Oeuvres complettes

The first collected edition, with a portrait frontispiece by Gabriel Henri Gaillard.
Contemporary full marbled calf binding. Smooth decorated spine. Red morocco title label and volume labels. Head of volume I worn, volumes V and VI partially worn. Upper joint of volume VI cracked at head. Some corners slightly bumped. Good copy.
One could hardly praise Belloy as a great dramatist despite the success of his plays, and especially the incredible national and popular success of the Siege of Calais. However, the interest of this edition on the world of theater and letters in the 18th century is important. Each of the author's plays is indeed accompanied by numerous elements, prefaces, memoirs, letters, notes and research which explain not only the public's reception, but also the quarrels with the philosophers' party, the support then disavowal of Voltaire. As a writer, Belloy seeks to revive classical tragedy, his essay on tragedy of which the public's taste was then approaching bears witness (Gluck had set Racine to music in his opera Iphigenia in Tauris); classical tragedy then became in the second part of the 18th century a nationalist literary model, a model however contemporary with the invention of a new theater, that of Diderot.