Traité du contrat de vente & Traité des retraits - POTHIER - 1781

PARIS, Debure l'ainé/Orléans, Vve rousseau-Montaut - 1781 –

Complete of the 3 volumes in 2 volumes in-12 - Full marbled brown calf (slightly rubbed corners and small lack of leather and tired hinge) - Title piece in red morocco - Back with 5 nerves decorated with florets, nerves highlighted with golden wheels - Golden casters on the cups - all red slices. xvi,480pp, vi- (1ff) - 208pp.; xi-558 pp.

R.J. Pothier wasborn on January 9, 1699 in Orléans, second city of the royal domain and seat of the teaching of law.

Renouncing his religious vocation on the prayers of his mother, he remained faithful to the family tradition by entering the judiciary: he succeeded his father and grandfather as councillor of the presidium of Orleans. On the death of Prévost de la Jannès, he obtained the chair of royal professor of French law at the always prestigious University of Orleans, refusing the post of professor of law in Paris offered to him by the Chancellor of Aguesseau. A man of the eighteenth century, he shared little with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, being, like his city of which he was alderman from 1746 to 1749, a follower of Jansenist rigor, pious and conservative.

His published work is considerable: encouraged by d'Aguesseau, he systematically studies Roman law and methodically presents the collections, hitherto scattered, in his Pandectes of Justinian, put in a new order of 1748; he was also interested in French civil law by comparing the written rights of langue d'oc to the customs of the langue d'oïl in his Commentaire de la coutume d'Orléans in 1740, published with his colleagues at Orléans Prévost de la Jannès et Jousse.

Then he developed his theories on civil law based on Christian morality by publishing a series of about twenty treatises devoted to the various matters of law of his time : his Traité des obligations of 1761 condemned the use of the question, noting that only the "answers to pain", the contract of sale, the contract of lease, the partnership contract, the fiefs, the community, the donations between husband and wife, the successions. Its impressive encyclopedic culture testifies to the extent of its sources and readings.

The influence of his works sometimes preceded the spread of the Civil Code in Napoleonic Europe, from Italy to Poland, and then in the Iberian Peninsula as his works were translated. Pothier is the vector of the influence of French law from Japan to Argentina through the countries of Common Law where his Treaty of Obligations benefits from several reeditions, which earned Pothier, who died in Orleans on March 2, 1772, to be the only Frenchman ruled at the Capitol.