L’Angleterre instruisant la France, ou Tableau Historique et politique du règne de Charles Ier et de Charles II.
8vo, (3) ff. [half-title, engraved frontispiece, and title proper], 98 pp., (1) f. Bound in wrappers. Some staining and foxing to frontispiece and title and in margin of scattered leaves; otherwise good. First edition of this pro-royalist, anti-regicide pamphlet, published on the eve of the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, recalling its readers to the tumultuous events that surrounded the execution of another unpopular monarch: England’s Charles I. The pamphlet opens with a full-page engraved symbolic frontispiece depicting two women, the Tyche (Fortune) of England passing a copy of the volume, inscribed with the motto Lisez et tremblez, to her French counterpart. An epigraph beneath the illustration, titled with the date of the king’s death, begins with the words “I have committed a great crime….” The pamphlet offers its readers a historically detailed, if slightly sensationalistic, account of the English Civil War, dwelling on England’s dwindling coffers, the Scottish rebellion and the increasingly hostile relationship between Charles I and Parliament, before moving on to Cromwell and the ill fortunes of the Commonwealth. The Restoration is then held up as an exemplar of the successful reinstatement of constitutional monarchy. For despite the potential of royal tyranny, “la monarchie limitée étoit le plus ancien, plus utile, le plus heureux et le plus beau de tous les gouvernemens; qu’un Roi peut abuser de son pouvoir, mais que l’anarchie est cent fois plus funeste que le despotisme.” It is worth remembering that Louis XVI was executed in January 1793 and Marie Antoinette in October of that same year. It seems likely that publication post-dates the first execution, if not the second. According to the National Library of Scotland record, the present work served as an introduction to a separately published work entitled Relation varitable de la mort cruelle et barbare de Charles I, traduit par J. Ango, and possibly written by Ango. OCLC lists Newberry, Kansas, Boston Atheneum and Westchester. * NLS record; BN Catalogue de l’histoire de la Révolution Française IV.1122.
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