Michel Chevalier LETTRES sur L'Amerique du Nord - 1838 Color USA Folding Map
TITLE: Lettres sur l'Amerique du Nord : par Michel Chevalier, avec une carte des Etats-Unis d'Amerique. Troisieme edition revue, corrigee, augmentee de plusieurs chapitres et d'une table raisonnee des matieres.
AUTHOR: Michel Chevalier
PUBLISHER: C. Gosselin et cie, Paris
DATE: 1838 Third Edition
DESCRIPTION: 2 v. 22 cm. 2 vol. xvi, 439 p., [1] Folding map, ; 535-[1] p.
CONDITION NOTES: VERY GOOD Corners bumped and some rubbing to the marbled boards. Dampstaining with a corner tideline up to page 30, vol.1 only. Scattered spotting elsewhere. Full caps, excellent page and cover attachment. Map is bright and properly folded.
BINDING: Period black polished calf over marbled boards.
Michel Chevalier (13 January 1806 – 18 November 1879) was a French engineer, statesman, economist and free market liberal.
.
In 1830, after the July Revolution, he became a Saint-Simonian, and edited their paper Le Globe. The paper was banned in 1832, when the "Simonian sect" was found to be prejudicial to the social order, and Chevalier, as its editor, was sentenced to six months imprisonment.
.
After his release, Minister of the Interior Adolphe Thiers sent him on a mission to the United States and Mexico, to observe the state of industrial and financial affairs in the Americas. In Mexico he exchanged ideas with the mineralogist and politician Andrés Manuel del Río. It was during this trip that he also developed the idea that the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking parts of the Americas shared a cultural or racial affinity with all the European peoples with a Romance culture. Chevalier postulated that this part of the Americas were inhabited by people of a "Latin race," which could be a natural ally of "Latin Europe" in its struggle with "Teutonic Europe," "Anglo-Saxon America" and "Slavic Europe."[1] The idea was later taken up by French and Latin American intellectuals and political leaders of the mid and late nineteenth century, who no longer looked to Spain or Portugal as cultural models, but rather to France, and who coined the term "Latin America."
The present volume Lettres sur l'Amerique du Nord is the third edition his popular travels. The map is worthy of note as it shows the extent of canals and roads built to facilitate trade throughout the United States of 1830.
About the same time as this edition, Des intérèts matériels en France (1837), after which his career took off. At age 35, he was appointed professor of political economy at the Collège de France. He was elected a député for the département of Aveyron in 1845, an appointment of Senator followed in 1860. In 1859, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Together with Richard Cobden and John Bright he prepared the free trade agreement of 1860 between the United Kingdom and France, which is still called Cobden-Chevalier Treaty.
