3. Back to Didier
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Guizot had returned to France in July 1849. As Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte made his way towards the Empire, he came to realise that a return to active politics was scarcely conceivable. From then on, he devoted himself chiefly to intellectual work during the last quarter of his life, and began by renewing ties with Pierre-Paul Didier, who had, after all, behaved well towards him for many years without always being repaid in kind. Relations between them were no doubt never trusting, Guizot making a point of dealing with him through his former chief of staff, since then his factotum as well as a friend of the family, Auguste Génie, whose tact did not match his devotion. Didier found it painful to have to beg for a personal letter, or, far more rarely, a meeting with his author. Nevertheless, at 63, the indefatigable Guizot was determined to complete the projects under way and to embark on new ones.
Such was the purpose of the agreement signed with Didier on 10 July 1850, covering no fewer than six works at once, some already partly published, others yet to be written. The first listed was a historical study of Monk, subtitled “Fall of the Republic and Restoration of the Monarchy in England, in 1660”. This 400-page book, intended in Didier’s mind to complete the Histoire de la révolution d’Angleterre, which, as we shall see, he was quite determined to recover, was the developed and enlarged version of an article published in 1837 in the Revue française. The situation in which France found itself in 1850 gave this work an obvious topicality, which the author, in a preface written as early as October, made no attempt to conceal: would Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte remain president of a French Republic, or would he restore the Empire{{1}}[[1]]”In 1837, it [this study] had a purely historical interest; obviously, it has another today.”[[1]]? The publisher therefore paid the considerable sum of 15,000 francs for the literary property of this book, which was moreover reissued seven times in various formats up to 1874. In the same move, but for only 6,000 francs, Didier acquired a volume of Études biographiques sur la révolution d’Angleterre, made up of the notices, revised and enriched, written for the collection of Mémoires relatifs à la révolution d’Angleterre published in 1823-1825, and supplemented by others. Another revival was the course in modern history of 1820-1822, published at the time as it was delivered, without the professor’s corrections, by the Journal des cours publics, and bought back by Didier to make two volumes of a Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif en Europe, revised and completed by Guizot, for 10,000 francs. The two volumes did indeed appear at the end of 1851, though not without dispute, for the publisher of Guizot’s Essais sur l’histoire de France – first Jean-Louis Brière in 1823, then, from 1842, Gervais Charpentier in his famous octodecimo series at 3 francs 50 – claimed that the new edition of the 1820-1822 course improperly reused material from the Essais, to the point of causing confusion between the two works. Guizot defended himself vigorously, arguing that in that case “one would have to maintain that a writer may neither treat certain parts of the same subject twice, in different works, nor himself quote, in one of his works, a few passages of what he has written in another; which is obviously untenable{{2}}[[2]]Unpublished note drafted in a first version on 16 August 1851, and in a second, more thorough one on 3 September, certainly intended for Didier. In his preface dated May, Guizot points out that he had used the Essais sur l’histoire de France in revising his course. The Essais were taken over by Didier in 1857, in the 1823 text, and constantly reissued until 1884.[[2]].” A lawsuit ensued between Brière and Didier, which the latter won, though not without losses and costs. Article 5 of the agreement also stipulated that “various pieces already published in certain anthologies and in certain collections” (a list follows), excluding any political work, would form the material for “four octavo volumes of at least five hundred pages”, each of which could be sold separately under its own title, the whole being paid 14,000 francs, a substantial sum for texts already published. We shall have done with this sprawling contract after mentioning the project, valued at 15,000 francs, for “an entirely unpublished work entitled Ce que j’ai cherché pour mon pays, a fragment of personal memoirs, forming an independent volume of 300 pages, but which might also serve as an introduction to a Collection des discours prononcés par M. Guizot devant les Chambres, avant le 24 février 1848, accompanied by introductions, linking passages and notes, which Didier undertook to publish in four volumes. This article 2 was to be cancelled in 1861, and article 5 took effect only in part, with the publication in 1852 of a single volume of Méditations et études morales.