Rouen. Photograph by Jorge Láscar, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

In France, the public library is a revolutionary inheritance in quite a literal sense. At the end of the eighteenth century, thousands of books and manuscripts were seized from nobles, convents, and monasteries, and they needed a place to be housed. The municipal library of Rouen, France, inaugurated on July 4, 1809, formed part of this history of democratized access to knowledge. Initially, however, it was open to the public only from ten to two, and not on Sundays—the only day working-class people had off. As a result, for a long time its patrons comprised a largely elite and intellectual milieu. Gustave Flaubert, for instance, spent many hours there. It was in Rouen’s municipal library that he took notes on ancient Carthage for Salammbô; it was where he read up on eighteenth-century philosophy, magnetism, Celtic monuments, and other topics for his unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet. A century later, having moved down the street to a belle epoque building that also houses Rouen’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, the library played a significant part in Annie Ernaux’s intellectual development, too. As she explores in this short essay, first published in French in 2021, to Ernaux the library represented the emancipatory possibilities of literature, though also the more opaque and oppressive codes of bourgeois culture. Class conflict, shame, ambition, hunger, imagination, the politics of knowledge—the kindling that fuels Ernaux’s writings—were all ignited by her early encounters at the public library of Rouen.

—Victoria Baena

If it hadn’t been for a philosophy classmate at the Lycée Jeanne-d’Arc, I never would have entered the municipal library. I wouldn’t have dared. I vaguely assumed it was open only to university students and professors. Not at all, my classmate told me, everyone’s allowed in, you can even settle down and work there. It was winter. When I would return after class to my closet-size room in the Catholic girls’ dorm, I found it gloomy and awfully chilly. Going to a café was out of the question, I didn’t have any money. The thought of working on my philosophy essays, surrounded by books, somewhere that was surely well heated, was an appealing prospect. The first time I entered the municipal library, at once shy and determined, I suppose, I was struck by the silence, by the sight of people reading or writing as they sat at long rows of tables pushed together and overhung by lamps. I was struck by its hushed and studious atmosphere, which had something religious about it. There was that very particular smell—a little like incense—which I would rediscover later, elsewhere, in other venerable libraries. A sanctuary that required treading cautiously, almost on tiptoe: the opposite of the commotion and confusion of the lycée. An impressive and severe world of knowledge. I didn’t know its rituals, which I had to learn: how to consult the card catalogue, separated into “Authors” and “Subjects”; how to record the call numbers accurately; how to deposit the card into a basket, before waiting, occasionally a long time, sometimes shorter, for the requested book. I got into the habit of coming to the library regularly and writing my philosophy essays there. In the age of the internet, one can no longer imagine the pleasure of opening a drawer, handling dozens of index cards, deciphering them—some were handwritten—and rifling through the titles before taking a risk on one of them. Then, finally, the surprise of encountering the book I had requested, with its particular shape and cover. To tackle the immortality of the soul, I took out the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. Its large bound volumes dated to the prewar years and might not have been opened since then. It was exhilarating. Seated among readers whom I identified as professors or experienced students, I was sometimes seized with a feeling of illegitimacy, even if this quickly ebbed. With a certain measure of pride, I felt myself becoming an “intellectual.” Read More