1 Vol In 8 Geneva 1768, "the Man With Forty écus" Original Edition Fm Arouet By Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet by Voltaire: “The Man with Forty Crowns”. Geneva, 1768 of 80pp. cardboard covered with marbled paper, smooth spine, brown morocco title label, André Hardy bookplate. Beautiful copy (modern binding). Rare year of the original edition. The man with forty crowns: this is a title that sounds like good money. In fact, we tend not to see it as more than a short treatise on amusing finance. In which we are mistaken, because the whole of Voltaire's philosophy is in this elegant charge directed against physiocratic ineptitude. The latter had reached its full development in 1767, the year preceding the publication of our precious work, immediately condemned to the fire by the Parliament of Paris and republished thirteen times the same year by the cosmopolitan virtue of tireless editorial activism. For the followers of what has been so beautifully called philosophy in a wheat field, income could only come from the land. What could be more natural than wanting to have the entire tax borne by landowners alone? However, with the tax cutting land income in half, the man with forty crowns would more deserve to be called the man with twenty crowns.... The figures have great importance here. Twenty crowns is poverty. Forty is the product of the division of the rent which comes from all the lands of the Kingdom by the number of subjects that can be counted there. We will have understood: the man with forty crowns is the average Frenchman, the statistical man. From which it follows the case of Monsieur André is exemplary and the demonstration of Voltaire universal? But is there more? We quickly guess that Monsieur André is none other than Voltaire himself. The itinerary which leads the man with forty crowns, inpecunious and naive, to Monsieur André, a prosperous and wise bourgeois, pedagogically merges with the story of Voltaire becoming more Voltaire every day as he becomes richer by throwing his mind full of hands all around him. The happy consequence of all this is that most of the constituent themes of the Voltairian universe are condensed in this elegant volume which constitutes the best introduction to an immense but uneven work. The short story ends with a piece of advice that contains all the others: the fortune acquired by Mr. André will serve him to finally "fulfill his great passion of having a library", a library worthy of the name, a library from which we can draw enough wisdom to never become poor again, a library where the man with forty crowns will occupy, we guess, the noblest floor... A very rare booklet at a justified price for man, one of the most brilliant minds of the 18th century.....