Les Moeurs [with] Arrest de la Cour du Parlement [with] Les Moeurs Appreciees, ou, lettre ecrite a un bel esprit du Marais, a l'occasion de cet ouvrage

[32], 106; [107]-334; [335]-474 pp. Contemporary mottled calf, marbled endpapers, spine gilt with red leather label, red edges. Frontispiece, engraved vignette on title and on first page of each of the three parts as called for, this copy bound without the separate titles to the 2nd and 3rd parts found in some copies. An immensely popular which was banned upon its release, and burned by the French court of justice. The scandal it caused would follow the author for the rest of his life (eventually it became thought that the work advocated regicide). Nonetheless, it became an influential work that went through at least 15 editions in 1748, and elicited a number of replies. Parts of it were later reused in Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie. This 474 page printing, which was also issued in a large-paper (4to.) format, is generally considered the first. The book was banned by the French parlement on May 6, 1748 and the author was subsequently forced to seek asylum in the Low Countries. The present volume is enhanced by having two additional items bound in: a printed copy of that Arrest de la Cour du Parlement…. [4 pp., folded]; and the anonymous Les mœurs appreciées, ou, lettre ecrite a un bel esprit du Marais, a l'occasion de cet ouvrage ([N.p.] 1748), of 45 pages (fly title). A lawyer, Toussaint contributed several short entries to the Encyclopedie and collaborated with Diderot and others on a translation of James' massive Dictionnaire universel de medicine (6 vols, 1746-48). He also wrote on economics and translated Discours prononces au parlement d'Angleterre … pour et contre la liberte du Commerce au Levant, which was published separately and also collected among four volumes of essays complementing Schreduer's edition of Hume's Discours Politiques, (5 volumes, Amsterdam: Schreuder, 1754-57); see Chuo 74. Les Mœurs, widely attributed to Diderot when it first appeared, was part of a broad movement within the French Enlightenment seeking to establish an ethics for civil society on a secular foundation, separate from the tenets Christian theology. The first episode was the now forgotten, but then highly important book by François-Vincent Toussaint, a friend of Diderot and Grimm: Les Mœurs. In this book Toussaint broke the connection between politeness and religion and defended both a deist position and a natural ethics. For Toussaint, politeness was a social virtue: it required 'constant attention, which inspires humanity, on pleasing everyone and offending no one.' It was not based on religious morality but on the natural sociability of man."—A. Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford 2015), page 124. WorldCat records at least one copy similarly bound, in the Danish Union Catalogue.