Pamphlet des pamphlets

An artillery officer during the Revolution and later under the Empire, Paul-Louis Courier preferred the study of Greek and reading to soldiering. His rebellious temperament eventually led him to settle as a winegrower in his native Touraine, where he studied and translated Greek authors. Above all, as a stylist of exceptional precision, he began writing pamphlets — small masterpieces of eloquence with incisive turns of phrase. His wit, admired by Mérimée and Stendhal, led contemporaries to compare him to Voltaire and to the author of the Provinciales.

The Pamphlet des pamphlets is probably his most virulent, in which he sought to demonstrate the very usefulness of the pamphlet form, as Pierre Larousse would later define it: “Le Pamphlet des pamphlets is an irresistible piece whose style, from beginning to end in harmony with the most capricious and daring movement of inspiration, is perhaps the most accomplished in taste and the most marvelous in art that our language can offer.”

Together with the Discours pour l’acquisition de Chambord and the Pétition pour des villageois que l’on empêche de danser, the Pamphlet des pamphlets forms the essential and unrivaled triptych of pamphleteering from the first half of the nineteenth century.

From the library of André Schück and Arpels, with bookplate.