Enfer
Enfer [ ɑ̃ˈfɛʁ ] ( French for hell ) is a special collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. It belongs to the reservation collection and mostly combines French-language printed works of an erotic or pornographic character, which, because of their rarity and preciousness, may only be viewed with permission. The Enfer was set up between 1836 and 1844 and is considered one of the most famous Remota funds. By 2013 the Enfer had grown to around 2,600 volumes from the 16th century to the present day.
Facility
The roots of Enfer in the French national library go back to the end of the 17th century. The catalog, which was introduced in the then still royal library, separated “good” books from “bad”. In 1702, orthodox and heterodox theological textbooks or academically recognized literature and entertaining novels, love and adventure stories were differentiated by means of special signatures . The latter included 24 “ ouvrages licencieux ” (“offensive works”) in the mid-18th century , above all Pietro Aretinos Ragionamenti . Most of these texts were kept in a " cabinet " (probably synonymous with a special cupboard), and their number was unlikely to have exceeded 50 until the revolution of 1789 - even though King François I had already introduced the deposit copy in 1537 , what with it came about that the library should actually document the literature circulating in France as comprehensively as possible. However, “ ouvrages licencieux ” were generally prohibited in France; so they had to be printed in Holland or Switzerland and sold in the bookstores and by the peddlers , and they often only found their way into the king's library through confiscations (less often than gifts or purchases). Here they were not made available to the reading public, although they knew of their existence through the library catalogs published.
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During the French Revolution , the book collections of emigrated aristocrats or secularized monasteries contributed significantly to the growth of public libraries. The forbidden writings from this source were soon joined by those that were subject to the strict censorship under Napoleon I ; many publications were also destroyed. In the Bibliothèque nationale (the former royal library), particularly noteworthy books were removed from the general system for the first time from 1795, thus laying the foundations for the later Réserve (reserve collection of rare and valuable books). This began operations in 1836, in 1844 the term (not yet the independent signature) " Enfer " appeared in its inventories for the first time for the sub- inventory of morally questionable writings, which the library director Joseph Naudet characterized in 1849 as follows: " fort mauvais, mais quelquefois très- précieux pour les bibliophiles, et de grand valeur vénal; cet enfer est pour les imprimés ce qu'est le Musée de Naples pour les antiques. »(" Extremely reprehensible, but from a bibliophile point of view sometimes extremely valuable and of great sales value; this hell is for the printed matter what the Museum of Naples is for the ancient works of art. ") The exact circumstances are not known under which during the Louis Philippe's government this collection of books, which is closed to the public, was built. The post-revolutionary bourgeoisie may have had a major influence on this development ; This social class, for whose growing influence the rule of the "citizen king" was an important step forward, increasingly enforced the separation of public and private spheres and the associated prudery . Although there was no official decision, the library set up a “ poison cabinet ” for obscene books. The most objectionable works of this kind were removed from the normal collections and kept under lock and key in order to protect the common reader from reading which was deemed to be detrimental to their moral attitudes.
Surname
The first book collection called Enfer is ascribed to the so-called Feuillanten , Cistercians in the Parisian Rue Saint-Honoré . A large number of Protestant writings, which a convert gave to the convent in 1652, are said to have been kept in the attic, which is ironically called “hell” . The name possibly alluded to the eternal damnation that threatened the authors and readers of these heretical writings or to the burning of works listed in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum . Similar collections with a theological focus were widespread, even without always bearing this nickname, most of them those in the Vatican Library .
By the time of the Second Empire at the latest , the nickname had found its way into the general vocabulary. Pierre Larousse's Encyclopedia Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Paris 1866–1877) defined the word as “ endroit fermé d'une bibliothèque, où l'on tient les livres dont on pense que la lecture est dangereuse; example: l'Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale. »(“ Closed area of a library where the books are located that are considered dangerous to read; for example: The 'Hell' of the Bibliothèque nationale. ”) When the Bibliothèque nationale in 1913 the huge book collection of Auguste Lesouëf and his sister (married Smith ), she gave 34 Erotica the signature Enfer Smith-Lesouëf . The prints and photographs of the Bibliothèque nationale were also given a special signature if they were considered morally questionable. This collection, too, was usually called “ Enfer ” by the end of the 19th century at the latest and was only made accessible with the permission of the curator of the collection.
Other libraries proceeded similarly to the Bibliothèque nationale and segregated their erotica. They used disguising signatures such as Private Case (“private matter”) in the British Museum , ***** in the New York Public Library , Δ (Greek Delta) in the Library of Congress and Φ (Greek Phi, onomatopoeic for “Pooh ! “Standing) in the Bodleian Library .
Inventory and cataloging
The closed section had the charm of the forbidden and stimulated the imagination. The “gallant library”, in which the shelves were full of erotic and pornographic literature and which served as a place of excitement and seduction, had even been a topos of this very literature. After the Enfer was set up, people wondered which and how many works could be found in it. One suspected a very impressive collection, since it drew directly from the book production of the French Ancien Régime and thus the heyday and the center of literary libertinage with authors such as the Comte de Mirabeau , the Marquis de Sade or Rétif de la Bretonne . From 1848 to 1850 the Enfer was the subject of a public polemic when the library was accused of negligent loss of large numbers of books. Rumor has it that two thirds of the original 600 books were lost, not least because unsupervised young employees made use of them. In fact, the library itself gave a maximum of 150 books for the recently established Enfer, minus a few losses and excretion of worthless works and without taking into account the initially only provisional book entries since the revolution. The first supplementary volume of the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle from 1877 considered it appropriate to relativize popular opinions about the enfer:
«The existence of the Bibliothèque nationale un dépôt qui n'est jamais ouvert au public; c'est l'Enfer, recueil de tous les dévergondages luxurieux de la plume et du crayon. Toutefois, le chiffre de ce recueil honteux n'est pas aussi élevé qu'on l'imagine généralement, puisque le nombre des ouvrages n'y est que de 340 et celui des volumes de 730. Mais il est bon de noter que cette catégorie ne comprend que les livres d'une obscénité révoltante, ceux qu'il est défendue de communiquer sous quelque prétexte que ce puisse être. »
“In the Bibliothèque nationale there is a collection that is never open to the general public; it is the enfer, the gathering place for all excesses of the pen and the pen. However, the number of this shameful collection is not as high as one generally imagines, since the number of works is only 340 and that of volumes 730. But it is well to note that this category only includes the repulsively obscene books, that is, those that are forbidden to circulate under whatever pretext. "
The Enfer experienced a renewed boost in the Second Empire , especially due to the increased censorship. In 1865 and 1866 alone the inventory grew by more than 330 copies, in 1876 there were 620 titles, more than half of which came from confiscations. In 1886 the collection had grown to just over 700, including many cheap reprints of libertine novels of the Ancien Régime. The Enfer was still hardly accessible. In order to be able to consult one of his volumes, an expressly justified submission to the head office and a decision by a committee were necessary.
The first separate indexing of the inventory under the signature Enfer as a replacement for the mostly used signature Y2 , which had been in use since the end of the 17th century, took place from 1876, at the latest from 1886; the titles appeared in 1896 in the general catalog of the Bibliothèque nationale. From 1909 to 1913, Guillaume Apollinaire and others wrote a special catalog without the support or knowledge of the library management, which listed 854 titles and described the works bibliographically. (A first, less well-veiled attempt, made after 1900 by the linguist Robert Yve-Plessis, had stopped the library.) Pascal Pia's critical catalog in the first edition from 1978 added around 700 titles. The sales success of these actually unspectacular book lists clearly showed the interest of the general public in Enfer: Apollinaire's catalog was sold in an edition of 1,500 copies, a second edition from 1919 counted 2,000 copies.
Change of purpose
The works of Apollinaire and Pias made a major contribution to gaining broad recognition for Enfer's literature, although the opposite was even desired in some works. The author Edmond Haraucourt was annoyed that his Légende des sexes (1893) was classified under the common French poetry. He had hoped that the “book would go to hell” (“ allât en Enfer ”). The Enfer's holdings increased in the 20th century mainly through acquisitions by the Bibliothèque nationale in the regular book trade. In the 1980s, the renowned publisher Fayard brought a seven-volume selection of Enfer novels that were no longer protected by copyright, provided with illustrations of their time and explanatory introductions. History also deals with the material provided by the Enfer. Research into pre-revolutionary pornography takes place primarily in the context of the New Cultural History . Robert Darnton deserves particular mention , who points to the emancipatory potential of the texts, in which the moral transgressions are often embedded in criticism of society and religion .
The development of the book market, changed moral standards and the extensive repeal of censoring legislation have changed the character of the Enfer. Due to the mass availability of erotic and pornographic works, it lost its meaning as a place where they left behind. As early as 1909, entire series of numbers in the normal reserve were repeatedly kept open in order to sort pornographic works from the free book trade (especially so-called flagellation literature ) and to protect them from theft. The further growth of this cheaply produced literature led to its own signature within the Réserve in 1932, which was replaced in 1960/69 by two other special signatures from the general catalog, which have since been abandoned without replacement. The Bibliothèque nationale closed the Enfer signature in 1969, but reopened it in 1983 for practical reasons; It was easier for librarians and library users to find all books in a genre under one signature. The purchasing policy is no longer based solely on the genre. Corresponding printed works will continue to be collected, but the decisive feature is now their rarity or bibliophile quality. In addition to older works that were previously missing, contemporary and foreign-language books can also be found in the Enfer. By 2013 it had grown to around 2,600 volumes since the 16th century. Due to the risk of theft or damage by unsupervised users, access to the Enfer is still subject to special, but no longer stricter conditions than for the rest of the Réserve (namely the requirement for scientific research) since 1977, in order to now - in a strange reversal of the former purpose - the To protect books from the general public.
literature
- L'Enfer de la Bibliothèque Nationale. Fayard, Paris 1984-1988. - Seven-volume selection of 29 novels from the Enfer collection.
- Guillaume Apollinaire, Fernand Fleuret, Louis Perceau: L'Enfer de la Bibliothèque Nationale. Paris 1913. - The first Enfer catalog, now outdated.
- Robert Darnton : Thinking Lust or The Sexual Enlightenment of the Enlightenment. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-8218-4138-9 . - Essay on Enfer and on the pornographic literature of the Enlightenment period. Also contains the German translation of the novels Thérèse philosophe and Histoire de Dom B… .
- Pascal Pia: Les livres de l'Enfer: bibliographie critique des ouvrages érotiques dans leurs différentes éditions du XVIe siècle à nos jours. Fayard, Paris 1998 (2nd, expanded edition), ISBN 2-213-60189-5 . - The standard directory of the Enfer contains further explanations on the inventory and on individual works.
- Marie-Françoise Quignard, Raymond-Josué Seckel: L'Enfer de la Bibliothèque. Eros au secret. Paris 2007. - Accompanying publication to the exhibition of the same name, thematic in-depth information, extensive image material, current knowledge.
- Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer: L'Enfer vu d'ici. In: Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale , 14 (1984), pp. 22-41. - History of the Enfer, current state of knowledge.
Web links
- Representation of the Enfer with a longer quote from the legal department of the Bibliothèque nationale on the acquisition policy
- Information on the Bibliothèque nationale exhibition on Enfer (December 4, 2007– March 2, 2008)
- Article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about Enfer and the Bibliothèque nationale exhibition (December 4, 2007– March 2, 2008)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Catalog of livers imprimés de la Bibliothèque du Roy: Belles Lettres, 1re-2e partie , Paris 1750
- ↑ Quoted from: Marie-Françoise Quignard, Raymond-Josué Seckel: L'Enfer de la Bibliothèque. Eros au secret. Paris 2007. p. 26.
- ^ Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle . Administration du grand dictionnaire universel, Paris 1866–1877, vol. 7, p. 557, col. 4, quoted from gallica.bnf.fr
- ↑ That the largest pornographic collection can be found in the Vatican Library is a widespread legend.
- ^ Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle . Administration du grand dictionnaire universel, Paris 1866–1877, Suppl. 1, p. 366, col. 3, quoted from gallica.bnf.fr
- ↑ The Bibliothèque nationale's online catalog lists 2,706 entries, around 100 of which are empty (accessed on February 9, 2013).
