D'ORLÉANS, Louis

by Louis D'orléans

£1,650 · Offered by Sokol Books

Extremely rare first edition of this strident piece of of propaganda against the person of Henri IV and French Huguenots in general, by the Parisian lawyer Louis Dorl éans, a prolific writer of anti-protestant literature. 1542-1629. Son of a Parisian procureur (solicitor) Dorl éans became an avocat. He studied with the humanist and the Latin poet Jean Dorat, and himself wrote poetry. A fervent Catholic he joined the revolutionary group of the Paris Holy League, the Sixteen. He was a prolific propagandist for the League, posing as a catholic Englishman warning French Catholics of the danger of a Protestant ruler. In 1589 he became avocat-general in the Leaguer parlement of Paris. Growing more conservative, he dissociated himself from the Sixteen and recommended the Leaguer estates not to accept the Tridentine decrees without Gallican safeguards. He fled from Paris to Antwerp in 1594 and published a satire vilifying Henri IV James Henderson Burns. The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700. The work is especially interesting as Dorl éans assumes the position of an English Catholic who who had been persecuted for his faith in Elizabethan England. The work covers every possible angle in its attack on Henri IV suggesting that he is himself diabolical, certainly in league with the devil, pointing out his many crimes, his sexual depravity (including that of his wife and mistresses), arguing that it would be impossible for the French people to accept a King who had been exc

• Binding: Hardcover

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