Under the tentative title “Picking Up the Pieces. Private libraries, Trauma and Transitional Justice in Postrevolutionary Paris”, my Civic Fictions subproject examines the restitution of private book collections confiscated in Paris during the French Revolution.
Research on libraries seized in Revolutionary France has traditionally focused on two themes. One is the role that the Revolution played in the formation of public libraries and the development of bibliography in France. The other concerns the size and contents of the collections of different groups of owners.
By contrast, there has hardly been any scientific interest in the restitution of confiscated books to their original owners. Yet, immediately after the demise of Robespierre, in the Summer of 1794, several regulations were issued in order to return confiscated property to deported priests and the heirs of people sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal. In the early 19th century, similar arrangements were made for returned émigrés. Since the Revolutionary authorities considered books a special type of object, which could not just be sold off with other confiscated moveable and immovable goods, libraries were in fact often one of the few properties that people could get back in kind.
One can imagine that restitutions were seen as a form of justice by the persons involved, but the question is how this took concrete shape and how it worked out in the longer term.
The aim of the project is therefore to collect and study archival material and other documents that shed light on different aspects of the library restitution processes in Postrevolutionary Paris. The documents are themselves as fragmentary and scattered as the memories and the stories of the people whose libraries were seized.
The focus of the study will be on these collectors and their families: what can we infer from the gathered data about what these libraries represented for them, emotionally, intellectually, financially, socially and civically?
Theoretically and methodically, I will build, among others, on insights developed in the burgeoning area of trauma and memory studies.