Benjamin Franklin Papers

To Benjamin Franklin from Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, 27 February 1784

From Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil

ALS: American Philosophical Society

Paris le 27e. fevrier 1784.

Monsieur

Permettez moi de me rapeller au Souvenir de votre excellence en lui envoyant un mémoire sur une matiere très importante, et qui ne vous est point étrangere.9

De Monville imprimeur de l’accademie française1 remettra sur ma lettre, aux ordres de Votre Excellence la quantité d’exemplaires qu’elle voudra envoyer en Amerique. Je suis avec un profond respect Monsieur, de votre Excellence Le très humble & très obéissant serviteur

Hilliard D’auberteuil

P.S. Cette matiere sera plus profondément discutée dans d’autres mémoires qui suivront.

D

Notation: Hillard d’Aubreteuil 27e Fev. 1784

[Note numbering follows the Franklin Papers source.]

9The work that Hilliard enclosed remains a mystery. We wonder whether it could have been his Nouveau compte rendu, ou tableau historique des finances d’Angleterre, depuis le regne de Guillaume III, jusqu’en 1784 (London [i.e., Paris], 1784), an 80-page booklet printed by Couturier, quai des Augustins. It was advertised to the public in the Jour. de Paris on June 9, 1784. BF’s copy is at the Hist. Soc. of Pa.

Hilliard applied for permission to publish this work in August, 1783, during a time when Controller General Calonne was curtailing publications about government taxes and finances. No response has been located. Hilliard then appended it to the two volumes he had written of Histoire de l’administration de Lord North …, which he sought permission to publish in December, 1783. (That work was based, in part, on a book that BF had lent him: XXXVIII, 20.) Histoire de l’administration de Lord North was prohibited in January, 1784, but was finally allowed on March 1, three days after Hilliard wrote the present letter: Joël Félix, Finances et politique au siècle des Lumières: le ministère L’Averdy, 1763–1768 (Paris, 1999), pp. 28–9. The author declared it the first complete, accurate history of “la Guerre de l’Amérique” (pp. ix–x). The Nouveau compte rendu, ou tableau historique des finances d’Angleterre appeared at the end of the work with its own title page and pagination, as in the separate publication.

1Antoine Guénard de Monville (or Demonville) had been the printer of the Académie française since 1774: Paul Delalain, Les Libraires & imprimeurs de l’Académie française de 1634 à 1793: notices biographiques (Paris, 1907), pp. 102–6. Hilliard was not a member of the academy, and to our knowledge, Guénard de Monville did not print any of his works.

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