Echantillon de l'Oeconomie raffinée [N.p., 3 May, 1697].

£4,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Extremely rare; an impressive survival of a piece of bilingual, administrative ephemera, issued in 1697 to enable the survey of newly acquired French territories at the end of the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697). We have found only one copy recorded, at Harvard (Goldsmith-Kress, 3459.1). Issued by the Royal Intendant to Louis XIV, this pamphlet instructs local justices to gather information on territories newly under their jurisdiction, using the list of 26 questions provided, arranged in two columns; one with questions in French, and one in German. They are extremely detailed and quite wide-ranging, and revealing of the structural, geographical, but above all economic priorities behind the survey . Questions concern the size of each territory, the number of towns, villages and fiefdoms they encompass, along with the names of the noble families that reside there and the nature of their noble status (inherited, awarded, married into) and their property; the nature of local justice and administrative systems (including in no.24, places of torture) and the quality of local officers; the type of land in the area - arable, empty, woodland - and the livestock, both domestic and for hunting and fishing; the climate and landscape (the names of principal mountains, rivers, lakes); the details of local manufacture (including the character of local workers - hard-working or lazy?) as well as any natural resources being quarried or mined; and so on. A significant proportion of these question

• Year: 1697

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