La bibliothèque de Saint-Victor et les Lumières

Abstract

The accounts of many 17th- and 18th-century writers (Giovanni Paolo Marana, Robert Challe, Montesquieu) and of foreign travellers (the Englishman Martin Lister, the Italian Alfonso Bonfioli Malvezzi) indicate that Saint-Victor was among the most famous and most frequented Parisian libraries. Modern scholars had already located five “clandestine philosophical manuscripts” belonging to Saint-Victor. This was the name given to unpublished, anti-Christian texts —sometimes deist, sometimes atheistic and materialistic, always violently subversive— from which the philosophers of the Enlightenment drew inspiration. This article discloses the existence of five additional manuscripts of the same kind in the catalogues of Saint-Victor maintained at the Bibliothèque Mazarine. Their titles demonstrate that the canons of Saint-Victor were capable of making relevant selections among the manifestos of the most daring contemporary thought and were thus far from retreating to past knowledge.