BEFFROY DE REIGNEY: Nicodeme dans la lune, ou la revolution - Lot 45

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BEFFROY DE REIGNEY: Nicodeme dans la lune, ou la revolution - Lot 45
BEFFROY DE REIGNEY: Nicodeme dans la lune, ou la revolution pacifique. Folly in prose mixed with ariettes and vaudevilles. At the Author, 1791. Booklet in-8 stapled, 72 pages, cover muffled of time (qq curls and tasks). First edition. Louis Abel Beffroy de Reigny, known as "le Cousin Jacques", born on November 6, 1757 in Laon and died on December 17, 1811 in Paris, was a French journalist, playwright and comic poet, nicknamed by his contemporaries "the comic poet of the Revolution". He studied at the Louis-le-Grand college in Paris, where he was a fellow student of Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins. First a teacher in several provincial towns, he got married in 1780 and gave up teaching to devote himself to journalism, burlesque poetry and theater. Between 1785 and 1791, he published a monthly newspaper, called in turn Les Lunes du Cousin Jacques, Le Courrier des planètes and Les Nouvelles Lunes du Cousin Jacques. Readers, who could subscribe in exchange for a gift in kind, such as a pair of velvet breeches, found stories, satires, songs, poems, playlets, mood bills and critical articles. The lunar allegory allows the author to situate in a utopian place his observations on the political and social transformations of his time. Also, being on the scene of the storming of the Bastille in 1789, he collected the testimonies of the participants; his text was read the same day in public at the town hall and printed shortly after. But when he publishes in 1793 The Constitution of the Moon, the contrast between this "political and moral dream" and the reality of the surrounding terror is such that the revolutionary authorities have him imprisoned. No doubt he owes it to the protection of his brother, Louis Étienne Beffroy, prosecutor of Laon and deputy to the Convention, to be soon released. In the theater, his greatest success is Nicodème dans la lune, ou la Révolution pacifique, a folly in prose and in 3 acts, mixed with ariettes and vaudevilles, first performed in November 1790. Two villagers, Frérot and Lolotte, lament the tyranny that prevails under the lunar government, when an air traveler, Nicodème, appears and praises to the Emperor of the Moon the benefits of the revolution that has just taken place in the distant country of France. The play was performed without interruption until April 1792, and then revived in 1797. Another of his plays, Le Club des bonnes-gens, which premiered in 1791, was also a great popular success. The author, however, did not renew himself and the whimsical comedies he continued to produce were torpedoed by the critics and eventually tired of the public.
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