A Note on Ordering Early Editions of Jacques Necker’s De l’administration des finances de la France (1784)

Jacques Necker’s seminal work on the finances of France at the end of the Ancien Régime was the bestselling book on economic affairs in the eighteenth century. According to Carpenter (1975), this three-volume study was said to have sold 80,000 copies. With such a large number of printed copies, the task of ordering the editions is not an easy one for the bibliophile. A detailed bibliographical examination of the copy that belonged to the Russian Tsarina Maria Feodorovna (1759–1828), wife of Tsar Paul I, suggests that Carpenter’s ordering of the earliest editions may need to be reconsidered.