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

Notes

Notes chapter 1 1. Jérôme Delatour, “Le Cabinet des frères Dupuy,” Sciences et Techniques en Perspective 9 (2005): pp. 287–328. 2. Martin Lister, A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698, ed. Raymon Phineas Stearns (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967). For introductions to the history of travel literature and learning see Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), in particular chaps. 1 and 14. Also see Justin Stagl, Eine Geschichte der Neugier: Die Kunst des Reisens 1550–1800 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1983), English translation: A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic, 1988), pp. 1–90; and Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 63–85. 3. Lister, Journey to Paris, pp. 2–13. 4. Ibid., p. 37. On the places and people visited by Lister see Alice Stroup, A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). 5. Denise Bloch, “La Bibliothèque de Colbert,” in Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, ed. Claude Jolly, 4 vols. (Paris: Promodis, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 156–79. 6. Charles de La Roncière and Paul-M. Bondois, eds., Catalogue des Manuscrits de la Collection des Mélanges Colbert (Paris: Éditions Ernest Leroux, 1920), introduction , p. xv. 7. Lister, Journey to Paris, p. 128. 8. Ibid., pp. 108–13. Lister was, however, disappointed when the librarian produced a magni‹cently bound copy of an early, incomplete copy of his history of conch snails, the Synopsis Conchyliorum (1685). Lister promised to send the library an 169 up-to-date edition. Simone Balayé, La Bibliothèque Nationale des origines à 1800 (Geneva: Droz, 1988), pp. 74–75; Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scienti‹c Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971); John Milton Hirsch‹eld, The Académie Royale des Sciences, 1666–1683 (New York: Arno Press, 1981), pp. 168–69; Denise Bloch, “La Colbertine ,” in Colbert 1619–1683 (Paris: Ministère de la Culture, 1983), pp. 401–26; “La bibliothèque de Colbert”; Stewart Saunders, “Public Administration and the Library of Jean-Baptiste Colbert,” Libraries and Culture 26 (1991): pp. 283–300. 9. And it continued to grow after his death, though at a much diminished rate. See Léopold Delisle, Le Cabinet des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1868), vol. 1, p. 440. 10. It is not easy for the modern historian to characterize Colbert’s practices or how exactly he saw his library and archives, for he never wrote a treatise about them in any analytical way. In his letters to his son and to his agents, he constantly insists that they “observe,” “examine,” “see,” and then “inform” him through clear “reports ” and “memoirs.” Richelet’s Dictionary of 1685 de‹nes the term intelligence, among other things, as political wisdom: “is said also of a great man, who through his talents and his wits [lumières] is above all others (he was the intelligence of the Council, of the State).” This wisdom could be gained by “secret Communications,” meaning spying, or simply being well informed. The term information derived from the Latin term erudire, to enlighten or instruct, and from legal usage. Richelet also de‹ned it as meaning to learn about something, for example “commerce,” or the “court.” Thus intelligence and information system seem the most accurate modern terms we can use to describe the system Colbert built. 11. See Roncière and Bondois, Catalogue des Mélanges Colbert, ‹les 1–100. On the importance of Colbert and the connection between practical industrial knowledge and the natural sciences see Margaret C. Jacob, Scienti‹c Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 47–50, 165–86. 12. The literature on the history of libraries, their ambitions, forms, and content is extensive. For a synthetic overview, see Roger Chartier, L’ordre des livres (Aix-enProvence : Alinea, 1992). On the history of knowledge, information, and government see Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge : Polity Press, 2000), pp. 116–48. 13. On the persistence of methods for searching for information see Anthony Grafton on the concepts of Google, “Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents ,” New...