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6 - A classical republican in eighteenth-century Bordeaux: Guillaume-Joseph Saige

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Keith Michael Baker
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
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Summary

On 28 June 1775, the magistrates of the parlement of Bordeaux, recently restored to their seats after the traumatic events of the Maupeou coup, ordered the ceremonial destruction of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Catéchisme du citoyen, ou Eléments du droit public français, par demandes et par réponses. Condemned as full of “seditious and false maxims, subversive of the independence and authority of the crown, tending to establish anarchy in the state, to excite fermentation in people's minds, and to weaken the respect and obedience due to the sacred person of the king,” the work was regarded as all the more reprehensible by the magistrates in that its pernicious maxims were “artificially linked and mixed in the said work with the principles of public law consecrated by the most authentic laws and monuments” – or, to put it more precisely, mixed with the principles of parlementary constitutionalism, as they had been elaborated during the protracted political struggles of Louis XV's reign. The pamphlet was condemned two days later in similar terms, and doubtless for the same ambiguous reasons, by the magistrates of the parlement of Paris.

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Inventing the French Revolution
Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century
, pp. 128 - 152
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1990

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