Fair to good anitquarian condition, lacking volumes 4 and 8. High rag paper shows some tide marks and occasional foxing. Some provenance on the FFEP, imported after WWII by a private citizen. Edges are worn, in some cases completely. Marking ribbons frayed and shortened to various lengths over the centuries. Marbled endpapers. A "new edition" in French, printed in London in 1752. Wood cut portrait of the Duc on the frontis of vol. 1. Most previous owner's bookplate on several volumes. Top Edge Gilt. Leather has been conditioned. Some of the gilt titling remains. Tightly sewn. Some crude repairs.  Authored by M.L.D.L.D.L., i.e. Pierre Mathurin de L'Ecluse des Loges, Sully Maximilien de Bethune Duc.

Henri IV, (Henry le Grand) unified France after the religious wars in Europe tore it asunder, and Duke Sully was his Prime Minister, pretty much entirely responsible for the execution of a re-organization of France under the King. The first parts of the memoirs outline a utopian Europe, divided into 15 separate and equal dominations, 11 monarchies and 4 republics, that shared in the governance of Europe without National rivalry. It took more than five hundred years to begin the formation of the Eurozone forseen in this book.


Maximilien de Bethune, first Duke of Sully (13 December 1560 ? 22 December 1641) was the doughty soldier, French minister, staunch Huguenot (Protestant) and faithful right-hand man who assisted king Henry IV of France in the rule of France. Historians emphasize Sully's role in building a strong centralized administrative system in France using coercion and highly effective new administrative techniques. His policies were not original, and most were reversed. Historians have also studied his neo-Stoicism and his ideas about virtue, prudence, and discipline.

Clearly the learned in what was to become the United States were familiar with these ideas, in as much as they codified the Constitution of the United States of America to the outline of these documents, especially the notion of equal sub-ordinate members of a unified whole.An important piece of American history, this, having been reintroduced to the intellectual world just before the Revolutionary War.

Each volume is roughly the size of a thick paperback novel.  We found hundreds of single volumes and several partial sets. No full set this old.