Le Panorama des boudoirs, ou l'Empire des Nairs • [FEMINISME]

Chez Pigoreau | Paris 1817 | 9.50 x 16 cm | 4 volumes reliés | Le Panorama des boudoirs, ou l'Empire des Nairs Chez Pigoreau | Paris 1817 | 9,5 x 16 cm | 4 volumes bound in sheep One of the first great but almost unknown feminist books, admired by Schiller, Goethe, Godwin, Burr and which influenced Carlisle, Percy and Mary Shelley, Suzanne Volquin and Flora Tristan. First edition of an extraordinary rarity, with a new title page with the Pigoreau address and enriched with four color-enhanced frontispieces, including one folding. Contemporary bindings in half blonde sheep, spines decorated with gilt finishing tools and fillets and title pieces and volume labels in red morocco, marbled paper boards. A tiny worm hole at the foot of the first volume, the joint at the top of the outer board of which is very slightly split. This long novel, made up of an erotic collection, is actually one of the most important feminist texts of the early 19th century. Despite a chaotic editorial adventure heavily hampered by censorship, this work written in French by a young Englishman, claiming to be a follower of Mary Wollstonecraft, will have a considerable influence on some of the most prominent European minds, including Percy and Mary Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Aaron Burr, Thomas Carlyle and Flora Tristan. Although it was published in three versions, German, French and then English, each one being a complete rewriting of the work by the polyglot author, this major and subversive work was very quickly removed from bookshop catalogs, and its author disappeared from literary history from 1840 to the end of the 1970s. “Today, after having long been known only by Shelley specialists, Lawrence begins to gain visibility within work on English radicalism. [.] He features prominently among the radical English feminists of the 1790s and [.] is considered as one of the precursors, with Shelley and Owen, to the fight against marriage and for sexual reform.” (Anne Verjus, Une société sans pères peut-elle être féministe ? L'Empire des Nairs de James H. Lawrence.) Despite dozens of editions published in the 19th century, we have not found any copy offered on the international market. Lawrence was barely 18 years old when he wrote a first essay on the 'system' of the Nairs, a matrilineal society situated on the Malabar Coast, in India, in which marriage and paternity had been abolished. Enthused by the critical success his essay encountered, in 1800 James Lawrence wrote a first novel version illustrating his thesis. On reading the manuscript, Friedrich von Schiller would have encouraged him to translate it into German. It is, therefore, in this language that, in 1801, the first version of the novel was published under the title Das Paradies der Liebe. Present in France in 1803, James Lawrence became a prisoner like the majority of the English and was then held at Verdun for several years. It was under these circumstances that he started the complete rewriting of his novel directly into French. It was entitled L'Empire des Nairs, ou le Paradis de l'amour and was published in 1807 by Maradan, the publisher of Wollstonecraft and Hays. Barely off the press, the work was seized by the police, considered “detrimental to good morals”. The copies were returned only on the condition that the entire edition was exported. The work was then distributed in Germany and in Austria where he had Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an ambassador, whom Lawrence met in 1799, when the romantic poet invited him to Weimar for the performance of Voltaire's Mahomet. In his memoirs, Frédéric Soret will report Goethe's criticism of his friend's work: “According to Goethe, this is the work of a madman with a great mind and he would pay much more attention to Lawrence's writing if his approach to gender relations had not become a sort of fixed idea.” (Soret, Conversations avec Goethe, 1932) The friendship between the two men will not be affected by this “obsession” and in an 1