One for RARE book dealers, collectors: RARE, perhaps one of a kind. I can find nothing quite like this - not through rare book dealers, nothing online. Gallais's books, yes. But his own scroll? It would appear this is a single production, likely a personal piece created for him in his final weeks of life.. Jean-Pierre Gallais was a Royalist. He fought against The French Revolution, with words. I have, in my collection, 1, Oct. 1820, the wooden container with the original printed scroll, meters long, inside. It is fragile (the old paper) and so I caution its next owner to have great respect for this piece of history, and the story of which it speaks, from the mouth of Jean-Pierre Gallais, would-be Catholic Cardinal, had the events of 1789 not derailed him. Read on:
ATTN: Museum of the History of Paris - this might belong with you.
Born in 1756. Jean-Pierre Gallais belonged to a family of surgeons and apothecaries established in Doué for a very long time. He was born in Doué on January 18, 1756 and baptized the next day.
He studied at the town college, then entered, at the age of thirteen, at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Nicolas, in Angers, as a candidate. He made his vows there in 1777, and was ordained a priest in 1779, in consideration of his talents and by virtue of an age exemption granted to him by the Pope.
He was then admitted to the abbey of Saint-Vincent du Mans, where the Revolution found him in 1789. Without it, he would have reached the highest ranks in the Congregation of Saint-Maur.
From the beginning of the revolutionary period, he published a satirical pamphlet concerning the elections of the clergy to the States-General. When it came to the abolition of religious orders, he called in a memoir which made some noise, the preservation of these orders, particularly that of Saint-Benoît.
Nevertheless, after the decree of February 13, 1790 which abolished the principle of religious congregations, he left orders and resumed his freedom. He settled in Paris, threw himself into the fray and militated in the royalist and Catholic ranks.
He wrote several pamphlets in which he fiercely criticized new ideas and, until August 1792, edited the General Journal of Abbé Fontenay. Three days before the execution of Louis XVI, he courageously launched his Appeal to posterity, which immediately had three editions; the bookseller who sold it, Weber, was arrested a few days later and subsequently guillotined. Appointed from then on for prosecution, he was arrested and detained at the Force prison, and only escaped the guillotine by miracle.
Released after 9 Thermidor, he wrote several small works noted against the revolution. Employed in the editorial staff of the Quotidienne, he founded, with Langlois, Le Censeur des Journaux, a newspaper which had great success at the start of the Directory, and which attacked all excesses.
On 18 Fructidor, Year V, he was excluded by law; his presses were broken, his house sacked, and owed its salvation only to flight. Hidden in Paris, he nevertheless published a work: Le 18 Fructidor, ses causes and effects, in which he dared to claim the monarchy for France, and the return of the Bourbons to the throne.
When the Directory fell, he resumed the fight, launching newspapers under various names which were no longer as successful. Then, from 1800 to 1811, he was in charge of the Journal de Paris, one of the most important sheets of this period.
Around 1800 he had married and had been appointed professor of eloquence and philosophy at the Academy of Legislation.
A monarchist, he had accepted the Napoleonic regime only reluctantly; also, at the fall of the Emperor, he published his Histoire du 18 Brumaire et de Bonaparte in five parts.
At the Restoration, Jean-Pierre Gallais obtained, in 1815, to be the literary correspondent of the Emperor of Russia, and he was charged around this time, by Wellington, the victor of Waterloo, with the education of his nephew, the Earl of Lemnox.
In 1817, he published Les moeurs et characters du XIXe siècle, and his Histoire de France from the death of Louis XVI to the treaty of November 29, 1815.
He died in Paris on October 26, 1820, carried away by a devastating stroke, aged 64.
