Bibliothèque nationale de France

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds, by law, a copy of everything published in France. Every book, every document, every printed object that enters the world through French presses must arrive here. That obligation has its roots in a royal library Charles V founded at the Louvre Palace in 1368, and it has survived revolutions, wars, plunder, and the collapse of empires across more than six centuries. Today the BnF spans four Parisian sites and holds roughly 14 million books, along with manuscripts, photographs, coins, audio recordings, video documents, and theatrical sets. Its digital library alone contains more than ten million items freely available to anyone online. How did a medieval king's private reading room become one of the largest repositories of human knowledge on earth? And what does it mean for a nation to decide that its own written memory belongs to all of its people?

• 2. A King's Books

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  Charles V received a collection of manuscripts from his predecessor, John II, and moved them from the Palais de la Cité to the Louvre Palace, where he founded the library in 1368. The first librarian on record was Claude Mallet, the king's valet de chambre. Mallet compiled a catalogue titled Inventoire des Livres du Roy nostre Seigneur estans au Chastel du Louvre, a document that stands as the earliest formal accounting of the collection. Jean Blanchet followed with another list in 1380, and Jean de Bégue produced inventories in 1411 and again in 1424.

  Louis XI inherited a new collection in the Louvre in 1461, and his successors kept enlarging it through seizure and inheritance. Charles VIII took part of the library of the kings of Aragon. Louis XII added the Gruthuyse collection and plunder from Milan. Francis I merged the Louvre holdings with his private library after transferring them to Fontainebleau in 1534. During his reign and that of Henry II, fine bindings became a royal obsession, and many of the books added in that period are described as masterpieces of the binder's art.

• 3. The Making of a Public Institution

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  Jacques Auguste de Thou took charge of the library as librarian and initiated what the sources describe as a period of development that made it the largest and richest collection of books in the world. He was succeeded by his son, and when the son was executed for treason, Jérôme Bignon stepped in as the first of a line of librarians sharing that name. Under de Thou, the library absorbed the collections of Queen Catherine de Medici, and steady growth continued through the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, driven in large part by the enthusiasm of Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, himself a dedicated collector.

  By 1666, the site on Rue de la Harpe had grown inadequate, and the library moved to two adjacent houses on Rue Vivienne. Colbert's successor, the minister Louvois, employed Jean Mabillon and Melchisédech Thévenot to acquire books from every available source. In 1688, a catalogue running to eight volumes was compiled. Louvois even drew up plans for an opulent new building on what would become the Place Vendôme, though the project died with him in 1691.

  The library opened its doors to the public in 1692, under the administration of Abbott Camille le Tellier de Louvois, the minister's son. Jean-Paul Bignon took over in 1719 and seized on an unexpected opportunity in 1721: the collapse of John Law's Mississippi Company had freed significant space in the former palace of Cardinal Mazarin around the Hôtel Tubeuf. Bignon also overhauled the library's entire organisational system. Catalogues compiled under his direction appeared from 1739 to 1753 in eleven volumes. After the Seven Years' War, the French government sent historian Louis-Georges de Bréquigny to England to copy roughly 70,000 medieval documents relating to French regions once ruled by England; these were later bound into 109 volumes now held in the collection.

• 4. Revolution and Napoleon

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  The French Revolution brought the library to the edge of destruction. At the height of radical upheaval, its survival depended on the efforts of Antoine-Augustin Renouard and Joseph Van Praet, whose interventions prevented significant loss. After the establishment of the French First Republic in September 1792, the Assembly declared the Bibliothèque du Roi to be national property, renaming it the Bibliothèque Nationale. The institution passed, as one contemporary account put it, from four centuries of control by the Crown into the hands of the French people.

  The collections swelled past 300,000 volumes during the radical phase of the Revolution, when the private libraries of aristocrats and clergy were seized and folded into the national holdings. Napoleon added further material from his military conquests across Europe, and he ordered that any book held by a provincial library but absent from the Bibliothèque Nationale be forwarded to Paris, with exchanges of equal value sent in return. The aim, as Napoleon himself stated, was to ensure that a copy of any book in France could be found at the National Library. A considerable number of books seized in conquests were returned after his downfall.

  For the period between 1800 and 1836, the library was effectively governed by Van Praet, the same figure who had protected it during the Revolution. At his death, the collection contained more than 650,000 printed books and around 80,000 manuscripts. By 1920, the holdings had grown to 4,050,000 volumes and 11,000 manuscripts.

• 5. Labrouste's Reading Room

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  Following a series of regime changes in France, the library became the Imperial National Library and in 1868 moved into newly constructed buildings on the Rue de Richelieu, designed by Henri Labrouste. The Richelieu site occupies a full city block, bounded by the Rue de Richelieu, the Rue des Petits-Champs, and two other streets, with entrances at 58 Rue de Richelieu and 5 Rue Vivienne. Labrouste died in 1875, and expansion of the site continued under academic architect Jean-Louis Pascal, who added the grand staircase and the Oval Room.

  The Richelieu location remained the library's principal address for 275 years, from 1721 to 1996. By 1896, the library still held the title of the largest repository of books in the world, though it has since been surpassed by other institutions. The Richelieu site was comprehensively renovated in the 2010s and early 2020s to designs by architects including Virginie Brégal. It now houses the BnF Museum, formerly known as the Cabinet des Médailles, as well as the library of the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, installed in the Salle Labrouste in 2016, and the library of the École Nationale des Chartes.

  The manuscript collection on the Richelieu site holds what the BnF describes as the largest collection of medieval and modern manuscripts in the world. That collection spans chansons de geste, chivalric romances, eastern literature, ancient history, and literary manuscripts by writers including Pascal, Diderot, Proust, Colette, and Sartre. The library holds roughly 5,000 Ancient Greek manuscripts alone, organised across three fonds: the Ancien fonds grec, the fonds Coislin, and the Fonds du Supplément grec.

• 6. The François-Mitterrand Building

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  On the 14th of July 1988, President François Mitterrand announced the construction of what he described as one of the largest and most modern libraries in the world, designed to be accessible to all, drawing on the most modern data transfer technologies and intended to collaborate with other European libraries. In July 1989, the government retained the architectural firm of Dominique Perrault for the project. The design later received the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture in 1996, the same year construction was completed.

  The project did not proceed smoothly. Construction ran into severe cost overruns and technical difficulties tied to the building's high-rise design. The problems were public enough that the project acquired a sarcastic nickname: the TGB, or Très Grande Bibliothèque, a jab at the TGV high-speed rail system the acronym echoed. Bouygues carried out the construction. Despite the difficulties, the major collections moved from Rue de Richelieu, and the National Library of France was inaugurated on the 15th of December 1996.

  Trade union opposition slowed the installation of a wireless network. A full wireless connection was not in place until August 2016, nearly two decades after the building opened. The François-Mitterrand site is now one of four Parisian locations where the BnF operates, alongside Richelieu, Arsenal, and Opéra.

• 7. Gallica and the Digital Library

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  Gallica, the BnF's digital library, was established in October 1997, less than a year after the inauguration of the François-Mitterrand building. On the 10th of February 2010, a digitised copy of Scenes of Bohemian Life by Henri Murger, in its 1913 edition, became Gallica's millionth document. The five millionth document arrived in February 2019: a copy of the manuscript titled Record of an Unsuccessful Trip to the West Indies, held at the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine. On the 30th of March 2023, the ten millionth document was added to the platform.

  The current holdings include 864,428 books, 186,495 manuscripts, more than 5.8 million newspaper and magazine issues, nearly 1.8 million images, 196,486 maps, 64,967 music scores, 52,004 audio recordings, more than 519,000 objects, and 5,585 video recordings. All of these materials are freely available. Most of the text collections have been processed through optical character recognition, enabling full-text search across the holdings.

  Each document in Gallica carries a digital identifier known as an ARK, an Archival Resource Key, assigned by the National Library. The BnF also partners with other institutions whose holdings appear alongside its own on the platform, extending Gallica's reach beyond the library's own walls. Alain Resnais captured an earlier vision of the library's ambition in Toute la mémoire du monde, a short film he directed in 1956, long before the digital era made that ambition achievable at scale.