Notice d'un livre imprimé à Bamberg en C I ) CCCCLXII, lue à l’Institut National, par Camus. Paris, Imprimeur de l’Institut National, An VII [1799].
First Edition. 4to (300 x 230 mm), pp. [ii], 29, [1], with five engraved plates, two of which are folding, uncut throughout in the original printed blue wrappers, some very light staining to extremities but otherwise in excellent original condition.
A lovely, fresh copy of this antiquarian study of a newly discovered Bamberg incunable, Historie van Joseph, Daniel, Judith und Esther, 1462. An unsophisticated copy in original condition with wide margins and five wonderful plates.
Camus was an ardent revolutionary whose zeal for social and political reform was only matched by his enthusiasm for bibliography and literature. In 1789, he was appointed by the Estates General as archivist of the Commission des archives, from which role he founded the Archives Nationales which he presided over until his death. An indefatigable speaker in the National Assembly and one of its earliest presidents, his legal background gave an authority to his speeches and he was called on to speak more than any other elected member: he is said to have addressed the Assembly more than 600 times, over a hundred more than the next most frequent speaker. Extreme in his political opinions, he was heavily involved in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, in cancelling payments of annates to the papacy and, in 1791, in abolishing titles of nobility. At the trial of Louis XVI, he voted for ‘death without appeal and without reprieve’.