Histoire générale des guerres. Tome premier contenant l'histoire de la Grande Arménie [...] Tome second, contenant l'histoire des peuples de la Basse Asie

First edition, rare, of the only two volumes published of this ambitious Histoire générale des guerres, printed in Paris by the Imprimerie royale in 1756 and 1758. Conceived as a work in three great periods extending from the earliest times to 1748, the project was never continued beyond these two volumes devoted to Armenia and the peoples of Asia Minor. The first volume is illustrated with an allegorical frontispiece and a large folding genealogical table.

A copy intended for Louis XV, bound with his arms and cipher. Contemporary full mottled brown calf, spines with raised bands decorated with the royal cipher repeated four times and fleurs-de-lys in the corners, red morocco lettering- and numbering-pieces, the royal arms of France at the centre of the boards, triple gilt fillet borders, red edges. Headcaps restored, several splits along the upper joints of both volumes, corners and some sections of the board edges restored. Loss to the right-hand corner of the first free endpaper. Some very pale dampstaining, chiefly marginal, extending slightly into the text towards the end of the first volume and affecting several endpapers in the second.

The royal binding directly reflects the presentation of the work itself. D'Arcq addresses his undertaking to Louis XV in a prefatory epistle, while its printing by the Imprimerie royale places the book from the outset within the sphere of royal patronage. The sovereign's arms on the covers and his cipher repeated on the spines materially extend that homage, giving the present set a particularly close coherence with the work's dedication.

Philippe-Auguste de Sainte-Foy, chevalier d'Arcq, was himself connected to the Bourbon dynasty whose king he addressed. Born in 1721, he was the natural son of Louis-Alexandre de Bourbon, comte de Toulouse, the legitimised son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan, and was therefore a natural grandson of the Sun King. After serving in the cavalry during the War of the Austrian Succession, he left the army in 1748 and increasingly devoted himself to letters. His military experience helps explain the governing principle of the present work: to recount the history of peoples through the conflicts that determined the rise, transformation, and fall of their kingdoms.

The extensive preliminary discourse sets out a deliberately critical method. D'Arcq rejects traditions lacking adequate evidence, distinguishes established facts from conjecture, and, where certainty is impossible, confines himself to what he considers the best-supported hypotheses. Political history is continually related to geography, genealogy, and institutions; war, however, remains the principal thread through which the destinies of states are organised and interpreted.

The first volume is devoted to Greater and Lesser Armenia and Cappadocia; the second continues through the peoples and kingdoms of Asia Minor, including Pontus, Paphlagonia, Heraclea, Bithynia, Pergamum, Phrygia, and Lydia. The allegorical frontispiece places this military history within a programme that links the contemporary campaigns of d'Arcq's own age with the great victories of antiquity, thus setting his experience as an officer in continuity with the wars he undertook to describe.

The work received a favourable response from learned critics, including the Journal des sçavans, which reviewed the two volumes in turn; the extensive programme announced by the author was nevertheless never carried beyond this second volume. Left unfinished, the Histoire générale des guerres remains the fragment of a much larger historiographical project in which war was intended to serve as one of the principal means of understanding universal history.

Remaining the only two volumes published of a project intended to encompass the universal history of warfare, these copies destined for Louis XV give d'Arcq's undertaking a particular resonance: that of a military history conceived by a former officer, natural grandson of Louis XIV, and placed under the direct patronage of the sovereign.