Navy calf spine with gilt title. Blue marbled boards.

• We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available

• Note: This book carries a £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list

FIRST EDITION. As the photographs show this book is in very good condition but with some signs of foxing which does not detract from its readability. See also the ‘State of the French Republic’ which also appeared the same year.

Goldsmith, c.1763-1846, was a political writer, journalist and publisher, and an ‘ardent sympathiser with the French Revolution’. Crimes of Cabinet was Goldsmith’s response to perceived aggression by Pitt’s government, and the intention to enter into a conflict with Napoleon’s France. Goldsmith warns, ‘I will a tale unfold that I think will in some measure open the eyes of Britons, and contribute to a change of men and measures, which may still save the nation, and may lead it from the precipice on which it madly sports.’. Mindful of the repercussions of producing such a damning publication, Goldsmith went to France with the intention of setting up an English language publication, and eventually ended up working for Napoleon. He returned to England some years later, was immediately placed under arrest, but his sympathies for Napoleon and the Revolution having cooled, was ultimately allowed to assimilate back into English society.

Lewis Goldsmith (c. 1763 – 6 January 1846) was an Anglo-French publicist.

Allied with Napoleon: In 1801, Goldsmith published The Crimes of Cabinets, or a Review of the Plans and Aggressions for Annihilating the Liberties of France and the Dismemberment of her Territories, an attack on the military policy of Pitt. Soon afterward, in 1802, he moved from London to Paris. There Talleyrand introduced him to Napoleon. With Napoleon’s assistance, Goldsmith established the Argus, a biweekly publication in English reviewing English affairs from a French point of view.

In 1803, according to Goldsmith’s own account, he was entrusted with a mission to obtain from the Comte de Provence, the head of the French royal family and subsequent King Louis XVIII, a renunciation of his claim to the throne of France in return for the throne of Poland. The offer was declined. Goldsmith says he then received instructions to kidnap Louis, or to kill him if he resisted. Instead, Goldsmith revealed the plot. Until 1807, however, when his Republican sympathies began to wane, Goldsmith continued to undertake secret service missions on behalf of Napoleon.

Goldsmith’s hand has been seen in the Revolutionary Plutarch of 1804–05, an émigré work edited in London, and with a title harking back to the British Plutarch of Thomas Mortimer. That would imply that Goldsmith was by then already playing a double game.

Anti-Napoleon: Goldsmith returned to England in 1809. At first he was arrested and imprisoned, but soon was released and established himself as a notary in London. By 1811 he had become strongly anti-republican, founding the Anti-Gallican Monitor and Anti-Corsican Chronicle (subsequently known as the British Monitor) through which he now denounced the French Revolution. He proposed that a price be put on Napoleon’s head by public subscription, but found himself condemned by the British government. In 1810 he published Secret History of the Cabinet of Bonaparte and Recueil des manifestes, proclamations, discours, etc. de Napoleon Buonaparte (Collection of the Decrees of Napoleon Bonaparte); and in 1812 he published a Secret History of Bonaparte’s Diplomacy. He claimed Napoleon then offered him 200,000 [francs?] to discontinue his attacks. In 1815, he published An Appeal to the Governments of Europe on the Necessity of Bringing Napoleon Bonaparte to a Public Trial.

Later life: In 1825, he moved back to Paris, publishing his Statistics of France a few years later. His only child, Georgiana, became the second wife of John Copley, 1st Baron Lyndhurst in 1837. He died ‘of paralysis’ after an illness lasting several months, in his home on the Rue de la Paix, Paris, on 6 January 1846.