Added to your basket:
Reponse a tout! Petit colloque entre un senateur allemand et un républicain francais. Rapporté litteralement par le Professeur Taciturnus-Mémoriosus et traduit librement par un sans-culotte.

Checkout now

First and seemingly only edition of this dialogue on the aftermath of the French revolution, attributed to the playwright, journalist, and diplomat Philippe-Antoine Grouvelle (1758-1806). While the ‘senateur allemand’ is instinctively hostile to the French revolution (‘J’ai l’horreur du nouveau, je suis à genoux devant l’antiquité; et conséquemment je n’aime pas la révolution de France, qui est venue tout à coup abattre ma doctrine, bruler ma bibliothèque et me couper les vivres’). In his conversation with the French republican, the two explore the dangers of Pitt (‘l’ennemi du genre humain’), the necessary of perpetual revolution (it will cease when ‘nos ennemis cesseront d’être en contrerévolution’), and the irony of a German ‘ville libre’ forced to go to war with an enemy that is in the right.

Grouville acted as secretary to the Prince de Condé, wrote a couple of coolly received plays, and became a keen revolutionary in 1789. In his role as secretary of the conseil exécutif provisoire, he was responsible for serving Louis XVI with his death sentence. He became the French Minister to Denmark in 1793, and served there until 1800. The present pamphlet may well, as suggested by the Danish national library, be printed in Copenhagen.

OCLC records only two copies outside Continental Europe, at the BL and the Newberry.

You may also be interested in...

EULOGY AS MANIFESTO [NECKER, Jacques.]

Eloge de Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Discours qui a remporté le prix de l’Académie Françoise, en 1773.

First edition of Necker’s first work. Necker (1732–1804) was the opponent of Turgot (whose position he was to take over in 1777) in action as well as in theory, agreeing with Forbonnais on the side of State-regulation. The encomiastic function of this work, his first book, is in fact a thin cover for what is effectively Necker’s first exposition of his ‘interventist’ sensibility in economics. Here as in his later works Necker loses no opportunity of emphasising his dissent from ‘laissez-faire’ and the Tableau économique. His declamatory appeals to the rights of humanity and attacks upon landed property, though probably incited by political ambitions, bring him into close harmony with State-socialists, who, like himself, favoured substantial government intervention; and the Physiocrats had always to reckon with him as a determined adversary.

Read more

SISMONDI, J. C. L. Simonde de.

Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, ou de la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population ... Tome premier [- second].

First edition. ‘A number of concepts and theories that later became important in the history of economics first appeared in the writings of the Swiss economist J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi … Sismondi developed the first aggregate equilibrium income theory and the first algebraic growth model. Yet both concepts had to be rediscovered and redeveloped by others before they entered the mainstream of economics, long after Sismondi’s time’ (The New Palgrave IV, 348 ff).

Read more