Bastille Day is today (Fête nationale)
Million of books were lost--a sudden, cataclysmic violence against the records
During the French revolution close to 12 million texts and documents were confiscated from the Old Regime’s private libraries.1
In Paris the Storming of the Bastille took place on July 14, 1789.2 The governor was seized and killed, his head was carried through the streets on a pike. The end of the Ancien Régime (old rule) in France moved quickly.3
The National Constituent Assembly declared the end of feudalism August 4, 1789.4
The State declared that all Church property in France belonged to the nation, confiscations were ordered and many Church properties were sold at public auction. This was millions of books and manuscripts. 5
The dismantlement and destruction of the Old Regime’s private libraries included the libraries of:
the aristocracy including the Royal Library,
the Clergy including monasteries and churches,
universities,
scientific and literary circles,
trade and other professional guilds.
In 1791, the Committee of Public Instruction, overseeing the dismantlement ordered all districts to seize the land, edifices, furniture, scientific instruments, art collections, and libraries belonging to religious establishments.6
Mobs burst into the monastery, cathedral, parish church, castle, or palace, dragged the manuscripts out of the armoires where they had been stored for centuries, piled them in a mound in a public place, and lit the patrimony of the nation on fire. ..…By burning genealogies, cartularies, title papers, and registers, revolutionary officials and mobs of local citizens dispossessed the nobility and removed legal cases against the actual inhabitants of the land, while simultaneously destroying some of the richest sources for the political, social, and economic histories of medieval France. 7
All belongings that could be transported had to be shipped into storehouses to be sorted, inventoried, and catalogued. Many items were stolen in the process and resold by booksellers.
However, Versailles was saved for the people.
The end of the ancien régime made the management and transmission of the past urgent. Pioneering legislation reclaimed the treasures of the church, the crown and the nobility as the birth right of a free and sovereign people. Artifacts that expressed a devotional or dynastic purpose were stripped of former meanings and converted into documents of the national saga. The French Revolution created a set of new tools for evaluating, classifying, inventorying and displaying works of art. It gave rise to the modern museum.8
One year after the fall of the monarchy, the Louvre, the former residence of the king was opened as the Muséum National (Sept. 1793). The Archives Nationales was created in 1794, where the organisation of documents reproduced the division between old and new. The State was now the custodian of the ancien régime, but had also consigned it to history.9
Grégoire, Henri. (1977). “Rapport sur la bibliographie.” Œuvres de l’abbé Grégoire. Ed. Albert Soboul, vol. 2. Paris: KTO Press/EDHIS, 1977. 199–213; Grégoire, Henri.“ (1977). Rapport sur les destructions opérées par le vandalisme, et sur les moyens de le réprimer.” Œuvres de l’abbé Grégoire; Carl Lokke. “Archives and the French Revolution.” The American Archivist 31:1 (January 1968): 23-31.
The storming was a flash point that came about after a series of events that were precipitated by France’s debts. In May 1789 Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General for the first time in over 150 years; by June the Estates-General had evolved into a National Assembly to write a new constitution; rumors that Louis would shut down the Assembly caused protest in the streets and the Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789. Of course this is very complicated and hundreds of books have been written about these events, but I’m focusing on the loss of books & manuscripts— and the shift of these resources to the public.
Elster, Jon. 2020. France before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime. Princeton University Press.
Stewart, John Hall, ed. (1951). A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution. New York: Macmillan.
Mazuet, Alix. "The French Revolution and the Dismantlement of the Old Regime’s Private Libraries." Pacific Coast Philology 52, no. 2 (2017): 255-73.
Ibid.
Lecaque, Thomas (2019). Archives Lost: The French Revolution and the Destruction of Medieval French Manuscripts. (April 29).
Stammers, Tom (2019). “The Homeless Heritage of the French Revolution, c.1789-1889.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 5 (May 2019): 478–90.
Ibid.