Sur le compte rendu au roi en 1781. Nouveaux éclaircissements [avec] De l'importance des opinions religieuses

The first editions of two major works by Jacques Necker, bound together.

Half green calf, stone-marbled green paper boards, smooth spine decorated with gilt bands and blind-stamped tools, three blind-stamped ornaments, black title labels, stone-marbled paper pastedowns, sprinkled edges. Very slight rubbing to the binding, an ink stain on the first free endpaper and the first title page, occasional light soiling to a few leaves.

Two works published on the eve of the Revolution, in which Necker, formerly Director-General of Finances under Louis XVI, defends his management of the public accounts and goes on to examine the religious foundations of the social order.

The title of the first work, Sur le compte rendu au roi en 1781. Nouveaux éclaircissemens, refers to the text that contributed to Necker's departure from the Director-Generalship of Finances. Published in February 1781, at the height of the American War of Independence, the Compte rendu au roi was intended to facilitate the monarchy's borrowing from private investors. To reassure them, Necker presented the ordinary finances of the State as showing a surplus of some ten million livres, a picture whose accuracy was later fiercely disputed. The work is regarded as the first public account of the finances of the French monarchy: by disclosing, among other things, the sums paid out in royal pensions, Necker won immense public acclaim but incurred the hostility of the court, and was forced to resign on 19 May of that year. Among his adversaries was Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, who coveted his position. Appointed Controller-General in November 1783, Calonne laid the blame for the kingdom's financial plight on his predecessors, and above all on Necker, while he himself stood accused of it (he was nicknamed at the time "Monsieur Déficit"). After his fall from favour he took refuge in England, from where he published his polemical memoirs. Having first answered Calonne's accusations in April 1787, Necker returned to the attack in 1788 with these Nouveaux éclaircissemens, once again vindicating his 1781 accounts with supporting tables and attributing the worsening of the deficit to the measures taken by his successor. As the preface states, the king recalled Necker even before this work of self-justification appeared. After Calonne's failure, Louis XVI had indeed been compelled to turn to him once more: by August 1788 the monarchy was virtually bankrupt. Published with the king's approval, the work appeared in 1788 in Paris, at the Hôtel de Thou, and in Lyon, in both quarto and octavo formats. Necker did not, however, retain the king's confidence for long: on 11 July 1789 Louis XVI dismissed him, a few weeks after his conspicuous absence from the royal session of 23 June.

The work bound after it, De l'importance des opinions religieuses, was published in the early months of the same year, while Necker was still out of office. Comprising eighteen chapters, it marks a turning point in his writings, which had until then centred on economic questions and on the political interest of the State. It is as a former administrator, reflecting on the close of his experience of public affairs, that the author addresses the relations between religion and sovereignty, between philosophy and morality. Necker argues that religious belief is indispensable both to public order and to private happiness, and opposes all attempts to ground morality on law alone, reason alone or public esteem alone. Religion alone, in his view, speaks to the imagination and to the conscience, and offers the afflicted a hope reaching beyond the present life. Keeping his distance from intolerance as much as from fashionable unbelief, he treats in turn of religious opinions in their relation to sovereigns, the objection drawn from the wars of religion, the respect philosophy owes to religion, toleration and Christian morality. He thus defends religion as a necessary support for the sovereign in maintaining public order, and warns the elites against the vogue for irreligion. Readers have seen in it a warning that a people deprived of the consolations of faith would not long endure its wretched condition, and the spectre of a revolt in which the ruling classes would have everything to lose. The work met with immediate resonance. It was translated into English as early as 1788 by Mary Wollstonecraft, and in the same year prompted a critical response from Rivarol, in the form of letters addressed to the author.

Two texts by a minister out of favour, in all likelihood written in the months preceding his recall to office, which may be read as the signs of a regime whose legitimacy was shifting towards public opinion, and whose social order was already perceived as under threat.