‎(SAIGE, J.)‎
‎Catéchisme du citoyen, ou Élémens du droit public français, Par demandes & par réponses; suivi de Fragmens politiques par le même auteur.‎

‎En France, 1788. 220, (2) pp. 8vo. Modern half red morocco, marbled boards, gilt lettering. INED 4025; Mornet 1363; Le Bucher Bibliographique, 607; Peignot, i, 298; Darnton, The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769-1789, 81. One of the two issues of the improved 1788 edition, enlarged with the 'Fragmens politiques', including a.o. 'Réflexions sur les droits des Etats Généraux, relativement à la concession des subsides'; 'De l'autorité des magistrats', etc. The book was first published in 1775 and almost immediately forbidden and suppressed. The work is cited as one of the most radical and serious attempts to maximalize the theory of Rousseau's Contrat Social and stating that nothing supercedes the social contract and the "general will." "Written in response to Chancellor Maupeou's attack on the parlements in 1771, the Catéchisme contained a radical statement of the doctrine of national sovereignty, not simply in the abstract terms of Rousseau's Contrat Social or the more congested historical formulations of the parlementary Maximes du droit public français, upon both of which it drew, but in the more immediate question-and-answer form of a political catechism offering a direct response to a precisely defined act of royal despotism, and culminating in a clear choice between revolution and the destruction of the political order. "Once one has read it, one is not surprised that the partisans of despotism have made such efforts to annihilate it," commented Pidansat de Mairobert in his Mémoires secrets. (...... As a result, copies of the 1775 edition are extremely rare.) Yet the interest of the work remains, not simply because it offered the most radical expression of the principle of national sovereignty, but also because it reappeared in 1787 and went through several editions in 1788 buttressed with additional fragments called forth by the events of the Pre-Revolution" (see: Keith M. Baker, "A classical republican in eighteenth-century Bordeaux: Guillaume-Joseph Saige" in: Inventing the French Revolution, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 128-151). - Slightly stained at blank upper margin throughout. ‎

Reference : 18078

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