Short answers, pulled from the story.
King Charles V of France transformed a chaotic pile of manuscripts into the first organized royal library within the Louvre Palace in 1368. This event created the foundational seed of what would become the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Claude Mallet served as the first recorded librarian of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and was a valet de chambre to King Charles V. He compiled the initial catalog and established a bureaucratic tradition that outlived the monarchy.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France opened its doors to the public in 1692 after being under the exclusive control of the Crown for four centuries. This move followed the compilation of a comprehensive eight-volume catalog by 1688.
The François-Mitterrand site of the Bibliothèque nationale de France was inaugurated on the 15th of December 1996. The construction was announced by President François Mitterrand on the 14th of July 1988.
The Gallica digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France was established in October 1997. It has made available online approximately 10 million documents including books, manuscripts, newspapers, images, maps, music scores, and audio recordings.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France removed four 19th-century books from its public access in 2024 after tests revealed that their covers and bindings were colored using green pigments containing arsenic. The books included two volumes of The Ballads of Ireland published in 1855 and a bilingual anthology of Romanian poetry dating from 1856.