Orazione a Bonaparte pel Congresso di Lione

Features

Author:  [Ugo Foscolo]

Publisher:  s.e.

Place of printing:  Italy

Year of publication:  1802

Product Condition:
Copy in good condition. Half leather binding with corners, with author's name and gilt fillets on the four-ribbed spine: peeling on the edges, corners and in particular on the spine; small lack on the upper portion of the spine. Author's name partly erased, but guessable. Brown stains around the corners of the back covers and flyleaves. Paper tag with description of the volume, probably from a library that owned it, applied to the front back cover. Leaves in general well preserved; to be noted: mold stains on the lower margin from page 21 to page 25; pen erasures on pages 40, 49, 50 and 51: the text is otherwise legible. Text in Italian.

Pages:  63,(1)

Format:  In sixteenth

Dimensions (cm):
Height:  18
Width:  12

Description

The editorial vicissitudes of this Oration to Bonaparte by Foscolo are interesting. The oration was commissioned by the Government Committee of the Cisalpine Republic on the occasion of the meeting of the Consulta in Lyon in January 1802, convened in the presence of Napoleon to write the Constitution of the republic. The oration was published, but the copy we propose is part of a second edition, a forgery of the original, published in January 1803 with a false edition date of 1802. A very well-informed scholar of Foscolo such as Gianfranco Acchiappati does not exclude Foscolo's participation in this editorial initiative, even though it was publicly defined as abusive, and provides us with the elements to distinguish the two editions: in particular, on the frontispiece the subtitle "For the Congress of Lyon" is printed in round capitals in the forgery, in italic capitals in the original, the "Sophocles" of the Greek quotation in lower case italics in the forgery, in italic capitals in the original. In our copy some lines are crossed out in pen (but still legible) by a clerical censor: it is the passage relating to the criticism of the temporal power of the Church ("And our destiny was so atrocious that the Christian religion, hope for us of gentle customs..., rebelled against its Founder, placed its royal seat in Italy... and selling the sky, bought, divided and made the earth tributary"), which is followed by the praise of Napoleon for his policy with which "he separated the mitre from the crown".

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