2. 2
I have often said that just as the French revolution, for instance, understood itself
through antiquity, I think our time can be understood through
the French revolution. It is quite a natural process to
use other times to understand your own time.
â Ian Hamilton Finlay
3. 3
INTRODUCTION
The period of the French Revolution is perhaps one of the most difficult for the
bibliographer. The very nature of revolution â with its tumult, chaos, destruction and
then proliferation through a cacophony of ideas and voices, spurred on by a newâ
found national zeal â engenders a legion of nascent and often fleeting presses and
publications which make the work of the bibliographer practically impossible to
perfect.
What remains after the blood is spilt, the ink is dried and the presses cease is a
jumble of dates, ideas, propaganda and paper. Ephemeral by design, many of the
publications from the period survive in the form of periodicals, newspapers,
broadsides, images and pamphlets. To compound the confusion, there remains a
large body of anonymous work accompanied by an equally impressive body of
fictitious work signed with pseudonyms and printed by imaginary presses.
Private (and later national) collections were created by individuals who recognized
the value of the printing of their time and preserved as much of it as they could for
future generations. These persist as valuable sources for the contemporary scholar.
Many of these individuals have become iconic and include such names as
Talleyrand, Deroche and Nadaillac. These collections have been dispersed and reâ
gathered over the centuries, providing a fascinating paper trail in auction catalogs â
many of which remain as some of the most important reference sources for the
period. There have also been several hardy individuals who have attempted period
bibliographies; their work is considerable and immensely important to scholarship,
but forcibly incomplete.
What follows is a listing of the most significant of these reference and bibliographic
sources. They have been divided into sections of: general reference, bibliographies,
catalogs, and finally, other sources. This list is not complete but provides a solid
foundation for the scholar. There are also several important sources which have not
been annotated due to their scarcity and the inability of the author to acquire a copy
either online or in print. These have been included under the heading Êčother sourcesÊč
along with other more contextual and historical works.
14. 14
publications and their place in relation to their authors and the Revolution as a
whole and will be cited in many other subsequent bibliographies and catalogs.
â 19 â
The Newberry Library. The French Revolution Collection (FRC): A Catalog of
French Pamphlets.
Available at:
http://www.newberry.org/frenchâpamphlets
The Newberry Library in Chicago is home to one of the largest French
Revolution pamphlet collections in the United States. The library houses over
30,000 pamphlets and more than 23,000 issues of 180 periodicals published
between 1780 and 1810. The Library acquired the collection between the years of
1957 and 1961 from Michel Bernstein, a Parisian book dealer. The collection is
significant in that it contains, in addition to many wellâknown journals, several
exceptional works and unique publications.
The collection covers both royalist and revolutionist factions between 1789 and
1799 and contains a large ephemera collection from the early Republic. The
majority of the collection was produced by lÊčImprimerie nationale, although
there are also a variety of provincial and fictitious publishers represented.
In 2009 the Newberry received a grant from the Council on Library and
Information Resources to catalog the collection beginning with a selection of
22,000 pamphlets. The team entrusted with the work has created a blog to
document the project available at: newberry.webfactional.com/frenchpamphlets/.
The collection is now becoming available online in the VuFind version of the
Newberry catalog available on their website. This has the potential for being
quite beneficial for scholars and dealers alike in allowing them to find pamphlets
online, particularly those that are rare and unique, by title and then go and see
them. There is currently no digitization of the collection, though such a thing is
perhaps conceivable in future.