Outlawed, burned, and banned - Voltaire’s debauched satire of Joan of Arc and other saints.
 
La Pucelle d'Orleans, poëme en vingt-un chants(The Maid of Orleans, A Poem in Twenty-one Cantos)
Voltaire
Paris, 1780
 
Octavo.  Two parts in one volume.  Engraved frontispiece and 21 vignettes by Duplessis-Bertaux.  One of the rare large paper copies.  Bound in 19th century full red morocco and housed in a decorative slipcase by the master binders, Chambolle-Duru.  Raised bands, gilt title with gilt dentelles and edges.  Marbled endpapers. Beautiful woodcut tailpieces at the end of each canto.  A gorgeous, wide margined copy.  Fine.
 
An unauthorized version was first printed in 1755.  The official condemnation of the Church in 1767 did not stop the book from being published throughout the rest of the 18th century.
 
“What Voltaire satirized in La Pucelle was not [simply] the historic figure of Joan, but the legends that had grown up about her and the institutions that supported them.  He took delight in disbelief of the heroine’s legendary virginity, and exploited the satiric possibilities of this along with other human foibles, such as hypocrisy, greed, superstition, and stupidity.
 
Voltaire’s main thrust of the parody is the satire of the saints – showing them as mythologized characters of their own unhistoric legends, resembling the pagan deities of classical epics who enjoy their immortality with only slightly more power than ordinary mortals, while remaining subject to all the human weaknesses.  They lack absolute power and must, therefore, like courtiers, resort to the all too human deceptions of flattery, cunning, and craftiness to achieve their goals.”
 
Ref: British Museum, Chu, Heimann, Nour-Elsayed, Severin