Description

ORIGINAL EDITION in contemporary binding of this collection of 4 poems, a burlesque tribute to the 1830 Revolution and the 3 Journées de Juillet, dedicated by the author to Louis-Philippe.

In close collaboration with Joseph Méry, Auguste Barthélémy published a number of biting satires on Napoleon and the imperial family, the last of which, "Fils de l'homme", directed against the Duke of Reichstadt, earned him a fine of 1,000 francs and 3 months in prison (despite a plea in verse that aroused the enthusiasm of the audience).
Released during the July Revolution, Barthélémy received a comfortable pension of 1,200 francs from Louis-Philippe. This did not prevent him from pursuing his ministers in a series of satirical poems published in the weekly magazine Nemesis. The king suspended his pension, but it was assumed that the publication of Nemesis having been interrupted, that his silence had also been bought. In the years that followed, Barthélémy published little. It was against this background that Fifth anniversary. The periodical Fashion mocked the poet's changing allegiances, going so far as to accuse him of collaborating with Jean-Charles Persil, the proverbially harsh Minister of Justice and Religious Affairs:

At the moment there is a sort of upsurge in the cynicism of apostasy. At the same time as a certain councillor of the Royal Court was condemning, without lowering his brow, the noble Count de Kergorlay, a renegade of another kind, Sieur Barthélémy, the former Republican of La Némésis, now a very humble servant and SUBJECT, was bringing to light a new palidony of his own composition. [...] We strongly suspect that Mr Barthélémy has got together with the Persil-sleuths to use these dynastic hooks to lure La Mode and other sheets of the bad press under the machine-gun fire of intimidation laws: but we know our code; and Mr Barthélémy's first national guard will not extract from us the slightest justiciable joke from Cayenne.