The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System

7. From Universal Library to State Encyclopedia

c h a p t e r 7 From Universal Library to State Encyclopedia colbert’s house of solomon I n 1666 Colbert found a new home for the itinerant and neglected Royal Library. A block from his house on the rue Vivienne, Colbert bought the Hôtel Beautru.1 It was here that he settled the Royal Library.2 In the Plan Turgot of 1739, Colbert’s house on the corner of the rue de Richelieu and the eponymous rue Colbert is clearly visible.3 He regularly sent archivists to retrieve books and manuscripts from the king’s library.4 In reality, he completely controlled the Royal Library. Louis, whose library it was supposed to be, would make only one symbolic visit there in 1681.5 The creation of this dual library was an act of great signi‹cance. Colbert physically brought the library under his control and connected it to his own. What this meant was that the Royal Library was neither an extension of the Republic of Letters, nor of a wider, semipublic world of learning, as it had been. It was now a part of Colbert’s administration. Where famed scholars had once managed the royal collection, Colbert now not only oversaw new acquisitions, but tightly controlled the hiring of personnel for both libraries, placing his brother, the abbé Nicolas Colbert (1628–76), later archbishop of Luçon (1661), at the head of the Royal Library upon Jacques Dupuy’s death in 1656.6 Once in control of the state library complex, Colbert set out to cre94 ate a collection designed for the needs of politics and state administration . Not only would his library contain the formal works of learning outlined in Naudé’s Advice on Establishing a Library, but also like Philip II of Spain, Colbert kept the papers of the colonial administration: navigational papers, maps, trade routes, and treaties.7 Intendant’s reports, surveys , and account books came back to Colbert’s central archive to be veri‹ed and ‹led.8 But whereas Philip took no interest in ‹nancial matters , Colbert, the merchant ‹nancier, also kept price lists of nails, winch designs, hand-drawn pictures of rope types, ships’ cargo logs, and arsenal inventories. This is how Colbert managed not just learning, but also the military and industrial sector of the state from his library. Colbert singlehandedly directed the building of the Ludovician Louvre and Versailles, and he therefore kept sketchbooks of arches, doorways, fountains, ceiling molding, architecture models, and garden perspectives.9 He also kept a vast archive of state account books, mentioned by Martin Lister, called États de ‹nances, or États de la recepte et despense.10 In this grand-scale library complex, Colbert had brought the charterhouse, the humanist legal library, and the state administrative archive together with the accounting of‹ce.11 It had a call-number system and was easily accessible to the librarians and to Colbert. While independent, Colbert’s library could draw on the wealth and even the funding of the Royal Library. A documentary collection based on the interests of administering the state, it had many of the practical characteristics that fascinated philosophes and physiocrats, and would later characterize Chambers and Diderot’s great encyclopedic projects. From the biblioteca selecta to the House of Solomon Paragons of the Republic of Letters such as Peiresc and de Thou saw their libraries and their research as extensions of themselves, manifestations of personal virtue. Theirs were biblioteca selecta: carefully chosen treasures, which represented the scholarly, individual virtuosity of their owner to a public of friends and trusted scholars.12 The idea that a wellchosen library was a mark of the learned, well-bred honnête homme was the basis for private collecting for scholars, political ‹gures, and dilettantes alike.13 When Hugo Blotius began building the Austrian Imperial Library (1575–1608), he not only envisioned it as an extension of the public world of learning; he also looked to create a formal, universal library beyond the lines designed by Conrad Gesner in his Biblioteca universalis (1545), which attempted to list and categorize all extant books. From Universal Library to State Encyclopedia 95 For Blotius, this meant formal works of learning from various disciplines , along with uncataloged state papers, news reports, and gazettes.14 Even more, Blotius had hoped to create an encyclopedic museum on knowledge, politics, the arts, and sciences. In a letter from 1575, Blotius outlined...