Author: anonymous [Daunou, Pierre Claude Francois (1761-1840)]
Title: Essai historique sur la puissance temporelle des papes, sur l’abus qu’ils ont fait de leur ministere spirituel...
Description: Paris, Chez Le Normand, 1810. Later boards.. 21x13xm, viii,374 pp. Last page and half-title soiled.. Recent binder's blind boards. VG. ¶ First edition of the anti-papal work authored anonymously by the influential French statesman [see: Palau y Dulcet III, 155; Barbier II, 219; Hoefer 13, 189f.] Full title concludes: "...et sur les guerres qu’ils ont déclarées aux souverains, spécialement à ceux qui avaiant la prépondé rance en Italie. Ouvrage traduit de e’espagnol.". [..Elected to the Convention by Pas-de-Calais [Daunou] associated himself with the Girondists..He took little part in the struggle against the Mountain, but was involved in the overthrow of his friends, and was imprisoned for a year. In December he returned to the Convention and was the principle author of the Constitution of the Year III. It seems to have been due to his Girondist ideas that the Council of the Ancients were given the right of convoking the corps législatif outside Paris, an expedient which made possible Napoleon's coup d'état of 18 Brumaire..His energy was largely responsible for the suppression of the royalist insurrection of the 13th Vendémiaire..in 1798 he was sent to Rome, to organize the republic there and again, almost against his will, he lent his aid to Napoleon in the preparation of the Constitution of the Year VIII. His attitude towards Napoleon was not lacking in independence, but in this controversy with the pope, the emperor was able again to secure from him the learned treatise Sur la puissance temporelle du Pape (1809). Still he took little part in the new imperial régime, with which at heart he had no sympathy, and turned more and more to literature.." - Free Encyclopedia].

Keywords: Ecclesiastical Law, Catholic Church, Papacy Papal, Italy, France, Popes, Political History, French Politics, Napoleon