Maroon calf binding with black title plate, gilt banding and title on the spine.

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A lovely book in contemporary binding; De l’Imprimerie de Clousier, Paris, 1790, 2 ff., 186 pp. The minor fame of the poet Claude-Marie Guyétand (1748-1811) may have been a source of inspiration for Stendhal for the character of Julien Sorel; the life of Guyétand has in fact many points in common with that of the hero of The Red and the Black”.

Claude-Marie Guyétand , born in Septmoncel in 1748 and died in Paris in 1811, was a minor figure in the French literary world of the  late 18th in the shadow and continuity of the great minds of the time such as Voltaire , whom he met and to whom he paid homage in his most accomplished text Le Génie Vengé , a satirical poem published in 1780 and revised in 1790.

Having gone to Paris after secondary studies at the seminary, he lived through difficult years with various occupations and tried his hand at literature of ideas. In 1780 he published Le Génie Vengé which earned him some fame and became the secretary of the Marquis de Villette (1781-1793) who attempted a political career at the time of the Revolution by publishing for example La Protestation d’un serf du Mont-Jura . in 1789, where the influence of his secretary, the son of serfs from the Abbey of Saint-Claude, is easily seen, recalling that Voltaire himself had fought against this survival of serfdom in the countryside of the Haut-Jura.

In 1793, on the death of his employer, Claude-Marie Guyétand took a job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but having become incapacitated, he had to give it up in 1797 and only survived on half his salary. He continued to write texts that were not published and died in Paris in 1811 at the age of sixty-three.

Biography: Born in 1748 in Septmoncel , a village in the land of Saint-Claude in the Haut-Jura, to parents who were mortmains , he first studied at the college of the small town and then at the seminary of Besançon . He quickly gave up ecclesiastical training and, at the beginning of the 1770s, he left his Franche-Comté for Paris like his fellow student Jean-Nicolas Démeunier, future royal censor and senator, who was thinking of pursuing a career as a barrister there. Armed with a recommendation for Abbé Sabatier , the author of Three Centuries of French Literature , Claude Marie Guyétand visited this opponent of the philosophical party who advised him to write in this vein, but Guyétand did not bring himself to do so: he venerated Voltaire , whom he had seen at Ferney (“But I live at Ferney//The greatest man in history”, The Revenged Genius ) and who had taken the side of the mortmains of the abbey of Saint-Claude, the last serfs of the kingdom. On the contrary, from 1777/78 to 1780, he wrote a play in verse, Le Génie vengé , which took up with verve the defence of Voltaire and his “caustic laugh” and denounced the mediocre writers of the time: the publication of the text in 1780 met with a certain success and allowed him to come into contact with the literary milieu and to earn the support of the poet La Harpe while living from private mathematics lessons and then from a small job with a bookseller. In these times of revolutionary ferment, he liked to define himself as “the Serf of Mont-Jura”, writing: “I can prove from father to son, // Twelve hundred years of servitude”.

Thanks to his friends, he then became secretary to the Marquis de Villette (1781-1793): he helped him polish his texts and cured him of gambling. The mark of Claude Marie Guyétand is particularly recognizable in the evocations of Jura personalities such as the sculptor Joseph Rosset (1706-1786), also from Saint-Claude and still famous at the time for his ivory sculpture and the busts of Montesquieu and Voltaire, now in the Louvre, or that of Antide Janvier, the famous watchmaker. This is also the case in the Protestation of a Serf of Mont-Jura signed in 1789 by the former Marquis who was launching himself into politics by abandoning his particle.

In 1790, in the preface to his collection of poems, he himself evokes his first decades in Paris, which are reminiscent of the beginnings of Figaro  :

Always on board my galley,
For twenty years I have tacked
Between ease and misery,
Without form having bent
My inflexible character.
Before being a slender Author,
I was in turn Secretary,
And geometer and Tutor,
The Master Jacques of a Bookseller,
And the Factotum of a Lord.

When his protector died in 1793, he found himself without resources and was forced to accept a job in the offices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He only held this position until 1797 because the loss of the use of one leg forced him to stay at home and he only survived thanks to the generosity of Talleyrand who kept him on half pay. Claude Marie Guyétand died in Paris in 1811 at the age of sixty-three .

The biographical notice of the Michaud brothers in 1817 sums up the character as follows: “Known for the natural harshness of his character, he liked to take the nickname of ‘the Bear of the Jura’: he was however an honest man of severe probity and unalterable cheerfulness despite his difficult life”. He claimed his social origin and remained very attached to his native Jura which he evokes for example in these terms: “Like ancient fir trees, with evergreen branches//Percent on the Jura the snow of winters” in the Epistle to Mr. Palissot by an inhabitant of the Jura .

Artwork: The texts published by Claude Marie Guyétand – he wrote in verse – are few in number but their pre-revolutionary spirit gave them a certain echo. Testimony and example of the literary and ideological effervescence that reigned in the 18th, he sings thus:

“… this happy day
Which will see near the throne, in common offerings,
The Orders of the State mingle their fortunes;
And the people strengthen their rights, their liberty,
By the sacred bonds of fraternity:
Which will see, under the effort of Patriotic arms,
The tyrannical prisons of your viziers crumble;
The Noble tear up his feudal Code,
Be a man, and in his Serf embrace his equal.”

The Avenged Genius , v. 368-376

Claude Marie Guyétand began with committed texts by publishing in 1774 Examen raisonné du plan d’imposition économique ou L’Enthousiasme du citoyen but his two most remarkable pieces are Le Génie vengé (1780, revised in 1790) and Le Doute , dedicated to Antide Janvier his fellow countryman from Franche-Comté, a skilled mechanic and famous watchmaker. His Poésies diverses were published in Paris in 1790: the collection brings together various pieces in verse published in different periodicals.

He continued to write epigrams , anecdotes, fables ( L’avare agonisant , in 1784 5 ) and poems such as Les Noces de Rosine (or Bagatelle à Rosine ), published in Paris in 1794/1795, until 1796. His pen then dried up and only one Epistle to M. Palissot by a resident of the Jura in 1806 is known. According to Joseph-Marie Quérard (1796-1865) and his France littéraire ou Dictionnaire bibliographique 6 and the Michaud brothers, Guyétand composed in the last years of his life “a satire in verse on the human race and a play of nearly six hundred verses full of freshness on the navigation of the Escaut” but these texts presented to his admiring friends were not really finished and are lost.

Claude-Marie Guyétand had also worked on Éléments de mathématiques which was close to his heart and whose innovative approach he praised1 but this text, like others, has not reached us.

His small fame despite a limited work and his social career may have partly inspired the character of Julien Sorel . The career of Stendhal ‘s hero indeed offers many points of resemblance with that of the “Serf of Mont-Jura”, such as the popular social extraction claimed, the region of origin (Franche-Comté), the passage through the seminary of Besançon, the rise to Paris, the secretariat of a marquis and also the adhesion to the revolutionary ideal of change of social structures.