GROTIUS, Hugo.

Le droit de la guerre et de la paix . . . Nouvelle traduction, par Jean Barbeyrac, professeur en droit à Groningue, & membre de la Societé roiale des Sciences à Berlin. Avec les notes de l?auteur même, qui n?avoient point encore paru en françois; & de nouvelles notes du traducteur.

      Amsterdam, Pierre de Coup, 1724. - 2 vols, 4to (255 x 195 mm), pp. [vi], xliii, [iii], 518; 519?1001, [39], with a portrait of Grotius; allegorical engraving at head of dedication; titles printed in red and black; some browning; contemporary calf, joints cracking but strong; small stamp of Dr Josef v. Schey on titles and stamped in gilt on front covers, ?Mr. Le Baron de Reischach? (eighteenth-century: this family was active in Austrian government and diplomacy). First edition of one of the most influential translations of Grotius?s De iure belli ac pacis. Barbeyrac, its editor and translator, had already published an edition in the original Latin: ?for many eighteenth-century readers the definitive version of the book had appeared in 1720, when Jean Barbeyrac issued a new edition, followed by a French translation in 1724 with elaborate notes. Barbeyrac was a leading figure in the French Protestant diaspora, the network of scholars whose families had been driven out of France following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. He worked tirelessly to put his own version of modern natural law before the European public, and his editions of Grotius built on the success of a similarly elaborate edition of Samuel Pufendorf?s De iure naturae et gentium in 1706. The notes to these editions keyed their texts into all the relevant discussions of natural law from antiquity down to the 1720s, and the two works together quickly became the equivalent of an encyclopedia of moral and political thought for Enlightenment Europe. The French version of De iure belli ac pacis was reprinted steadily through the middle years of the century, and it found an audience beyond the French-speaking polite world in an English translation of 1738? (Tuck, ed., Rights of war I pp. x?xi).Meulen & Diermanse 654.