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Sur la liberté de la presse, imité de l'Anglois de Milton. Par le Comte de Mirabeau

Authors of source text

John Milton

Contributions

Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau
translator
uncertainty Anonymous (Louis-Laurent-Edme Le Jay)
publisher

Related resources

is translation of
Areopagitica. A speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of unlicens'd printing, to the parlament of England has translation
has related to
Sur Milton et ses ouvrages translation has other edition
has other edition
Sur la liberté de la presse, imité de l'Anglois, de Milton. Par Mirabeau l’aîné translation
has paratext
Sur la liberté de la presse, imité de l'Anglois de Milton. Par le Comte de Mirabeau paratext

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Notes

Mirabeau’s translation of Milton’s text (pp.9-55 out of 66 pages) is embedded within a framing preface and postface, in which he explains his reasons for translation and makes an appeal for press freedom in France. He wants the King to reverse a royal decree suppressing an important contribution to the debate over the role of the forthcoming States-General – 'Précis des procès-verbaux des administrations provinciales depuis 1779 jusqu’en 1788' (1788, Strasbourg: Levrault) – and to guarantee the freedom of the press. This decree contravened an earlier edict from 5 July 1788, granting de facto press freedom to all “the instructed people” of the kingdom”, who had been invited to contribute their thoughts on the matter.

The reason for this sudden volte-face? The original decree had asked the provincial assemblies to inform the King separately on how the States-General – which had last convened 175 years earlier in 1614 – should meet and what they should discuss. By publishing the various contributions in a single volume, the Strasbourg publisher was providing a de facto coherence to these claims as demands from the whole nation. Mirabeau hoped to weaponize his translation of Milton as a warning to the King against the bad faith of his Ministers and to galvanize public opinion on his side.

Mirabeau’s interest in British models and ideas owed much to his links with the ‘Bowood circle’ – the group of writers and Whig politicians gathered around the former Prime Minister, Lord Shelburne (later the marquess of Lansdowne) from the 1780s onwards. During his stay in England (1784-85), Mirabeau became acquainted with many of these figures, including Benjamin Vaughan and Dr Richard Price, via a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin [another source suggests his introduction came via Gilbert Eliot, the 1st Earl of Minto, whom he knew from the pension militaire in Paris]. Around the same time, his Genevan friends introduced him to Samuel Romilly, who probably introduced him to Milton’s prose writings. Members of this circle believed that the French and British could learn much from each other, and greatly assisted Mirabeau in his attempts to introduce British constitutional practices into France.

See Rachel Hammersley, 'The English Republican Tradition & 18th Century France' (2010, MUP), pp.174-84; and Olivier Lutaud, ‘Des Révolutions d’Angleterre: La Révolution française. L’exemple de la liberté de presse, ou comment Milton “ouvrit” les etats généraux’ (1986, Colloque Internationale sur la Révolution française).