Du suicide

Paris: Le Clerc, 1797. FIRST AND ONLY EDITION. Engraved frontispiece in first volume. Partially printed on blue paper. Contemporary russet calf- backed marbled boards, spines gilt, marbled endpapers. An excellent copy. First and only edition of this rare treatise on the controversial subject of suicide. The anonymous author hopes to shed more light on this cultural taboo. He begins by providing statistics of suicides that have been announced in France (500 suicides in 6 years or 20,000 suicides in the last century), which he believes are consistently underreported by families and newspapers due to public and religious shame. The author sets forth examples to support his conclusion that suicides are a systemic problem in French society, as illustrated by Madame L’s suicide (a woman with a seemingly happy life who drowned herself in the river). He claims her death to be a combination of boredom with life, disgust at her needs, and mood swings brought on by dramatic novels. Our author disagrees with contemporaneous scholarly and popular opinions on suicides and concludes the first part with a historiographical critique of literature including Dubois Delaunay’s Dissertation sur le Suicide, Jean Henri Samuel Formey’s Mélanges philosophiques, M. Funck’s commentary on Johan Robeck’s (1672–1739) theological interpretation of suicide, and Jean Dumas’s Traité du suicideou du meurtre volontaire de soi-même. The author defines fourteen causes of suicide, including disgust at the satedness of life, loss of property, a feeling of humiliation, an unfortunate or ill-fated passion, the abuse of the pleasure of the senses, envy or jealousness, anger, guilt of crimes, fear and terror, belief in suicide as just and deserved punishment, madness, and cruel fanaticism. A rich section of discursive notes fills the second half of the second volume.