Essai sur le principe de population [An Essay on the Principle of Population]

Paris & Genève, J. J. Paschoud, 1809.
3 vols. (120 x 195 mm) of 424, 395 and 392 p. Brown half calf, spine decorated with gilt finials and gilt rollers, title and volume number pieces, speckled yellow edges (binding slightly later).

First French edition.

We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.

In the early 1790s, the English philosopher William Godwin expounded a “principle of population”. Reacting mainly to the thesis then developed by Godwin, Malthus then published the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, a pamphlet that appeared – anonymously – in 1798. In 1803, he replaced it with what was intended to be a more scientific treatise, in which he also referred to four other major sources: “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations” by David Hume, “A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind” by Robert Wallace, “Observations on Reversionary Payments” by Richard Price and “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith.

Two years after its publication, the Essay was partially translated by Pierre Prévost, a Swiss professor of physics and philosophy at the University of Geneva. Some chapters of the 1803 Essay were translated in full, while others were only partially translated. Prévost accompanied his translation with personal notes and comments; encouraged by Malthus, Pierre Prévost published this new edition in 1809 in Paris and Geneva, the first complete edition, based on the last one established by Malthus in 1807 (the fourth English edition). “[Malthus] even authorized me to make the changes I deemed necessary. I have not abused this permission. On the contrary, I have made it my duty to make Mr. Malthus’ work known as he himself published it. The appendix is the only part where I have made deletions and a few modifications, without indicating them in detail; because the objections that the author discusses there sometimes seemed to me too weak or too particular to deserve to be exposed and refuted in a translation, with as much scope as they are in the original. However, I have removed certain passages and even entire chapters that stray somewhat from the main subject or are too directly related to England.”

“The Essay of the Reverend Malthus caused a real ideological shock in 1798 in an England in crisis, traumatized by the French Revolution. This text contains the first formulation – unchanged in the five subsequent editions – of the principle of population. A fundamental advance, this principle asserts that the growth rates of the population and subsistence are very different, the former increasing more rapidly than the latter” (INED, preface to the critical edition of 2017). His analysis of overproduction crises sets him apart from Jean-Baptiste Say and makes him a precursor of Keynes – through his emphasis on insufficient demand – the latter emphasizing that he is “the first of the Cambridge economists”.

A rare first French translation of this text, a major reference in the history of ideas.
A good copy.

From the Antoine Larue library, with bookplate.

Antoine Larue, a director in several chemical companies in the second half of the 20th century, was also a fine bibliophile. His library was dispersed in 1985 and then in 1993, at the Hôtel Drouot, by Claude Guérin.

Printing and the Mind of Man, no. 251 (for the first English edition of 1798); Kress, B, 5591.