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Essai sur le principe de la souveraineté. Par un grand vicaire.

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First edition, rare, of this anonymous attack on the idea of popular sovereignty and the newly crowned Napoleon published at the outset of the First French Empire.

Virtually unstudied in the scholarship of post-Revolutionary political thought, the present tract is attributed by some to the French churchman and future Bishop of Laon and Évreux, Charles-Louis Salmon du Châtelier (1761–1841). Much of the tract is a dissection of the theories of sovereignty and the state of nature in Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Against these thinkers the author constructs a conservative and (given the late date) remarkably patriarchalist, almost Filmerian concept of political power: man, in the weakness of his fallen state, needs the God-granted authority first of parents and then, as societies develop, of ‘superior’ clans and their leaders. This, and not some voluntary compact, is the origin of government. But even in this divinely ordered state there is room for usurpation and tyranny, and the treatise ends with a fierce denunciation of the ‘monstre politique’ then afflicting France, what can only have been an attack on Napoleon, just crowned Emperor of the French, and no doubt the reason why the present work was published in London.

OCLC and Library Hub find four copies in North America (FSU, Harvard, Princeton, Yale) and four in the UK (BL, Fitzwilliam, Rylands, Senate House).

Goldsmiths’ 18948.