Les collections de Louis Rondonneau. Formation et destin des collections juridiques au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles

Abstract

In a time of unprecedented political and social change, several jurists and printerbooksellers put together large legal collections and made them accessible to the public. Louis Rondonneau (1759-1834), keeper of the archives of the royal chancery, turned to a similar commercial career, associating with bookseller Laurent-François Prault and the director of the Imprimerie Royale, Anisson-Duperron. They established an important public reading room for legal texts, the Dépôt des Lois, at three successive Paris addresses. Rondonneau endeavoured to become the exclusive printer and supplier of the national assemblies and administrations, claiming public utility status for his business. In the end he failed both because of the difficult economic situation of the publishing and bookselling trade, and because the government refused formally to entrust the printing and distribution of official texts to a private businessman. Some of the collections put together by Louis Rondonneau were acquired by order of Bonaparte as reference material for the Secretariat of State and thus came to be preserved in the Archives Nationales, as the core of the printed documents series (shelf mark AD), a valuable complement to institutional records.