Recherches physiques et chimiques sur la fabrication de la poudre à canon, contenant des observations et des expériences nouvelles

First edition (cf. Quérard II, 140).

Our copy is preserved in its original publisher’s wrappers, under the plain pink provisional cover; the spine is split and faded with losses, and there are small marginal tears to the covers.

A scholar and statesman from Île de France (present-day Mauritius), J.-F. Charpentier de Cossigny (1736–1809) was elected deputy for the island to the Constituent Assembly. He returned there in 1800, sent by Bonaparte to announce the advent of the Consular regime and to serve as Director of gunpowder manufacture in Port Louis.

But because he sought to employ enslaved workers while paying them as free men, he encountered such fierce opposition from the colonists that he chose to abandon his plans and return to France to devote himself to his scientific work.

In this memoir, addressed in 1792 to the Minister of the Navy, he sets out the results of his research aimed at improving the safety of gunpowder manufacture.