Causes célèbres et intéressantes, avec les jugemens qui les ont décidées

First edition of the first two volumes of the jurist François Richer’s collection Causes célèbres et intéressantes avec les jugements qui les ont décidées, published in twenty-two volumes between 1772 and 1788.

The first volume is decorated with a few headpieces and tailpieces.

Bound in contemporary full brown mottled calf, spines with five raised bands, compartments decorated with gilt bands and fleurons, brown morocco title and volume labels, gilt roll on board edges, French curl paper pastedowns, red edges. Corners worn, headcaps damaged, rubbing and scuffing to spines, small marginal tears to pages 101, 365 and 473 of the second volume.

Two volumes gathering several celebrated criminal cases, including the famous usurpation of Martin Guerre’s identity, tried in Toulouse in 1560.

To compile this collection, the jurist François Richer drew on an earlier collection published under the same title by the lawyer Gayot de Pitaval. Richer did not merely reissue Pitaval, but rewrote the work, pruning it of superfluous detail, and enlarged it with new cases, marked with asterisks in the table of the first volume. In the preface to this first volume, he passes severe judgement on his predecessor, whom he faults for having "ni gout, ni critique, ni philosophie" [neither taste, nor critical judgement, nor philosophy], and above all for a prolixity that robbed the cases of all their interest. His revision aimed first and foremost at making the narrative more gripping: the reader was to remain in suspense until the outcome of the case, unable to foresee the verdict. More concise, livelier and enlarged with new cases, this version seems to have quickly become the standard collection of famous trials. It was also the basis for the German translation published under Schiller’s direction from 1792 onwards.

As in Pitaval's collection, the first volume opens with the Martin Guerre case. In 1556, a man arrived in the village of Artigat, in the diocese of Rieux, and passed himself off as Martin Guerre, who had vanished eight years earlier. Convicted by the judge of Rieux, the impostor, Arnaud du Tilh, appealed to the Parlement of Toulouse. He was on the point of winning his case when the real Martin Guerre suddenly reappeared, on a wooden leg. Following the ruling handed down on 12 September 1560, one of the judges, Jean de Coras, published his Arrest memorable, which lay at the origin of the case’s literary fortune. The historian Natalie Zemon Davis devoted to it what has become a classic study, The Return of Martin Guerre, after serving as historical consultant and co-screenwriter on Daniel Vigne’s 1982 film Le Retour de Martin Guerre, starring Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye.

The first volume brings together other cases that have remained famous: that of the murderous Marquise de Brinvilliers, tried by the Parlement of Paris in 1676 for poisoning her father and her two brothers, then beheaded, a prelude to the Affair of the Poisons at the court of Louis XIV; the "célèbre cause de Saint-Géran", a filiation suit within the La Guiche family, from which Alexandre Dumas drew one of his Crimes célèbres; and finally the "Gueux de Vernon", the story of a missing child whom people believed they recognised in the boy accompanying a passing beggar. The second volume is devoted entirely to a case that captivated Europe in the 1730s: the trial between Catherine Cadière and the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Girard, her spiritual director, whom she accused of having bewitched and abused her.

Designed to keep the reader in suspense until the verdict, Richer’s work helped sustain the renown of the Martin Guerre case and became a landmark of judicial narrative, a distant ancestor of the true crime genre.