MAISTRE (J. de): Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg,... Lot 89

MAISTRE (J. de): Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, ou Entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la Providence, suivie d'un traité sur les sacrifices. Paris, Librairie grecque, latine et française, 1821. 2 vols. in-8 half red morocco with small period corners, smooth spine decorated (headbands and corners worn, spines cracked). (2) ff, XXVI pp, (526) pp. misfigured 456 (the pagination changes from 320 to 351 without missing), (1) f. for volume 1 and (2) ff, 474 pp, (1) f. for volume 2. Posthumous first edition, decorated with a lithographed portrait-frontispiece after Bouillon by Villain. "At its publication, the work was welcomed with fervor by the ultras who were about to take the power and saw in the attacks against the written constitutions an ideological justification of their opposition to the Charter. Maistre influenced Montalembert, Lamennais and, closer to us, Baudelaire and Auguste Comte" (Benoit Yvert). The Treatise on Sacrifices, which appears at the end of the second volume, very much inspired by W. Jones' "Asiatic Researches", insists on the expiatory virtue of blood and its millenary symbolism (cf. Fernand Baldensperger, Le mouvement des Idées dans l'Emigration française, II, pp. 93-94).