£1,100.00
Vicat, Pierre. Traité du droit naturel, & de l’application de ses principes au droit civil et au droit des gens. A Lausanne: Chez la Société Typographique; et à Yverdon, Chez la Société Litt. et Typogr., 1777.
Posthumous edition.
Four volumes.
Contemporary vellum, red morocco spine labels, later paper shelf numbers.
Some surface marking and wear, internally clean with institutional stamps.
Year: 1777
Edition: Second Edition, revised and expanded.
Publisher: Chez la Société Typographique, Lausanne
A substantial Swiss Enlightenment treatment of natural law, issued in Lausanne in 1777 and published posthumously from the papers of the jurist Pierre Vicat. The work attempts a systematic grounding of civil law and the law of nations upon universal moral principles, reflecting the intense eighteenth-century effort to rationalise authority, governance, and justice.
The set remains in its period bindings and carries the signs of long library preservation, including shelf labels and institutional markings. Such custodial histories, while unromantic, have often ensured completeness and stability of survival.
An imposing and increasingly uncommon survival of francophone legal philosophy from the later Enlightenment.
Natural law theory lay at the centre of eighteenth-century debates on sovereignty, rights, and international order. Vicat’s synthesis forms part of the intellectual current that fed directly into later revolutionary and constitutional thinking. Multi-volume survivals from Swiss presses of this period are steadily becoming less available on the market.
