[Rarebooks] fa: RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE - LES FRANCAISES 1786 - 3 vols. - Plates/Morocco Bindings

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, January 17. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/hso8ycb

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain

[Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne:] Les Françaises, ou XXXIV Exemples choisis dans les Moeurs actuelles, propres a diriger les Filles, les Femmes, les Epouses, & les Meres. Neufchatel, et se trouve a Paris, 1786. FIRST EDITION. Three (of four) volumes, 12mo (16.5 cm), in full navy blue morocco tooled in blind and gilt, spines with raised bands, gilt-tooled turn-ins, page edges gilt, marbled endpapers; 312, 312, 324 pp.; with 26 engraved plates after Binet by Giraud. Cohen-De Ricci v. II, 878.

Three volumes only, lacking vol. I, but each volume complete in itself and complete in regards to plates. Bindings with some wear to the edges and corners, spines sunned and a bit rubbed, but the contents very fine: a few occasional small light spots, mild offsetting from the plates, otherwise exceedingly clean and fresh.

Restif de la Bretonne's satirical examination of the four stages of French womanhood: les filles, les femmes, l'epouses and les meres (the first of which is missing from this set). The delightful plates by Binet were executed under the direction of the author, who specified the bizarrely tiny feet, heads and waists. In addition to its lively depiction of eighteenth-century manners and fashions, the work is also notable for the prescience of its warnings, written just three years before the storming of the Bastille, of the cataclysm to come if political and social reforms are not enacted, e.g., "Voici une loi eternelle, la plus sacree de toutes: l'avantage du Public, de la Nation, de l'Etat; c'est a celle-ci que tout doit etre immole. Riches, ne soyez donc plus ni durs, ni insolens, ou vous haterez une Revolution desastreuse pour vous!" (vol. II, p. 139).

Restif (or Retif) de la Bretonne (1734-1806), printer, pamphleteer, pornographer, hack journalist, novelist, essayist, and shoe fetishist, was an indefatigable and prolific, if not always trustworthy, eyewitness to his times. Admired by Schiller and Benjamin Constant, loathed by the Marquis de Sade, and considered something of a patron saint by the Surrealists of the early twentieth-century, he was called "the gutter Rousseau" and "the Voltaire of the chambermaids" by his contemporaries. He coined the term "pornographe" and was an early advocate of communism.