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9 BECCARIA, Cesare, marchese di. Traité des délits et des peines, traduit de l’italien. Lausanne: [no publisher,] 1766; [bound with:] VOLTAIRE . Commentaire sur le livre des délits et des peines, par un avocat de province. 1767 ; [and:] MUYART DE VOUGLANS, Pierre-François. Réfutation des principes hasardés dans le Traité des délits et peines. Lausanne & Paris: Desaint, 1767 A seminal work of criminal justice First edition in French of undoubtedly the most influential work on criminal justice in the 18th century, originally published in Italian in 1764, here bound with two contemporary responses by Voltaire and Muyart de Vouglans. Cesare Beccaria, Marchese Beccaria-Bonesana, a well-to- do Milanese professor of law and economics, had made many prison visits and was appalled at what he saw. His short book was immediately successful and widely influential in stimulating reform in many countries, including the nascent United States – Thomas Jefferson had a copy of the New-York edition of 1809 (Sowerby 2349). “Beccaria maintained that the gravity of the crime should be measured by its injury to society and that the penalties should be related to this. The prevention of crime he held to be of greater importance than its punishment, and the certainty of punishment of greater effect than its severity. He denounced the use of torture and secret judicial proceedings. He opposed capital punishment, which should be replaced by life imprisonment; crimes against property should be in the first place punished by fines, political crimes by banishment; and the conditions in prisons should be radically improved. Beccaria believed that the publication of criminal proceedings, verdicts and sentences, as well as furthering general education, would help to prevent crime. These ideas have now become so commonplace that it is difficult to appreciate their revolutionary impact at the time” ( PMM ).
The translator André Morellet was a French economist who contributed to the Encyclopédie . His translation is based on the third edition of Beccaria’s treatise and, according to the imprint, includes previously unpublished additions by the author. It was criticized for diverting widely from the original text, leading Beccaria to seek out another translator, whom he found in librarian Chaillou de Lisy. There were nonetheless several editions of Morellet’s translation and it is this text on which Voltaire and Diderot based their commentaries and annotations. Three works bound in one volume, octavo (149 × 90 mm). Contemporary mottled calf, red morocco spine label, raised bands, spine decorated gilt with central floral tools, blind rule border to sides, marbled endpapers, edges sprinkled blue and white. Armorial bookplate of the M. B. Bouhier de l’Ecluse to front free endpaper verso. Small round wormhole to rear joint, contents unaffected; margins trimmed quite closely, occasional light spotting and the odd stain; a very attractive volume. ¶ Printing and the Mind of Man 209 (for the first edition). £2,750 [145600] 10 BECCARIA, Cesare – FACCHINEI, Giorgio Benaglio. Note ed Osservazioni sul libro intitolato dei delitti e delle pene. [Venice: Zatta,] 1765 One of the earliest instances of “socialism” in print First edition of an important work of the Enlightenment with deep implications in philosophy, politics and economics – made all the more remarkable by its containing in a single page both one of the earliest instances of the term “socialist” in print and an early reference to the concept of “invisible hand”, pitched one against the other. Written in polemic against Beccaria’s momentous anonymously-published On Crimes and Punishments , but in fact much wider in scope, Facchinei’s Note ed Osservazioni was
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