A FEMALE ST. SIMONIAN, MODELED ON THE LIFE OF CLAIRE DÉMAR. Large 8vo. [22 x 13.8 cm]. VIII pp, 487 pp, (1). Bound in contemporary half calf over speckled boards; gilt title on spine. Three different printed tickets of contemporary booksellers/circulating libraries in Romorantin (Loire): De Cros on half-title; Mr. Becci on verso of title; and Gustave Blanchet on spine. A wonderfully fresh and unsophisticated copy, but lacking the woodcut frontispiece if it was ever bound in. Very rare sole edition of this remarkable novel based on the life of the feminist, journalist, and militant Saint-Simonian Claire Démar (1799–1833). On the night of August 3rd, 1833, Démar committed suicide alongside her lover Perret Desessart; we suspect that this occurred shortly after the present work was sent to the press by the author, Josephine Lebassu, in that same year. Lebassu’s heroine - Claire Énard – is a young girl from a middle-class background who delights in reading Romantic fiction and dreams of a better world. She is gradually seduced by the Saint-Simonians and in particular by the apostle Reinal; however, Lebassu’s attitude towards the sect is in fact rather even-handed, recognizing value in their ideals of the ‘nobility of the soul’ and the emancipation of women. In terms of religion, the followers of Enfantin are seen as thoroughly heretical – and at the moment of Claire’s conversion, the heavens thunder as Reinal demands that she remove the cross from her neck to complete the ceremony (pp. 269-273). Unlike the (subsequent?) suicide of her namesake, Claire Énard survives her experiences after participating unwillingly in the death of Reinal the priest. Some copies contain a woodcut “frontispiece”, also described as a loose leaf bound in [“chine volant”] – lacking in this copy. COPAC shows no UK copies; OCLC shows just a handful of copies worldwide, with US copies at Stanford and Wisconson only. We can find no trace of the present work in Anglo-American auction records. * Walch, J. Bibliographie de Saint-Simon, 900; and cf Serge Zenkine, “L'Utopie religieuse des Saint-Simoniens: le Sémiotique et le Sacré”, pp. 33-60 in Régnier (ed.), Études Saint-Simoniennes (2002).