Archives Lost: The French Revolution and the Destruction of Medieval French Manuscripts
By Thomas Lecaque
There is a moment, while contemplating gaps in the archival record as a medievalist, when we are then tempted to focus on the “bibliocide” of the past, to mourn the death of records that would have offered insight into our narrow, chosen fields. For French medievalists like myself, the French Revolution represents at once a fundamental shift towards modernity and an irrevocable loss of medieval materiality. Mobs burst into the monastery, cathedral, parish church, castle, or palace, dragged the manuscripts out of the armoires where they had been stored for centuries, piled them in a mound in a public place, and lit the patrimony of the nation on fire.
The destruction of medieval texts was part of a well-established pattern of destruction of title deeds, charters, and other business records that established land controls and rents, with notable documents stretching from the high Middle Ages on. By burning genealogies, cartularies, title papers, and registers, revolutionary officials and mobs of local citizens dispossessed the nobility and removed legal cases against the actual inhabitants of the land, while simultaneously destroying some of the richest sources for the political, social, and economic histories of medieval France. Writ large, however, the estimate is that during the French Revolution, more than FOUR MILLION VOLUMES were burnt from suppressed monasteries, of which 25,000 were medieval manuscripts.
Why did these documents, this particular incarnation of the past, these ‘feudals’ have to die? Book burning, with all of the modern baggage attached to it, is not a simple act of wanton destruction, it is a purposeful reshaping of intellectual, cultural, and historical thought and life for concrete purpose. The documents called “feudals” were a particular form of medieval legal control undertaken by the aristocracy, clergy, and monasteries, and for centuries, since the Middle Ages themselves, rebelling groups of peasants and townsfolk had assaulted archives, “not [as] the revenge of a residually oral culture against the appurtenances of a literacy that was threatening because [it was] alien and mysterious,” but rather a “precise targeting of legal instruments.” Wat Tyler’s rebellion in England in 1381 specifically targeted documents, with rebels breaking into houses, castles, and government offices; then they “burnt the Rolls touching the Crown of our Lord the King, and the Rolls of the office of Receiver of Green wax from the county of Kent,” or the “charters, writings, and divers muniments there found.”
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