Unrecorded Second Edition
L'Autorité législative de Rome anéantie, ou Examen rapide de l'histoire & des sources du droit canonique, dans lequel on prouve ses incertitudes, ses abus & la nécessité de lui substituer pour la discipline de l'Église, des Loix simples &c.
[N.p.]: 1785.
Price: $400.00
About the item
Second edition. 95 pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Unrecorded Second Edition. Disbound. Not in Cioranescu (see 14003 for 1784 ed.); Not in OCLC.
Item #52084
Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754-1793), French journalist, prolific pamphleteer, and revolutionary, much influenced by Rousseau.
Brissot was imprisoned briefly in the Bastille for writing a seditious pamphlet. He visited the Netherlands, Switzerland, England, and the United States. Interested in humanitarian projects, he founded in 1785 the Société des Amis des Noirs. After his return to France in 1789 he began to edit the Patriote français, which later became an organ of the Girondists (who were at first called Brissotins). Brissot, feeling that war would spread the principles of the French Revolution, did much to foment it with his diatribes against Europe's monarchs. After the fall of the monarchy, a power struggle between Jacobins and Girondists ensued; when the Girondists were defeated, Brissot de Warville was guillotined.
Brissot's Théorie des lois criminelles (1781) was a plea for penal reform. His memoirs of American travel are also of note. In the present work, Brissot argues that the abuses of canon law and the absurd contradictions it contains demonstrate that it must be replaced. The first edition was printed in 1784 (pagination differs from the present work); a 1791 edition entitled Rome Jugée treats the same subject matter. This edition is unrecorded.
