Les Œuvres de Mr. Fouquet

8 parts in 16 volumes 12mo [132 x 71 mm] of : I/ (6) ll., 288 pp. ; II/ (2) ll., 264 pp.; III/ (1) l., 268 pp. ; IV/ (1) l., 270 pp. ; V/ (1) l., 406 pp. ; VI/ (1) l., 432 pp. ; VII/ (1) f., 396 pp.; VIII/ (1) l., 304 pp.; IX/ (1) l., 240 pp. ; X/ (1) l., 379 pp. ; XI/ 350 pp. ; XII/ (1) l., 311 pp. ; XIII/ (1) l., 268 pp.; XIV/ (1) l., 480 pp. ; XV/ (1) l., 270 pp. ; XVI/ (1) l., 356 pp..

Full calf, double blind fillets around the covers, arms stamped in gilt in center, ribbed spine decorated with gilt fleurons, lettering pieces in red morocco, sprinkled edges. Contemporary binding.

Fouquet. Les œuvres de Mr. Fouquet, Ministre d’Etat. Contenant son Accusation, son Procez & ses défenses, contre Louis XIV, Roy de France.

Paris, chez la veuve de Cramoisy, 1696.

First complete edition of the report of Fouquet’s trial, Louis XI’s surintendant des finances.

It is decorated with a frontispiece representing his arrest and trial.

Willems, 1361 ; A. Sauvy, Livres saisis à Paris entre 1678 et 1701, n°956.

In August 1661, king Louis XIV ordered the arrest of his surintendant Fouquet after the party given by the latter in his castle of Vaux le Vicomte.

“Transferred to the castle of Angers, then to Amboise, Vincennes, and finally the Bastille, the prisoner was finally put on trial, and it lasted four years.”

It was a considerable event, that moved the court, the elite and the people.

“The widow Cramoisy from Paris successfully purchased the edition of the Recueil des défenses de M. Fouquet, 5 + 7 volumes 12mo printed by Daniel Elzevier in 1665 and 1667, and put it back for sale in 1696 (16 volumes). To the volumes of the Elzevirian edition were added the Traité du Péculat and the Factum. This text, written in Fouquet’s defense, had been seized.” (Willems)

Judged by a commission appointed by the king and made up of his most ardent enemies, he was pronounced guilty on all charges and condemned. He was guilty even before the trial started.

However, Colbert and Louis XIV were disappointed, in the sense that the trial only banished Fouquet and deprived him of all his belongings : they had hoped for death and the general attorney Talon had required a most infamous ordeal, the gallows.

The iniquity of the procedure and the relentlessness of his enemies brought public opinion back in his favor, all the more so because several ministers just as guilty, like Mazarin, had never been punished.

Louis XIV, thinking it was too dangerous to let such a man leave the kingdom considering all the things he knew on royal affairs, transformed his sentence of banishment to life in prison.

Fouquet’s friends pleaded and fought, in vain. Pellisson published four eloquent memoirs in his defense, and that got him thrown in the Bastille; La Fontaine wrote an elegy addressed to the king (…). Saint-Evremond, Mlle de Scudéry, Brébeuf, Mme de Sévigné all sided with the surintendant : nothing worked. He was transferred to the castle of Pignerol and lived for nineteen years in harsh captivity.

“This trial was one of the most scandalous of history. At the beginning, the inventory of the elements seized was modified, fabricated pieces were added, others were removed, the text that was submitted to the sovereign courts was altered and for several months Fouquet was denied legal counsel.

When word got out that Fouquet would not be executed, the people rejoiced. But so did the queen mother, who was troubled at the beginning of the trial by the anti-Fouquet cabal and had come to understand what was really at stakes with the trial.

As to Louis XIV, Paul Morand makes the following remark: “In politics, Louis stayed for too long in Mazarin’s shadow for him to admit to being in Fouquet’s.””
(C. Dorgueille, Le cas Fouquet)

One of the rarest copies, preserved in its contemporary armorial binding, here with the arms of Louis-César de Crémeaux, marquis d’Entragues (1679-1747) and lieutenant-général.