LINGUET, Simon Nicolas Henri.

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Essai Philosophique sur le Monachisme. One of two editions bearing a Paris imprint printed in 1775, without known priority, though the absence of a contents table in this edition, present in the other, implies this is the earlier. Simon Nicolas Henri Linguet (1736-1794) was a French journalist and lawyer "whose delight in taking views opposing everyone else's earned him exiles, imprisonment, and finally the guillotine" (Encyclopaedia Britannica online). The present work, a discourse on monarchy, is heavily derived from the author's history of the Jesuits, published in 1768. The work is scarce, with Library Hub listing copies of the two editions in only six British institutions.

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