Lettre d’un habitant des Vosges…

As the Empire tottered, Senancour, aligned with liberal circles, published these two pamphlets in which he took a stand with singular independence of mind. The Lettre d’un habitant des Vosges is a vehement response to Chateaubriand’s famous libel, De Buonaparte et des Bourbons; despite the sympathy he always showed toward Napoleon, Senancour was never a Bonapartist — nor did he ever join the republican camp. As Escoffier sums it up, this is “the letter of a solitary man sheltered from the enthusiasms of the crowd.” In the Seconde lettre, he stresses the impossibility of a republic suited to French customs, while mocking the “republicans of the great cities”: “You do not exactly love servitude; but what you cannot bear is liberty.”

Of extreme rarity: unknown to Vicaire and Carteret, these two pamphlets do not appear in Germond (Les Pamphlets de la fin de l’Empire) nor in Davois (Bibliographie napoléonienne). The first is described as “extremely rare” in the Catalogue du Mouvement romantique (1934); the second is not even mentioned there. Clouzot (p. 252) calls them “very rare.”