Essai sur les Fables de La Fontaine

Paris: Librairie Mme ve Joubert. Very Good. 1853. Second Edition. Hardcover. 208 pages; Contemporary dark green half morocco over green and black pattern-printed boards, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt -- signed binding by Chatelin (stamp in tiny letters on the upper edge of the blank verso of the front free-endpaper). Minor rubbing and wear to the binding, especially at the corners and at the top of the spine, which is missing the top 2 mm. -- still quite handsome. The text shows light diffuse foxing throughout. Second edition, as stated on the title page. The first edition, published earlier in this same year of 1853, had 2 preliminary leaves and 200 pages and stated on the title page: "Thèse--Faculté des lettres de Paris." [see Carteret, II, p. 380 & Vicaire VII: col. 726-7]. There was a third edition, published in smaller format in 1861, under a slightly different title ('La Fontaine et ses Fables'). The author, whose first real book this is, was Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, an important French critic and historian. Modern critics view him as the intellectual father of naturalism, a major inspiration and source for Zola, Bourget and Maupassant. This dissertation completed his Sorbonne doctorate (after he abandoned a thesis and degree program in sociology). Taine had a longstanding skepticism toward the political left, from his earliest years as a student. Taine's distaste for the French Revolution led him to reject the French Constitution of 1793 as a Jacobin document. Historians of conservative thought view him as an important touchstone, but the details of his writings and influence have some complexities which some conservative purists find troubling. .