‎LINGUET, (S.N.H.)‎
‎La France plus qu'Angloise, ou Comparaison entre la procédure entamée à Paris le 25 Septembre 1788 contre les ministres du Roi de France, et le procès intenté à Londres en 1640, au Comte de Strafford, principal ministre de Charles premier, roi d'Angleterre. Avec des réflexions sur le danger imminent dont les entreprises de la robe menacent la nation, & les particuliers. Seconde édition.‎

‎Bruxelles, 1789. 149, (2) pp. 8vo. Modern half morocco. Cioranescu 40562; not in INED; not in Kress; not in Goldsmiths; not in Martin & Walter. Second edition, first published in October 1788. Linguet had printed, in the 116th number of his Annales, a proposal for fiscal reform which he had first publicized in his Annales in 1778 and 1779, an exepient for terminating once and for all the chronic state of financial crisis that had precipitated Louis's capitulation to the aristocrats. The king ignored Linguet's lesson in political and economic pragmatism. Financiers and capitalists were up in arms against it, as was the Paris parlement. This body condamned the 116th number of the Annales to be lacerated and burned at the foot of the grand staircase in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice. Linguet, in rage, published his La France plus qu'angloise in October 1788 and included in it a thinly veiled warning to the king that his next blunder, a fatal one, would be to retreat headlong into the arms of aristocratic reactionairies more English in their pretensions to exercising legislative supremacy than Commons or Lords. This move would signal disaster for the monarchy, as it would alienate the Third Estate from the throne as well as from the aristocratic party, driving it into isolation, and from there into independence and the revolution. At the same time, Linguet was educating the Third Estate in this work: how to recognize their rights and act in their own best interest. For an extensive analysis of this work see: D. Gay Levy, The ideas and Careers of Simon-Nicolas-Henry Linguet, pp. 243-4. ‎

Reference : 16041

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