Réflexions politiques sur la nouvelle constitution qui se prépare en France, adressées à la République: Par le citoyen ROBERT MERRY, Anglais, auteur d’un poème intitulé, Le laurier de la liberté; et d’une Ode sur l’anniversaire du 14 Juillet etc. etc.
Authors of source text
Contributions
- Anonymous (Nicholas Madgett)
- translator
- De l'imprimerie de J. Reyner (Jean-Louis-Antoine Reynier)
- publisher
Related resources
- is translation of
- A short treatise in English on the nature of free government has translation
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Notes
Never published in English but directly translated to French. Whereabouts of source-text unknown. Merry's obituary in the Monthly Magazine noted, "a short treatise in English, on the nature of Free government...translated into French by Mr. Madget".
Composed soon after the declaration of the French Republic in September 1792, Merry's 19-page pamphlet conveyed his own proposals for France's new constitution. In it, he called for popular participation at every level of the political process, recommended a role for primary assembles in confirming laws, and argued that the French experiment was a necessary step for liberating all the enslaved peoples of Europe, especially the British. Promoting classical republican virtue over commercial republicanism, it mocked the British template as an example of false representation, corruption and economic decline, contrasting it unfavourably to France as a beacon of liberty.
See Jon Mee in Print, Publicity and Radicalism in the 1790s (2016), p.122; and Rachel Rogers, Vectors of Revolution: The British Radical Community in Early Republican Paris, 1792-1794 (PhD, Université Toulouse le Mirail, 2012, via HAL), pp.154, 238 & 245ff.