French Pamphlets

It’s not really fair to say I discovered the Dictionnaires d’autrefois page (on the ARTFL Project website) while working on this project because I relied heavily on it while doing my academic work, but it is definitely true that I have come to value it in a whole new way.  The Dictionnaires d’autrefois page includes 8 French dictionaries from 4 centuries:  Jean Nicot’s Thresor de la langue française (1606), Jean-François Féraud’s Dictionaire critique de la langue française (1787-1788), Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française (1872-1877) and the Dictionnaire de L’Académie française 1st (1694), 4th (1762), 5th (1798), 6th (1835), and 8th (1932-5) editions.  This webpage allows you to search for one term in all eight dictionaries, though for this project, I mostly use the 1762 and 1798 editions of Dictionnaire de l’Académie française. Consulting a dictionary contemporary to the material we are cataloging is essential because it helps me pin down the definitions of words as they were used during the French Revolution.

Case FRC 13528-13539

There have been a couple of times where I’ve come across a series of pamphlets in the collection that, for one reason or another, have been especially interesting. One of the first such sequences that I found was a collection of 21 pamphlets by Pierre-Antoine Antonelle (call numbers: Case FRC 13528-13539) This series was more interesting because of what I learned outside of the pamphlets. Antonelle was a mayor of Arles who was influential in the reunion of Avignon and what eventually became the department of Vaucluse with the rest of France. He was best known for writing the Catéchisme du Tiers-état, (which he may not have even written, at least according to some of the pamphlets in the collection), but very little academic research has focused on his contribution to the French Revolution. To me, coming across this and discovering that we were the only library (at least in WorldCat) to have most of these pamphlets was not only exciting from an academic standpoint, but also because it represents the value of this project and the work that we are doing here.  It really underscores the importance of cataloging, in that it makes available previously undiscovered sources. Many times it feels like the collection is primarily of interest to legal historians interested in looking at the development of the civil law system (which is a topic very well represented in this collection; there are a great many pamphlets dealing with drafts and proposed amendments, additions, and revisions of what eventually became Napoleon’s Code civil) and isn’t particularly exciting for anyone else, but every so often there comes a chunk of previously undiscovered material that renews my enthusiasm for the project.

Yesterday we had a great visit with CLIR Scholarly Engagement Study Team members Gabrielle Dean and Tim Stinson and CLIR Program Officer Christa Williford.

Gabrielle and Tim gave a presentation about the CLIR-funded study aimed at tracking successful aspects of user outreach – specifically with scholars –in the 2009 award-winning projects.  The study is collecting information about the ways in which grantee institutions interact with scholars during the grant period.

After the presentation, the group met with our cataloging project staff, collection curators, Library Services staff and staff from the Newberry‘s Research and Academic Programs.

While I have been a part of the project team since the project began early this year, today I step into my new role as Cataloging Project Librarian for the French pamphlet cataloging project as Eric moves into his new position as Acquisitions Manager.  Over the past two years I have worked on several special collections projects at the Newberry Library as a Cataloging Project Librarian, including cataloging materials for the Newberry’s Roger S. Baskes Collection of cartographic and travel materials and theological and rare materials in the McCormick Theological Seminary Collection and collections identified via the Gannon Initiative.

Because we are now almost a year along in the project, it will be an opportune time to take a fresh look at our workflows and to meet with the project team to discuss what types of training have or have not worked for them.  One thing that has worked especially well for us is our project wiki, which has been not only a great research tool for cataloging activities but also an invaluable reference tool for documenting project guidelines and workflows as they evolve.  More feedback to come as I begin my new position!

As I prepare to begin an exciting new (for me) position as Acquisitions Manager, I’m surveying the landscape of the French pamphlet project, what we’ve learned, what we’ve accomplished…  I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made in the 9 months or so since the project officially began.  The candidates we found for the Project Cataloging Assistant positions have done a great job.  With an intellectual curiosity and a desire to accomplish a job-well-done, I’m glad to say that in terms of our projected time-line, we are ahead on our production statistics.  It’s also been satisfying to see the growth in cataloging skills among the assistants.  Remembering the challenge it was for me to teach subject analysis, I’m happy to say now that there are some subjects for which various assistants have developed an expertise, through research and perhaps trial-and-error, and I find myself drawing on their insights when cataloging a pamphlet of the same subject.  I’m happy to leave the project in a good state of operation, with the project humming along.  It’s also exciting to know that as Jessica assumes the role of lead cataloger for the project, she’ll be bringing some fresh eyes that will no doubt be helpful in tweaking the current workflow and that, as staff will (unfortunately, but probably) turn over in the course of the project, she’ll have the chance to work with new Project Cataloging Assistants, have the great experience of learning by teaching, and have the enjoyment of seeing the cataloging skills of new assistants develop and flourish under her guidance.  Much thanks to everyone for the chance to work on this project, and for all the help and collaboration I received along the way.  The project truly felt like a team effort and I was glad to play a part of it!

One interesting aspect of the training process has been figuring out how to work on this project as a team.   Cataloging can seem like a lonesome and solitary job, and much of the time, I work on my own without consulting anyone else.   Nevertheless, this project is very team-oriented: we meet regularly to talk about issues or problems we’re having, we peer-review each other’s work, and I, for one, make ample use of the work the other members of the team have done so far.  As I work on creating new records for our catalog, I constantly search through the records that have already been added to see what my colleagues have chosen as subject headings for pamphlets with similar titles and to see whether authorized headings were found for certain publishers or authors, among other things.  Our project wiki acts in the same way; it’s a storehouse of information built up by the team over the first 10 months of the project that has proven to be a key resource for me as I continue to catalog.  I believe that doing the work of cataloging has become much easier for me because I have all this information to draw upon.  It’s a challenge to remember that the work I can get done is in large part thanks to the work the team has already completed, but I also think this is one of the best parts about this project: that we have many tools and systems in place that let us take advantage of each other’s work.

When 18^th-century booksellers and publishers in France planned to publish a new title, it was not uncommon for them to request in prospectuses or advertisements for the proposed work that subscribers mail their subscription fee to a notary, who acted as an agent for the bookseller or publisher.

Case Wing Z 45 .18 ser. 1a no. 111

Many of these notaries aren’t listed in standard bibliographies or in lists of authorized name headings that we commonly use when making catalog records.  But I still wanted to include the names of these notaries in our records to make them accessible to researchers.  In my efforts to find a helpful reference resource, I stumbled upon ETANOT (ETAt des NOTaires de Paris).  Compiled by the Centre historique des Archives nationales, ETANOT is a database containing biographical and professional information on more than 3,000 notaries operating in Paris from the 15^th to the mid-19^thcentury.  In addition to full-text searching, you can browse by name, neighborhood, street name, and time period.

On a basic level, handling a piece of history dating back to the 1790s or earlier is awe-inspiring. These pamphlets were not necessarily intended to stand the test of time—they were printed and distributed rapidly, and much of the content addresses volatile events in contemporary politics. Through handling these documents, I have really gotten a sense of their importance as a medium for the continuous dissemination of information, misinformation, propaganda and political discourse. They include everything from personal defenses against libelous accusations (especially frequent—and dangerous—during the Reign of Terror) to the opinionated speeches of legislators who were not given floor time (as they often indignantly note on the first page) and took their words to press instead. There are biting satires of prominent figures, lyrics to patriotic songs, and elaborate justifications for the mounting political violence of the time period. These are supplemented and contextualized by the less striking but equally important pamphlets on taxation, legislation, mortgages, public finance, and more. Many of the pamphlets deal with highly specific subjects, what might even be called the minutiae of the French Revolution, but when taken together they form a more comprehensive picture of the time period.

Initially, the most difficult aspect of working on the project was dealing with the highly technical legal language in most of the pamphlets I worked with at the time. I ended up spending more time with English-language reference sources, trying to figure out what the legalese I was finding meant. Ironically, now that I’ve spent more time with the project, the situation has reversed. The amount of research that I had to do on subjects like emphyteusis (the term the helpful French-English dictionary gave for the French word emphytéose and that I had to look in three English language dictionaries to find. I have since discovered that the secret to figuring out these things is to look in the French language dictionaries like the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française which provide much more detailed definitions than bilingual dictionaries) has ended up paying off, and now the pamphlets published by the legislature on property law, public finance, and any number of other obscure legal topics, are the easiest part of the day. The other pamphlets, the political rants, denunciations, justifications and satires that represent the majority of what I have been working with recently now consume most of my time. They aren’t any more difficult than they were during the beginning of the project, but while cataloging the government documents has gotten easier (especially since the same relatively small group of topics seemed to be the focus of most of the revolutionary legislation) cataloging the other (generally more interesting and exciting) pamphlets continues to take the same amount of time, simply because of how disorganized these pamphlets are. The fact that they are frequently unfocused, give false publishers, locations, authors, and dates (if they include any of that information in the first place) and frequently cover minor political events that are given generic names (for example, “les événemens du octobre dernier”) without any indication of the relative importance, or even the opinion of the author doesn’t encourage swift cataloging either.

Last week, the CLIR project staff met with students visiting the Newberry for  the Mellon Summer Institute in French Paleography.   The French Paleography course, directed this year by Marc Smith (École nationale des chartes, Paris)  is one of several Institutes funded by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The summer institutes provide intensive practical training in reading late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern manuscripts in European vernacular hands: English, French, Italian and Spanish.

Even though most of the material we are cataloging through our project is published material rather than manuscripts, we knew that some of the researchers would be interested in our work and the material. Additionally, we do have some manuscript material in the collections and some of the pamphlets are annotated.

For the session, we put together a slide show of some of the (not yet cataloged) manuscripts and annotated items  from the French Revolution Collection (FRC), Saint-Sulpice Collection and Collection of publishers’ prospectuses, catalogs, and other materials.