Le monde, son Origine, et son Antiquité. [-De l’Ame et de son Immortalité - Essai sur la Chronologie.] Première [Seconde] Partie. Londres, 1751.
First Edition. Three parts in one volume, 12mo, (168 x 100mm), pp. xii, 244; [iv], 172; 72, some leaves in the final part dust-soiled along the lower edge, prior to binding, in contemporary polished calf, triple filet to covers, flat spine continuously gilt with brown morocco label lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers, gilt edges, with the decorative engraved bookplate of the ‘Bibliothèque de Henri Tardivi’.
A handsome copy of this scarce materialist diatribe in three parts by three different authors. The first part, Le Monde, son Origine et son Antiquité is by Jean-Frédéric Bernard, an exiled French Protestant who set up as an editor and bookseller in the Netherlands, where he published a number of books on different subjects. The second part, which has its own separate title page, is in two sections, firstly De L’Ame, et de son Immortalité, also dated Londres, 1751, which is by Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud. Concluding the volume is Essai sur la Chronologie by Jean-Baptiste Le Mascrier, which has its own register and drop-head title.
‘L’entreprise de Mirabaud parait d’une cohérence exemplaire, par sa méthode et par la fin systématique qu’elle poursuit. Elle résume un aspect essentiel de la pensée matérialiste du début du XVIIIème siècle’ (Olivier Bloch, Le Matérialisme du XVIIIème siècle et la littérature clandestine, p. 98).
Darnton, The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France 1769-1789, no. 452; Cioranescu 11384 & 45100-45101 & 39047-39048.
ESTC n30361, well held in France and the UK; California State, Wisconsin-Madison, DLC, UCLA, Chicago and North Carolina in America. OCLC adds Princeton and Stanford.