Histoire de la guerre civile en Amérique

First edition, published in seven text volumes between 1874 and 1890, the first four by Michel Lévy frères and the final three by Calmann-Lévy, successor to the house of Michel Lévy. One of the very rare copies printed on Holland laid paper, an unrecorded large-paper issue not mentioned in the justification and apparently absent from the bibliographies consulted. Cf. Vicaire VI, 397-398; F. Monaghan, p. 74, no. 1157.

The seven text volumes are in the original wrappers, entirely untrimmed with deckle edges preserved. Small marginal tears and occasional losses to some spines and wrappers.

Complete with the folio atlas containing 30 maps with colour-highlighted outlines. Contemporary dark blue cloth, smooth spine with applied lettering-piece, gilt cipher to the upper board. A few scuffs to the covers.

The atlas comes from the library of the Cercle de l’Union Artistique, known as “Les Mirlitons”, whose gilt cipher appears on the upper board together with a library stamp on a flyleaf. Founded in 1860, this fashionable Parisian artistic club merged with the Cercle des Champs-Élysées in 1888 and was eventually absorbed into the Nouveau Cercle de la rue Royale in 1946.

A grandson of Louis-Philippe and heir to the House of Orléans, Louis-Philippe-Albert d’Orléans, Comte de Paris (1838-1894), was still living in exile when the American Civil War broke out. In September 1861 he entered the Union Army with his brother Robert, Duc de Chartres, and was appointed captain and aide-de-camp to General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac.

He took part in the Peninsula Campaign, the siege of Yorktown, and the battles of Williamsburg, Fair Oaks, and Gaines’ Mill. At the latter engagement, fought on 27 June 1862 during the Seven Days Battles, he found himself directly involved in one of the most critical phases of McClellan’s advance on Richmond. The Comte de Paris left Federal service in the summer of 1862; traditional biographies relate his departure to the growing tensions between France and the United States caused by Napoleon III’s intervention in Mexico, while his formal letter of resignation refers more cautiously to personal reasons requiring his return to Europe.

Twelve years later, this military experience became the starting point for a historical undertaking on an entirely different scale. Beginning in 1874, the Comte de Paris set out to reconstruct methodically a war of which he had personally witnessed only the opening phase. The memories of the former staff officer were supplemented by military records, testimony, and the growing literature on the conflict, resulting in a vast synthesis pursued over nearly two decades.

The thirty maps in the atlas give visual form to this historiographical ambition. They allow campaigns, troop movements, and battlefields to be followed with the precision expected of a former staff officer, making the work far more than a political narrative or memoir: it is a fully developed military history grounded in operations and terrain.

The undertaking nevertheless remained unfinished. The seven published volumes carry the narrative through the campaigns of 1863-1864 without reaching the final collapse of the Confederacy in 1865. This incompleteness scarcely diminishes the scale of the project: through its documentation, the author’s first-hand experience of the operations of 1862, and its extensive cartographic apparatus, the Histoire de la guerre civile en Amérique remains one of the major contemporary French-language histories of the American Civil War.

In this rare deluxe copy on Holland paper, preserved in wrappers with full margins and accompanied by the complete atlas, the author’s own trajectory gives the set particular resonance: the French prince who entered Union service in 1861 became, a decade later, the methodical historian of a war whose battlefields he had first known at first hand.