De la Grèce moderne et de ses rapports avec l'Antiquité

First edition of De la Grèce moderne et de ses rapports avec l’Antiquité, published in Paris and Strasbourg by F.-G. Levrault in 1830. Two parts in one octavo volume. Cf. Blackmer 1372; Droulia 1817; Contominas 595; not in Atabey, the latter two references still requiring direct verification in the printed bibliographies. Blackmer and Droulia are confirmed by the bibliographical records consulted.

Contemporary half blond calf, smooth spine with five false bands framed by gilt garlands, compartments and fillets tooled in blind, gilt rolls at head and foot, marbled paper boards, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, marbled edges. Foxing.

An important provenance: with the library stamp of François Guizot on the half-title. On the first flyleaf his grandson Robert de Witt subsequently added his name and stamp, dated 11 March 1875.

Edgar Quinet (1803-1875) was not yet thirty when he travelled to Greece as a member of the scientific commission attached to the Morea expedition. The journey answered a long-standing ambition. On 8 December 1828 he wrote to Joseph-Marie de Gérando that he hoped the sight of places particularly rich in myth would resolve questions that speculation and the observations of others could not. In 1829 he thus reached a Greece only just emerging from its War of Independence, at the precise moment when the ancient country on which Europe had built so much of its imagination encountered a nation recovering its political existence.

De la Grèce moderne arose directly from this experience. Throughout the book Quinet confronts the country through which he travels with the literary, historical and religious memories attached to its landscapes. The result is neither simply an archaeological itinerary nor the picturesque narrative of a philhellene: travel becomes a means of testing, on the ground, the relationships between geography, myth, history and the formation of peoples. The second part, entitled De la Nature et de l’Histoire dans leurs rapports avec les Traditions Religieuses et Epiques, broadens the enquiry further. Jeannine Guichardet has aptly identified the work born of the Morea mission as marking the emergence of Quinet as a writer.

The particular interest of the present copy emerges when this youthful book is set against the identity of its first owner, François Guizot. Fifteen years separate Quinet’s Greek journey from the confrontations that brought him into conflict with the July Monarchy. Appointed to the Collège de France, where he taught from 1841, Quinet increasingly turned his chair into a platform against the Jesuits and ultramontanism, in an intellectual campaign pursued notably alongside Michelet.

Guizot’s role in the suspension of his teaching nevertheless requires precision. The measure was not personally taken by Guizot: Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy, Minister of Public Instruction, secured the suspension of Quinet’s lectures in October 1845, and later that of Michelet in January 1848. Guizot was then Minister of Foreign Affairs and, from 1840, the dominant political figure in Louis-Philippe’s government; he did not formally become President of the Council until September 1847. The stamp in the present volume therefore does not allow the book to be described as having belonged to the man who personally removed Quinet from his chair, but it does place it in the library of the statesman who dominated the regime under which his teaching was suppressed.

The distinction scarcely diminishes the contrast. By the 1840s Guizot embodied a political order to which Quinet was openly opposed; yet this work of the young traveller of 1829 found its way into his library, having been written long before their political trajectories came to stand in such opposition. Its provenance thus adds retrospectively a history that the book could not, of course, have possessed when first published.

That history continued within Guizot’s own family. Robert Conrad Guillaume de Witt (1854-1881), son of Cornélis de Witt and Pauline Guizot, was the former minister’s grandson. He inscribed his name and impressed his stamp on the first flyleaf on 11 March 1875. The date gives the transmission a final resonance: Guizot had been dead for only six months, while Quinet himself would die sixteen days later.

A rare copy of the first edition of one of Quinet’s earliest major works, directly arising from his journey with the Morea scientific expedition, bearing the library stamp of François Guizot and subsequently the mark of his grandson Robert de Witt: a provenance materially bringing together the young philhellene of 1829 and the family of the statesman whose government would suspend his teaching fifteen years later.