[Rarebooks] fa: CHATEAUBRIAND - GENIE DU CHRISTIANISME 1802

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, October 4. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/yyxup2jr

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Francois-Auguste Chateaubriand: Genie du Christianisme, ou Beautes de la Religion Chretienne.. Nouvelle edition a laquelle on a insere les notes formant l'appendice a la fin de chaque volume. Paris: Migneret, 1802. Four volumes, 8vo (20.5 cm), in early/period half calf and marbled boards, gilt-lettered spine labels; viii, 288, 56 pp.; 336, 16 pp.; 304, 16 pp.; 352, 48 pp.; with the half-titles.

Complete in four volumes, as evidenced by the statement at the end of vol. IV: "Fin de l'Appendix du quatrieme et dernier volume." Possibly a pirated edition published in the same year as the five-volume first edition. Bindings a bit rubbed, bumped and worn at the corners, contents with occasional mild toning and scattered light spotting, but generally very clean and sound, firmly bound. Half-titles with the early ownership signature of  "H. Elliot"; front paste-downs with later armorial monogram bookplates of "D.E."

An early printing of Chateaubriand's famous defense of Christianity against the excesses of the French Revolution. A hugely influential work, it "set a current of sympathy flowing between the author and a whole generation of young French men and women, kindling their imaginations over a wide range of feelings and ideas: the power of the great epic writers, Nature in its immense diversity and grandeur, the poetry of ruins, the spell of the distant past, the beauty of immemorial popular rituals and the haunting melancholy of the music accompanying them, the pangs of awakening consciousness and the perils and ardours of the solitary adolescent soul. More than any other work, it was the primer of early French Romanticism" (David Cairns, Berlioz: The Making of an Artist 1803-1832).