Michel Roland's Library tagged Colbert →  View Popular

As Francis Bacon famously remarked: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, with diligence and attention."

anyone who identifies Wikipedia with the end of civilization should be reassured to learn that early modern Europeans already possessed an impressive arsenal of intellectual crutches and shortcuts, some of them quite dubious.

Ann Blair has shown that many of the greatest Renaissance thinkers had no compunction about attacking their books with scissors, cutting and pasting what they considered the crucial passages into commonplace books or card files for easy reference.

"The ministry is a world of paper," wrote Saint-Just at the height of the Terror. "I don't know how Rome and Egypt governed without this resource." Saint-Just also identified the problems that arose as a result: "Government is impossible with too many words . . . the demon of writing makes war on us, and government stops." In short, early modern government needed information management just as much as early modern scholarship did.

the attempt by the French monarchy under Louis XIV to establish a new sort of political pre-eminence over its large, diverse, and notoriously fractious nation: what historians today call the project of absolutism. In this process, Soll argues convincingly, officials began consciously to treat the generation, the control, and the management of information as a central instrument of power.

Colbert, as Soll shows, took inspiration from the humanist scholars who longed to create a usable universal library, but he sought to direct his own information management system toward the single goal of strengthening the French monarchy. He would not collect information in general, but information of use in governing. And instead of making it available to all interested readers, he would hoard it as a valuable commodity, deploying it publicly only when it served the purpose of the state.

Colbert brought together two very different European traditions: not just the forms of information management developed in the humanist Republic of Letters, but also the reporting and accounting systems developed by Europe's great merchant houses.

In his early years, this mercantile background brought Colbert a great deal of scorn, both from the grand aristocrats who dominated the French state and the humanist scholars who advised them. They mocked his vulgar manners, his bourgeois dress (especially his "merchant's collar"), and his literary ignorance.

While treating Colbert as a sort of glorified servant, Mazarin nonetheless made him his principal accountant and trusted adviser, and then, most crucially, his librarian. The cardinal possessed the largest and best-kept library in France, which would become the core of the royal library, and thus the direct ancestor of today's Bibliothèque Nationale.

Since the Middle Ages, the French monarchy had allowed layer after layer of institutions, laws, and practices to accumulate, often in competition with each other, and each possessing their own royally guaranteed privileges and responsibilities.

In this context, the single most valuable sort of information for the government concerned precedents.

If the crown controlled the sources of information on such questions, it could resolve disputes in its own favor without incurring the charges of arbitrary rule and despotism that might destroy confidence in the system altogether.

In the 1660s, he began to train, and send throughout the country, a cadre of "professional state observers" to put together what amounted to a political fact book of France: population numbers; information on land holdings, regulations and laws; sketches of important personalities; data on economic activity.

look at . . . its situation, its military forces, the number of its peoples, the greatness of the state, the number and size of cities, towns, and villages, the quantity of the peoples that compose the whole; the form of State government, and if it is aristocratic . . . of the names and status of noble families that have taken or will take part in governing the Republic; their different functions; their general and particular councils; who represents the State,


in whom the sovereign power lies and who resolves peace and war, who makes laws; etc . . . the suffrages collected and the results taken and pronounced; the particular councils for the militia, the admiralty, justice, for the city and for the rest of the State; the laws and the customs under which they live; in what consist the militias meant to guard the main square. . . . Visit the public works, maritime and on ground, all the palaces, public houses, and generally all that is remarkable.

Not surprisingly, Colbert's long-term goal proved impossible to realize. Soll defines it as the idea that "all knowledge, formal and practical, could be used together in one archival system to understand and master the material world." Colbert could no more complete this system than the Renaissance humanists could complete their ideal universal library.

In 1683, after Colbert's sudden death (probably from a kidney stone), the king dismantled the system, and spread the responsibilities of information collecting and management among different ministries.

Yet Colbert did accomplish a great deal. He bought whole libraries and archives, and by the time of his death, the royal library had tripled in size, housing some 36,000 books and 10,500 manuscripts. His aides produced by far the most systematic and detailed descriptions of the country ever attempted, and for the first time in history the "nation" of France began to come into focus as a social unity that could be managed and transformed by political action. Colbert trained a cadre of talented officials to implement all these projects. He also enlisted some of the most gifted intellectuals of the day to help, including Charles Perrault, the famous author of fairy tales, and the academician Jean Chapelain. And he made excellent use of the information that he harvested, particularly against the principal sources of domestic resistance to the king's absolutist project: the parlements and the Catholic church. In 1682 he deployed his vast erudition to ensure wide support for measures subjecting the church to an unprecedented degree of state control.

Colbert also worked to restrict the public flow of information, and here he set particularly long-lasting precedents. He made secrecy his byword, and insisted that no one outside government had any right to a knowledge of its workings--particularly its financial workings. Soll depicts him at work ensuring that no Paris printer could learn Greek or Latin without official approval, so that potentially seditious classical scholarship would remain under close surveillance. He shows Colbert striving to suppress Richard Simon's pioneering critical treatment of the Old Testament--one of the first attempts to treat Scripture as a historical text--and promoting the idea that "history should serve only to conserve the splendor of the King's enterprises." While Louis XIV abandoned other elements of Colbert's information system, he happily retained all of these.

What Galileo and Newton strove for in natural science, and Hobbes and Montesquieu in political science, Colbert, we now see, pursued in the less glorious but still vital realm of management and paperwork.

Following the French historian Roger Chartier, Soll suggests that the more the absolute monarchy became associated with secrecy, the more its opponents deployed the banner of "publicity" to resist it, seeking to promote both the free circulation of information and free debate about what that information meant. The antithesis of Colbert's philosophy of state secrecy came in the visions of a public sphere of free, rational, critical debate developed in the eighteenth century by writers such as Malesherbes, Condorcet, and Kant. As Soll astutely points out, this dialectical relationship between secrecy and publicity makes the state a much more important actor in the development of the early modern public sphere than most of its historians (who have principally studied the institutions of the sphere itself, such as salons and coffee houses) have recognized.

"Even for the most open of democracies," he writes, "the culture of state secrecy is necessary and potent, but at the same time, in its very essence, perverse and dangerous." True enough, but while such sentences conjure up images of a malevolent Dick Cheney, the true modern heirs of Colbert's information system did not work in the office of the American vice president, but in Hitler's Chancellery, in Stalin's Kremlin, and in the East German Ministry of State Security, infamously known as the Stasi. It was in the bulging files that the Stasi insanely tried to compile on each and every East German citizen, enlisting a substantial proportion of the population to spy on the rest (and each other), that Colbert's dream of encyclopedic information came closest to realization. Since the collapse of communism, the spirit of Colbertism lingers on in such places as Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran. And it is in such places that dissidents are now deploying the tools of the current information revolution, from e-mail to Facebook to Twitter, to establish a new public sphere in defiance of state secrecy.

What distinguishes democracy from authoritarian rule, on the level of information systems, is that in democracy such systems have the double purpose of informing the state about its citizens and its citizens about the state.

The mercantile perspective the minister brought to bear on statecraft and scholarship was, despite the mirage of universal knowledge it came bound up with, deeply utilitarian. When trying to understand and to evaluate the information that he so assiduously collected and organized, Colbert applied a single clear criterion: its practical use-value to the French state.

Colbert may have been a quintessential figure of the Old Regime in his attachment to royal power and noble privilege, but in his utilitarian and empirically minded way of thinking he was nothing less than a precursor of the Enlightenment. Soll notes that the great Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert made reference to Colbert no less than 143 times.

How does our relationship to formal knowledge change when we do not read through a book from start to finish, submitting ourselves to its logic and authority--when we impose our own organizational scheme on it through sophisticated forms of note-taking and the use of reference guides? The suddenness and completeness of the shift from one form of reading to another should not be exaggerated, but the phenomenon still has clear importance to the development of what we call, however imperfectly, modernity. The still more radical challenge to reading posed by the electronic dissemination of texts likewise promises, in the long run, to have profound effects on our broader intellectual universe.