L'Ami des loix, comédie en cinq actes, en vers. Représentée par les Comédiens de la Nation, le 2 janvier 1793. Par le citoyen Laya. Auteur des Dangers de l'Opinion et de Jean Calas.

First edition of a play regarded as historically significant, performed for the first time nineteen days before the execution of Louis XVI, which set all of Paris and then France ablaze to the point of interrupting the King's trial, by a constitutional monarchist playwright.

Nineteenth-century Bradel binding in half brown percaline, smooth spine decorated with a gilt fleuron, red morocco lettering-piece, pebble-pattern marbled paper boards, edges lightly red-speckled.

Corners bumped.

Discreet scattered foxing. 

Minor printing flaw on p. 7.

"'The Friend of the Laws' is one of the most interesting plays in the theatre of the Revolution. The author, who had boldly made it a satire of the Jacobins, risked his life in 1793 for having staged this play at the Théâtre de la Nation during the trial of Louis XVI. One might have supposed that this comedy, written by a sincere monarchist, would, under the government that succeeded the Consulate and the Empire, have won the wholehearted approval of the Royalists. The opposite proved true. The censors of the Restoration banned 'The Friend of the Laws', as though it had been a revolutionary or Bonapartist work."

Henri Welschinger, La Revue d'art dramatique et musical, 1891

"This desire to cast Laya as the martyr of a powerful faction of hypocrites doubtless accounts for the repeated comparison of 'The Friend of the Laws' to Molière's Tartuffe, rather than to the work that had actually inspired it, Les Femmes savantes, in which Molière had behaved far more as aggressor than as victim." 

Mark Darlow & Yann Robert, eds., "The Friend of the Laws", 2011

(our own translation)