[IMPRESSION MONTALBANAISE] Coup-d'oeil sur l'éducation

Second edition, largely original in its own right as it was substantially enlarged, to which was added a "Lettre sur l'instruction des aveugles", addressed to the author in 1816 by Mr Isaac Roquès of Montauban, himself blind, together with a selection of his poems.

Our copy is preserved in its plain grey temporary wrappers, the spine faded and showing small losses.

The first edition had been issued at the same Montauban address in Year VI of the Republican calendar.

A Montauban property owner and Protestant, Antoine Gautier-Sauzin was the author of several pedagogical pamphlets of considerable interest, notably his remarkable and curious reflections on the form of public instruction best suited to our southern countryside (1791), in which, taking the opposite view to that later adopted by Abbé Grégoire and the Montagnards, he sought to promote a form of popular education adapted to the rural populations of the Midi.

His project was to educate the peasants of southern France in their own vernaculars, first by printing alphabets "gascons, languedociens, provençaux, etc", and, in those same languages, "preliminary lessons" for children, followed by "a succinct, clear and precise account of the Revolution and of the abuses which […] gave rise to it", together with a "faithful translation of the constitution and the rural laws".

Furthermore, "in return for certain fees, a learned individual would be entrusted […] with preparing each week, and translating for the surrounding countryside, a digest of the public news and in particular of those decrees which would concern them in a direct manner"