The inauguration of the newly restored historic headquarters of the National Library of France is a great event in French cultural life. After ten years of meticulous rehabilitation and renovation, the legendary Richelieu Quadrangle opens towards a new destination, now being, at the same time, a library, museum and also a space for visits and walks, in the very heart of Paris.
The origins of this venerable institution lie in the Grand Siècle – the 17th – when royal absolutism, personified by Louis XIII and his all-powerful Cardinal Richelieu as prime minister and then by Louis . In this period, France became a very centralized State, with a great cultural ambition that attested to its power.
Already at the beginning of the 16th century, Francis I had established the obligation to send a copy of any book that was printed for the king’s library. Richelieu – very concerned about the preservation of “good French”, established the Académie Française and contributed much to the development of the Sorbonne. Mazzarino expanded the Academy and transformed it into the College of the Four Nations – the Institut de France, located on the banks of the Seine – and created there France’s first public library, which still bears his name.
At the same time, in 1643, Mazzarino, newly appointed prime minister, bought the Hotel Tubeuf, a palace that occupied part of the Richelieu Quadrilateral, near the Palais Royal and the Louvre Museum. The cardinal – Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino, an Italian naturalized French – had no experience as a priest, and was proposed to the position by Louis XIII. His passion for art fueled the creation of a large personal collection. The architect François Mansart was commissioned to build a new wing connected to the Hotel Tubeuf to house this collection: the ground floor housed the sculptures and, on the first floor, the paintings of the prelate. The galerie basse – today the Mansart gallery – serves as a temporary exhibition hall and the first floor – the Mazarin gallery, with its magnificent frescoes by Romanelli – is the main space of the new museum, where treasures from the extensive and encyclopedic collection of the Bibliothèque.
The cardinal also had a large collection of books and had a beautiful library installed – on the large blocks along rue Richelieu – which now houses the Manuscripts room. Many other books came later: 60 years after his death, in 1722, the royal library was moved here. In fact, the current reopening coincides with the tercentenary of the institution’s installation in the Quadrilateral.
The next significant moment in the evolution of the place occurred after the Revolution and Bonaparte, in the mid-19th century, when Napoleon III had reestablished the empire and Baron Haussmann was dedicated to remodeling the city of Paris.
The need to expand the library – imperial at that time, national after the Revolution – was evident. The new project was commissioned in 1854 to Henri Labrouste, who had shortly before finished the Sainte-Geneviève Library, a magnificent construction on the other bank of the Seine in extensive naves defined by a diaphanous exposed metal structure. Twenty years later, the work delivered by Labrouste is one of the architectural wonders of Western culture. A space of more than 1,000 m2, exciting for its proportions and luminosity. Its structure is visible, metallic, with nine domes supported by cast iron columns of great formal elegance.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the National Library of France inaugurated another large reading room, the Oval Room, a huge elliptical-shaped space, the longest side of which exceeds 43 meters, a height of 18 meters, covered by a large central skylight. The room, which was originally free access and is now open again, was also known as “the oval paradise of Paris.”
The creation of a second headquarters of the same library – the complex of four towers on the banks of the Seine, a presidential project known as the François Mitterand library – has led to the present remodeling of the Richelieu library. The architect Bruno Gaudin created this work with great sensitivity: the most visible part of his work is, without a doubt, the new entrance room with a grand staircase leading to the museum. You can enter the room, passing through a garden open to the public on the rue Vivienne side, a creation of the landscape designer Gilles Clèment. The courtyard of honor – the traditional entrance to the National Library of France – was also restored, so now you can enter not only from Richelieu Street.
In the same 19th century there was strong opposition to the democratization of access to culture. The Catholic Restoration Movement, whose most illustrious figure is Joseph de Maistre, was frankly adverse to all “the lights” of the 18th century. Maistre was an intellectual convinced that the dissemination of culture prevents the masses from being governed, and his ideas were exploited by the various expressions of fascism that emerged in the 20th century.
For very different reasons, some great writers also had a certain aversion to cultural democracy. Gustave Flaubert, horrified by “the proliferation of political speeches, of popular magazines, of the deluge of printed material,” as he complained to his friend George Sand in a letter preserved in the National Library of France. Flaubert considered that this reality forced him to constantly invent new ways of writing.
