[Rarebooks] fa: YU LE GRAND ET CONFUCIUS - HISTOIRE CHINOISE 1769 - Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, March 10. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/k58soof

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

[Nicolas-Gabriel LeClerc:] Yu le Grand et Confucius, Histoire Chinoise. Soissons: de l'Imprimerie de Ponce Courtois, 1769. FIRST EDITION. Four parts in one volume; bound in recent half calf and marbled boards with gilt-lettered morocco spine labels; 4to (26.5 cm); xviii + 710 + [9] pp.; with 8 folding tables (complete). Damp-stain to the top margins of the text block, mostly light to moderate, occasionally more pronounced, otherwise quite clean and crisp, firmly and recently rebound in a handsome half-calf binding.

First and only edition of Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc's monumental and somewhat fantastical account of the semi-historical Emperor Yu the Great (c. 2200 - 2100 BCE) and the origins of the Chinese Empire and Confucianism. Clerc (afterwards LeClerc) was a French physician in the service of Catherine the Great of Russia, who commissioned this work for the edification of her son, the Grand Duke Paul, the future Tsar Paul I, to whom the book is dedicated. An important work, not only for its details of the lives of Yu and Confucius and ancient Chinese commerce, society and ideology, but also for its Enlightenment-era views. These had a significant effect on the French philosophes, as well as republicans and revolutionaries such as Saint-Just, who is known to have owned a copy. One historian has even described the work as a "philosophical novel… a wordy Physiocratic treatise dressed up as chinoiserie… Clerc declared that natural law was the only authentic foundation for all laws that are sanctioned by humanity… [He] did not shy away from severe pronouncements against those individuals, like tyrants, who 'violate the laws of order, the law of nature, the law of nations [il violeroit donc les loix de l'ordre, la loi naturelle, le droit des gens…; p. 222]'" (Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature & the French Revolution, 2009 ).