CAMPANELLA, Tommasso. François VILLEGARDELLE, translator. ~ La Cité du soleil, ou Idée d’une république philosophique... traduite du Latin. Paris: [Versailles: Michel Fossone for] Alphone Levavasseur, 1840.
Small 8vo (130 × 78 mm), pp. 171, [1], complete with half-title. Light spotting. Contemporary green quarter calf, mottled paper covered sides, old paper shelf label. Slightly rubbed and soiled, but a very good copy.
First edition in French of La città del sole, the seventeenth-century utopian work in which Campanella described a just society where goods, women and children are held in common and work is evenly distributed. It was understandably of great interest to early socialist and communist thinkers, though did not appear in French until this translation by the French Fourierist, François Villegardelle, who also translated More’s Utopia. Despite its influence on emergent French socialism, this is now a rare book. WorldCat locates copies at: International Labour Office (DC), MacMaster and Stanford only outside continental Europe. LibraryHub locates copies at BL and London Library.