spain to the Concert of Europe the Inquisition would need to be eliminated which would require the importation of foreigners of all beliefs as the only means of attaining "good results" in a reasonable amount of time; as he considered that the use of indigenous workers would take centuries to achieve the same results.
