Dissidences at Work

Autograph letter signed by Victor Hugo to Léon Richer, two pages in black ink on a double sheet framed in black. Crosswise folds inherent to envelope inserting. A central tear at the junction of the two sheets. Published in Œuvres complètes de Victor Hugo (Ollendorff, 1905).
Manuscript housed in a blue half morocco chemise and slipcase, marbled paper boards, marbled paper slipcase, signed Boichot.

A magnificent and important letter to Léon Richer, one of the first male feminist activists, considered by Hubertine Auclert as the "father of feminism" and later regarded by Simone de Beauvoir as its "true founder". This deeply humanist text is a compendium of Victor Hugo's campaign for the abolition of capital punishment and the female attainment of social equality and civil rights.

First edition of the French translation established by Emmanuelle de Lesseps.
Handsome and very rare copy.
With a presentation by Christiane Rochefort.

Gender discrimination, hate speech and calls for genocide, violent action with a furious, premeditated and unrepentant murder attempt on one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, promotion of violent anarchy with great scatological laughter, programmed elimination or humiliation of half the human race...
 
In her misandrist pamphlet, Scum manifesto ("Society for Cutting Up Men"), Valerie Solanas shows no empathy, leaves no room for moderation or reconciliation, and grants no exception to her project of eliminating all men except for "men who methodically work toward their own elimination [...] [such as] drag queens who, by their magnificent example, encourage other men to demasculinize themselves and thus render themselves relatively harmless." The first manifesto of radical feminism addresses not only women but also encompasses in its struggle the sexual identities rejected by the phallocratic society that Solanas wants to bring down with unprecedented rage for such a battle.
 
"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex."
An introduction that in 1971, Emmanuelle de Lesseps, undertaking a French version, would translate as:
"Vivre dans cette société, c'est au mieux y mourir d'ennui. Rien dans cette société ne concerne les femmes. Alors, à toutes celles qui ont un brin de civisme, le sens des responsabilités et celui de la rigolade, il ne reste qu'à renverser le gouvernement, en finir avec l'argent, instaurer l'automation à tous les niveaux et supprimer le sexe masculin." ["Living in this society means, at best, dying of boredom. Nothing in this society concerns women. So, to all those who have a bit of civic-mindedness, a sense of responsibility and of fun, there remains only to overthrow the government, finish with money, establish automation at all levels and eliminate the male sex."]
 
At once an insurrectional political program, paranoid delirium, and poetic text, Solanas's manifesto disturbs through its refusal to be confined within a genre—serious, utopian, or satirical. For the question posed by such a work may not be that of its morality, but of its author's right to claim excess. Published after her murder attempt on Andy Warhol, Solanas's terrible manifesto is the literary and literal assertion that man does not have a monopoly on violence.
 
Although it presents itself as a cry of anger written in urgency, SCUM is in reality the fruit of two years of reflection and writing before being, for lack of a publisher, mimeographed by Solanas in 1967 and sold in the street ($1 for women and $2 for men), without meeting any success.
 
Seeking recognition, Valerie Solanas then moves in the New York underground milieu and befriends the pope of counterculture, Andy Warhol, whose Factory she frequents. Unable to get her manifesto published, "the best text in all of history, which will only be surpassed by my next book," Solanas tackles her first literary work: Up your Ass, a play she wants her mentor to produce. Unfortunately, Warhol refuses the play and loses the unique manuscript. In compensation, he offers his friend a role in two of his films. Solanas is not satisfied with this small artistic success and, on June 3, 1968, fires three times at Andy Warhol, seriously wounding the artist and achieving fame at the same time. The young woman does not hide that her murderous gesture, more than revenge against the artist, is above all a political act and an artistic necessity to allow her to disseminate her work. Thus, questioned about the motivations of her criminal attempt, she submits to justice and the media this laconic response: "Read my manifesto, you will know who I am."
Maurice Girodias, the sulfurous publisher of Olympia Press, condemned several times notably after the publication of Lolita and Naked Lunch, had already noticed Solanas the previous year. He had then rejected her manifesto but had offered her a contract for her future works. After the attack, he finally decides to also publish the feminist pamphlet of this atypical criminal who declares the omnipotence of women and the harmfulness of the male sex. The height of provocation, Girodias reproduces on the back cover the front page of the New York Post, relating Warhol's tragic hospitalization.
 
Is Solanas's book the work of this sick woman, a violated child, a prostituted high school and university student, an adult diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, escaped from several asylums, and who would end her days in extreme solitude and poverty? Or is this interpretation precisely the demonstration of the prohibition for a woman to claim all the extremities of anarchist delirium and utopia that are granted to men?
 
In 1968, at the heart of the interminable Vietnam War, violence is no longer the preserve of oppressors and the rising anger of minorities against the endemic discrimination of the United States manifests itself through violent confrontations and the birth of radical groups such as the Black Panthers. But women remain excluded from demands and their rights are denied by both camps, as Angela Davis and Ella Baker would also denounce.
 
However, unlike them, Solanas adheres to no emancipation struggle and refuses all fashionable utopias which, according to her, only liberate man; woman remaining, at best, a reward:
"Le hippie [...] est follement excité à l'idée d'avoir tout un tas de femmes à sa disposition. [...] L'activité la plus importante de la vie communautaire, celle sur laquelle elle se fonde, c'est le baisage à la chaîne. Ce qui alléche le plus le hippie, dans l'idée de vivre en communauté, c'est tout le con qu'il va y trouver. Du con en libre circulation : le bien collectif par excellence ; il suffit de demander." ["The hippie [...] is wildly excited at the idea of having a whole bunch of women at his disposal. [...] The most important activity of community life, the one on which it is based, is chain fucking. What attracts the hippie most in the idea of living in community is all the cunt he's going to find there. Freely circulating cunt: the collective good par excellence; you just have to ask."]
 
"Laisser tout tomber et vivre en marge n'est plus la solution. Baiser le système, oui. La plupart des femmes vivent déjà en marge, elles n'ont jamais été intégrées. Vivre en marge, c'est laisser le champ libre à ceux qui restent ; c'est exactement ce que veulent les dirigeants ; c'est faire le jeu de l'ennemi ; c'est renforcer le système au lieu de le saper car il mise sur l'inaction, la passivité, l'apathie et le retrait de la masse des femmes." ["Dropping out and living on the margins is no longer the solution. Fucking the system, yes. Most women already live on the margins, they have never been integrated. Living on the margins means leaving the field free to those who remain; it's exactly what the leaders want; it's playing into the enemy's hands; it's strengthening the system instead of undermining it because it relies on the inaction, passivity, apathy and withdrawal of the mass of women."]
 
A true explosion in protest circles, S.C.U.M. divides emerging feminist movements like NOW or Women's Lib and gives birth to radical feminism. Yet, Solanas refuses any affiliation and even rejects the help of militant lawyer Florynce Kennedy by pleading guilty at her trial while Warhol did not want to press charges against her: "I cannot press charges against someone who acts according to their nature. It's in Valerie's nature, so how could I hold it against her." (A fascinating testimony to the mutual psychological hold these two contrary beings had on each other).
 
In a great fireworks display of obscenity and laughing extremism, Solanas's work nevertheless methodically deconstructs the propositions of progressive intellectuals as much as it reveals the irremediably machistic structure of a falsely modern society. "S.C.U.M. stands against the entire system, against the very idea of laws and government. What S.C.U.M. wants is to demolish the system and not obtain certain rights within the system."
 
Fifty years later, Solanas's manifesto remains bitingly acute, and the sometimes delirious verve of its author cannot justify the progressive erasure of her memory in social history, like her own mother destroying all her manuscripts upon her death.
 
Outraged, convinced, or stunned by the cathartic violence of the text, no one claims to emerge unscathed from the S.C.U.M. experience. This is undoubtedly linked to the almost Célinean literary force of Solanas's pen but perhaps also to the undeniable relevance of her revolt:
"Celles qui, selon les critères de notre « culture », sont la lie de la terre, les S.C.U.M. ... sont des filles à l'aise, plutôt cérébrales et tout près d'être asexuées. Débarrassées des convenances, de la gentillesse, de la discrétion, de l'opinion publique, de la « morale », du « respect » des trous-du-cul, toujours surchauffées, pétant le feu, sales et abjectes, les S.C.U.M. déferlent... elles ont tout vu - tout le machin, baise et compagnie, suce-bite et suce-con - elles ont été à voile et à vapeur, elles ont fait tous les ports et se sont fait tous les porcs... Il faut avoir pas mal baisé pour devenir anti-baise, et les S.C.U.M. sont passées par tout ça, maintenant elles veulent du nouveau ; elles veulent sortir de la fange, bouger, décoller, sombrer dans les hauteurs. Mais l'heure de S.C.U.M. n'est pas encore arrivée. La société nous confine encore dans ses égouts. Mais si rien ne change et si la Bombe ne tombe pas sur tout ça, notre société crèvera d'elle-même." ["Those who, according to the criteria of our 'culture,' are the scum of the earth, the S.C.U.M. ... are comfortable girls, rather cerebral and quite close to being asexual. Rid of conventions, kindness, discretion, public opinion, 'morality,' 'respect' for assholes, always overheated, bursting with fire, dirty and abject, the S.C.U.M. surge forth... they have seen everything - the whole thing, fucking and company, cock-sucking and cunt-sucking - they have been both ways, they have done all the ports and have done all the pigs... You have to have fucked quite a bit to become anti-fuck, and the S.C.U.M. have been through all that, now they want something new; they want to get out of the mire, move, take off, sink into the heights. But S.C.U.M.'s time has not yet come. Society still confines us in its sewers. But if nothing changes and if the Bomb doesn't fall on all this, our society will die of itself."]

First edition, a Service de Presse (advance) copy.

Iconography at rear.

Precious autograph inscription signed by André Malraux to the diplomat and great resistance fighter, faithful among the faithful of General De Gaulle, Gaston Palewski to whom this work is dedicated below the printed dedication: "C'est pour vous distraire. Vous recevrez vos exemplaires convenables la semaine prochaine" ["This is to entertain you. You will receive your proper copies next week"].
 

First edition, one of 17 numbered copies on alfa mousse paper, the only deluxe copies.
Spine slightly sunned.
Fine and rare copy, complete with the publisher's notice printed on page 7 which was removed from most copies at the author's request.
In this work the author, a volunteer paratrooper active at the front during almost the entire "Algerian War", describes with complete impartiality the abuses committed by the French Army in Algeria, which resulted in "Saint Michel et le Dragon" being seized upon publication.

First edition of this special issue dedicated by the Fidel Castro's Cuban State to Ernesto Che Guevara, who passed away a month earlier after being executed by the Bolivian army.
Tribute issue illustrated with many photographs of Che.
Text in Spanish.

A very beautiful copy despite some small minor folds on the last sheets.
Rare issue that participated greatly to the hagiography of Che, who still today remains the Christ of anti-capitalist revolutionaries and third-worldists.

Exceptional complete autograph manuscript of Ravachol’s true last testament — largely unpublished — unknown in this form, preceding its rewriting by a third party for publication in the press. A unique testimony to the genuine thought of the anarchist icon.
 
Four-page lined quarto manuscript, entirely written in black ink and signed twice “Konigstein Ravachol” at the foot of each sheet. Pencil corrections within the text, possibly in the hand of his lawyer. Some horizontal folds and very minor marginal tears, without loss.
Written in his prison cell during the second Montbrison trial that led to his death sentence, this text, hastily penned, without punctuation or capital letters, and in naïve spelling, was meant to be delivered orally by Ravachol during the hearing.
 
“Ravachol was dead set on putting in his two cents for the defence, not to defend himself, but to explain. No luck, dammit! Four words in and the judge cut him off. His statement isn’t lost, by Jove!” (Émile Pouget, in Père Peinard, July 3–10, 1892).
This self-styled Rocambole of anarchism was not allowed to read his statement aloud, but he handed it to his lawyer Maître Lagasse, and by June 23 the forbidden text appeared in the conservative newspaper Le Temps.
This first publication was so faithful to the original that it preserved the author's eccentric spelling — a fidelity that Émile Pouget would ironically criticise in the Père Peinard issue of July 3, 1892, one week before Ravachol’s execution: “Le Temps, that opportunist bedsheet, printed it as is. Like a true Jesuit, it even printed it too true. Ravachol had written the thing for himself; he knew how to read it — but there wasn’t a word of correct spelling, seeing as he knew about spelling as much as he knew about cabbage farming. Le Temps printed the thing without changing a line, so it’s practically unreadable [...]. That’s exactly what the bastards wanted, dammit! [...] I’m reprinting it below, without changing a word, just fixing the spelling.”
 
That same July 3 issue of Père Peinard included a corrected version — orthographically — of the statement initially published in Le Temps.
This dual publication, combined with Ravachol’s defiant bearing before the guillotine, had a powerful effect on public opinion. Until then, even anarchist publications had kept a certain distance from this provocative criminal, suspected of using the anarchist cause for personal gain. But following his execution, the testament was quickly reproduced in other newspapers, and Ravachol’s final cry of revolt soon became a genuine anarchist anthem among libertarians worldwide.
However, the version circulated in the press — the only known version until now, the original manuscript having disappeared — differs markedly from the manuscript in our possession.
Indeed, the style was lightly polished, several turns of phrase refined, and, most significantly, entire passages were excised, including the conclusion paragraph, which was fully replaced.
 
Our manuscript, with its crossings-out and revisions, is likely the original version of this political testament. Written in a single burst, in dense handwriting, without punctuation or paragraph breaks, it includes two lengthy sections expressing concerns for public health that are entirely absent from the published version.
The first is a third of a page-long passage about the “dangerous ingredients” added to bread: “no longer needing money to live, there’d be no fear of bakers adding dangerous ingredients to bread to make it look better or heavier, since it wouldn’t profit them, and they’d have, like everyone else and by the same means, access to what they needed for their work and existence. There’d be no need to check whether the bread weighs right, if the money is counterfeit, or if the bill is correct.”
The second, nearly a full page long, concerns the silk-dyeing industry in which Ravachol had worked: “If one reflects attentively on all the wasted materials and the energy required to produce them, it becomes clear that all that labour was for nothing — to produce chemicals and fix them on silk, which then gets burned by the overload of ingredients dangerous to workers and turns the silk into something unsafe to touch or wear, especially from the dust released when these chemicals dry.”
The length of these passages — and their absence from the printed version — indicates their importance to the author and profoundly alters the discourse’s reception.
 
Unlike the well-known version, this manuscript focuses on individual well-being and public health. More importantly, it draws on the personal experience of its author — his background as a silk worker — which formed the bedrock of Ravachol’s political awakening. The only other known manuscript by him (now lost, but transcribed in the republican newspaper L’Écho de Lyon) also featured a digression on silk-making and its effects on worker health.
 
Yet the published speech makes no mention of this formative occupation, which concludes the original manuscript. Instead, a prosaic paragraph is replaced with a strikingly eloquent plea whose polished style and rhetorical flourish break entirely with the rest of the speech — now linked only by Ravachol’s peculiar spelling.
“Yes, I repeat: society creates criminals, and you jurors…”; “I am just an uneducated worker; but because I have lived the life of the wretched, I feel the injustice of your repressive laws more keenly than any wealthy bourgeois.”; “Judge me, gentlemen of the jury, but if you have understood me, then in judging me, you judge all the wretched.”
 
Powerful rhetoric, and a grandiloquent finale in which one struggles to recognise the oral style of a worker whose only other fully published text — his Memoirs, dictated to his guards on the evening of March 30, 1892 — ends as abruptly and unceremoniously as our manuscript.
This soaring conclusion in praise of anarchism — for which no manuscript trace exists, and which is wholly absent even in outline from our version — is, beyond doubt, apocryphal.
Given that the first publication appeared in a conservative newspaper, it is unlikely that the journalist authored it. It is far more probable that the version sent to the press was revised and polished by Ravachol’s lawyer, Maître Louis Lagasse — an engaged legal advocate for several anarchist newspapers and future Radical-Socialist deputy.
 
Our manuscript thus sheds light on the ideological reframing of Ravachol’s message — not a betrayal, but a careful recasting within a more intellectual framework. The appropriation of this man, still the day before vilified as corrupting the anarchist cause, proved a complete success. He became an icon of defiance and independence, celebrated in song, sanctified in novels, idolised by fighters, and even institutionalised — his name becoming, in Walloon, a common noun.
Alongside Proudhon and Bakunin, the grand theorists of anarchy, there was lacking a figure of action — someone who embraced the violence at the core of nihilist ideology. Through this extraordinary declaration, Ravachol became that long-awaited martyr.
 
It is doubtful whether the authentic version of Ravachol’s speech, as we reveal it today, would have had such an impact — especially when, as Émile Pouget noted about its first appearance, “you’ve got to bust your brains to catch the meaning.” But he added slyly: “Those stuffed-shirt bourgeois think you have to spell right to have ideas in your head.”
Indeed, it would be presumptuous to claim that Ravachol’s reputation was usurped by the pen of a clever ideologue. The original manuscript, while revealing the fabrication, also highlights the genuine depth of Ravachol’s ideas and the roots of his revolt. Every notion polished or reworded by the lawyer is, albeit in rougher form, present in the manuscript.
 
For Ravachol, misery and deprivation drive the desperate to crime. From the outset, he holds accountable “society, which by its organisation sets people in constant conflict with one another, [and] is solely responsible.”
In response, the justice system, he argues, treats not the causes but the consequences of poverty: “Perhaps, in time, people will understand that the anarchists are right when they say that to achieve moral and physical peace, we must eliminate the causes that breed crime and criminals. [...] Well, gentlemen, there are no more criminals to judge, only the causes of crime to eradicate.”
This defence of anarchist violence is not gratuitous: despite his limited writing ability, Ravachol outlines a reform and proposes a utopian vision based on social justice: “In creating the Code, legislators forgot that they were not attacking the causes but merely the effects, and thus were not eliminating crime. [...] It would suffice to build a new society where all is held in common, and where each, producing according to ability and strength, could consume according to need.”
And in denouncing social misery, Ravachol’s original text needed no reworking by his lawyer: “Do those who have more than enough care whether others lack the essentials? A few will offer small help, but it’s negligible and cannot relieve all those in need — who will die prematurely due to all kinds of deprivation, or choose suicide to escape a miserable life, to avoid enduring the torments of hunger, countless humiliations, with no hope of relief.”
Stripped of rhetorical embellishment, this moving manuscript reveals the preoccupations of a man condemned to die. Death is omnipresent — both of criminals driven by need, and of the impoverished who labour to exhaustion. The rapid scrawl, lack of punctuation, and breathless phrasing convey the urgency of a final testament: an ink-drenched gasp in which the condemned man tries to explain his actions and summarize his struggle. There is no pause for the reader — the four pages are filled to the last line, and Ravachol, as if to stand by every word or fearing he would not finish, signs each sheet.
 
A previously unpublished testimony from Ravachol — who stole and killed to survive — this testament reclaims his thought in all its authenticity. Here, we see the final words of an ordinary man, driven by a real fight for justice — far removed from both the anarchist-Christ image and the criminal-Judas who hijacked the libertarian cause.
 
The man who emerges from this crucial document is certainly no orator. But his speech — twice censored, by judge and lawyer — reveals humanist concerns likely too advanced for his time. At the height of the industrial revolution, he denounces not only poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth, but also the dangers of industrial chemistry for the health of the working class.
 
Behind the ideologue and utopian Ravachol, this unpublished manuscript reveals François Claudius Koënigstein — more modest in tone but more visionary in thought — a forerunner of the ecological and public health challenges of the future.
 
A powerful last testament to human dignity.

First edition, second issue. The first of 1784 contains only 212pp. against 403 for this one, which has been expanded with the translation of Price's work: "Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution". Turgot's letter and Price's book benefit from a half-title.

Later, modern binding. Pastiche blonde cardboard Bradel binding. Smooth spine with pink sheep title and volume labels. Spine lightly darkened. Rubbing. Uncut copy, bound directly from the original wrappers. The first 2 leaves browned. Scattered browning. Last leaf with lack to lower right corner.

First edition. The second part is regarded as rare, since Prussia ordered the manuscript to be seized and the copies burned, although in fact the second part is found in many sets.
Contemporary full mottled brown calf binding. Spine with raised bands richly gilt. Red morocco lettering-piece. Lower headcap partly torn. Abrasion to the lower cover with loss along the joint. Two corners rubbed. A brown stain in the upper margin of p. 49, about 2 cm. Loss in the margin at the corner of p. 144, not affecting the text. Marbled endpaper with a cut along the outer margin. Some gatherings browned. A good copy.

Exceptionally rare autograph satirical poem by Louis Aragon, entitled Distiques pour une Carmagnole de la Honte, written between September 1944 and February 1945. 26 lines penned in black ink on a single leaf, with a note from the author in blue ink at the foot of the page.
Our manuscript belongs to a group of thirteen poems composed during the first half of 1945, intended for publication in a poetry anthology (Aragon, published by Pierre Seghers in Paris, Collection “Poètes d’aujourd’hui” no. 2, 20 July 1945). It was sent by Aragon as a working copy to his editor and friend Claude Roy. This autograph poem is the only known manuscript of the Distiques, with neither manuscript nor proofs held in the extensive Triolet-Aragon archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Second Elzevir edition of Milton's first text, which was originally published in 1651 in Amsterdam. First edition of Milton's Second and Third Defences.
Full polished tobacco calf bindings, ca. 1820. Spines with raised bands, decorated with four floral tools, fillets and rolls. Chocolate morocco title and volume labels. Cold-stamped border on the boards with small corner fleurons. Inner roll-tooled border. All edges gilt. A handsome copy.


NB: This volume is available at the bookshop on request within 48 hours.

First edition, one of 80 numbered copies on Hollande paper, the deluxe issue.
Fine copy.

New edition, following the first collected edition also published in Amsterdam in 1775 and produced by d'Holbach.
Contemporary full blonde calf bindings. Smooth spines richly decorated with gilt compartments and fleurons, as well as red morocco title labels and green volume labels with red morocco inlay. Fine gilt decorative board-edges framing the boards. Gilt roulettes on the leading edges and headcaps. All edges marbled.
Headcaps slightly rubbed and some minor wormholes. Each volume shows dampstaining to outer margin. Quite good copy, of handsome appearance.
The first volume contains the author's most famous text: L'Antiquité dévoilée, the second the Recherches sur le despotisme oriental, an Essai philosophique que le gouvernement as well as other texts: Esope fabuliste, Du bonheur, Le Christianisme dévoilé, Dissertation sur Elie et Enoch, Examen critique de Saint Paul and Dissertation sur Saint Pierre. The Extrait d'une lettre sur la vie et les ouvrages de Mr. Boulanger which precedes it would be by Diderot according to Grimm. Le Christianisme dévoilé would be by D'Holbach, while the Recherches sur le despotisme oriental is a collective work bringing together d'Holbach and Boulanger. Around Baron d'Holbach formed a sort of coterie (with authors such as Diderot, Boulanger or Naigeon), a spiritual association of figures who had all worked on the great work of the Encyclopédie and who assembled around a certain number of strong ideas: a critique of religious but also philosophical superstition, an atheistic materialism and a utilitarian politics; each of the authors worked toward the deconstruction of Christianity and the edification of materialism, achieving the true combat of the Enlightenment for man's liberation from religious, spiritual and political constraints.

First edition, one of 25 numbered copies on "pur-fil" paper, most limited issue.

The book Camus dedicated to his friend René Leynaud.

Rare and handsome copy.

Third edition statement (third reprint by the same publisher in December), the first edition having appeared the same year in November.

Contemporary temporary wrappers in bluish paper. Lacking paper on spine, with exposed signatures.

The printed copies sold quickly, with a decree condemning the work to be destroyed and the author accused. The work begins with a plea in favor of press freedom, and is primarily summarized by the demand for unity between the people and the government. The author accuses public authorities, deputies, and police of tyranny, supporting his argument with history and sound common sense.