United States or Slovakia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Literary Majorats: An Examination of a Bill having for its object the Creation of a Perpetual Monopoly for the Benefit of Authors, Inventors, and Artists;" 2. "The Federative Principle and the Necessity of Re-establishing the Revolutionary party;" 3. "The Sworn Democrats and the Refractories;" 4. "Whether the Treaties of 1815 have ceased to exist? Acts of the Future Congress."
"Before the Revolution of 1789, there had been a great accumulation of the landed property of the country, and, indeed, of all its property, by means of laws of entail, majorats, and other legal contrivances, in the hands of the privileged classes; chiefly in those of the nobility and the clergy.
Owing to the lack of workmen, the increase of imposts, and the prejudice against the mechanic arts, industry was being ruined; while the increased depopulation of the realm, the mainmort of ecclesiastical lands, the majorats of the nobility and the privileges of the Mesta, brought agriculture rapidly into decay.
Human nature is singularly homogeneous on the subject of money; and younger-son nature, in the lands of majorats and entails, enjoys a liveliness of longing on the subject, that is quite as conspicuous as the rapacity of the veriest plebeian who ever picked a pocket.
"There are authors," he says, "who crave the privileges of authors, and who for that purpose point out the power of the melodrama. They speak of the niece of Corneille, begging at the door of a theatre which the works of her uncle had enriched.... To satisfy the avarice of literary people, it would be necessary to create literary majorats, and make a whole code of exceptions."
About the same time, he wrote at Brussels, in "L'Office de Publicite," some remarkable articles on the question of literary property, which was discussed at a congress held in Belgium, These articles must not be confounded with "Literary Majorats," a more complete work on the same subject, which was published in 1863, soon after his return to France.
Word Of The Day