On the Abolition of Duelling
[DUELLING.]
Pieces en vers composées pour le prix de l’Academie. Paris, Claude Barbin, 1671.
4to, pp. [iv], 16; woodcut vignette to title-page, woodcut initials, woodcut and typographic headpieces; some fading to text on p. [iii], lightly toned, else a good copy; disbound.
Seemingly unrecorded edition, one of two published in the same year with no precedence established, of Bernard de la Monnoye’s poem on the abolition of duelling, the first poem to be awarded a prize by the Académie Française, highly esteemed by both Perrault and Voltaire.
1671 was the first year of the Académie Française’s poetry prize, judged by Guez de Balzac, which de la Monnoye would go on to win another four times; it was thought that he was asked to refrain from entering to give other poets a fair chance. The text of de la Monnoye’s ‘Le Duel aboly’, praising Louis XIV and describing the horrific consequences of duelling, had appeared in Etienne Girard’s Discours de la louange et de la gloire, also printed in 1671, along with the subsequent poems ‘Sur les Duels’, ‘Ode pour le Roy sur la defence des Duels’, and ‘Sur la Navigation et le commerce’, all of which also appear here, with no precedence established; ‘Le Duel aboly’ was also included in Pellisson’s Relation contenant l’histoire de l'Académie françoise the following year.
This edition, according to the publisher’s preface, was printed soon after the Academy's competition to satisfy ‘the desire of the whole world … and the curiosity of the public, and my efforts have at last been rewarded through the help of an illustrious person to whom the public and I are already indebted. I could have, through his influence, included seven works initially selected by the Academy and brought to Court, but as one of these has been published by the author himself, and it is said that another is said to appear under the name of its author, I have limited myself to the four poems presented here’ (trans.).
The printer and bookseller Claude Barbin (c. 1628–1698) was notably the publisher of several epistolary novels, as well as works by Perrault, Racine, La Fontaine, Corneille, and Molière, and had previously apprenticed with Estienne II Richer, publisher of the Mercure. Barbin was constantly in search of larger premises and relocated frequently, here operating ‘at the second step of the Sainte-Chapelle’.
We find no copies on OCLC, Library Hub, or CCfr.