Mon oncle Benjamin

Born in Clamecy in 1801 and dead prematurely in 1844, Claude Tillier lived only through the Empire and the July Monarchy. A republican journalist and pamphleteer, he first published Mon oncle Benjamin as a serial in the local review L’Association, between 6 March and 14 December 1842, before issuing it in book form the following year with Coquebert, in a slightly revised version.

The narrator recalls his family, and above all his uncle Benjamin Rathery, a dilettante doctor and cheerful drinker who embodies a libertarian and irreverent voice. An inveterate bachelor fond of swords and bottles, Benjamin denounces the nobility, “the most absurd of all things,” and declares that “any man who acquires his fortune by means other than his labor and his talents is not its legitimate owner.”

A novel of rare freedom of tone, Mon oncle Benjamin has become a classic. Georges Brassens considered it his bedside book and used to say that “anyone who has not read Mon oncle Benjamin cannot call himself one of my friends.” Adapted for the screen by Édouard Molinaro in 1969, with Jacques Brel in the title role, the novel has never ceased to embody an anticlerical and anti-aristocratic vein inherited from the eighteenth century.

The first edition of this, the author’s only novel, is notoriously rare: Clouzot describes it as one of the “rarest and most sought-after Romantic first editions” (Clouzot, 264).

Discreet and skillful restoration to the half-title leaf.