The Antiquary and the Information State: Colbert s Archives, Files and the Affaire of the Régale

Transcription

1 Jacob Soll The Antiquary and the Information State: Colbert s Archives, Files and the Affaire of the Régale In 1679, Nicolas-Joseph Foucault, the Intendant of Montauban, went to the town of Pamiers, in the County of Foix on the edge of the Pyrenees in France, to censor the local bishop, François-Étienne Caulet, who had refused to recognize the royal Régale. In 1673, Louis XIV had made his declaration of the right of Régale, the culmination of the long Gallican movement against the powers of the papacy. In it, Louis declared that he had the right to collect benefices from empty bishoprics, and that only he, and not the pope, had the right to name bishops: ( ) the right of Régale has been judged inalienable, imprescriptable, and owed to us in all the archbishoprics and bishoprics of our kingdom, lands, and regions bound to us; and our intention being that our right be universally recognized. 1 These prelates of the church would have to make a sermon of fidelity to the king, recorded under the authority of the secular Parlement, at the Chambre des Comptes, the financial administration and archive of the kingdom. 2 Whether the clergy liked it or not, the king and his Parlements which had voted the king the right of Régale in 1608 had temporal control over the French Church. 1 Louis XIV, Déclaration pour la Régale, February 10, 1673, registered in the Chambre des Comptes de Paris, July 27 th of the same year. Published in Colbert, Lettres, VI pp : le droit de Régale auroit esté jugé inaliénable, imprescriptable, et nous appartenir dans tous les archeveschés et éveschés de nostre royaume, terres et pays de nostre obéissance; et nostre intention estant que nostre droit soit universellement reconnue. 2 Ibid., p On the Régale see Charles Gérin, Louis XIV et le Saint Siège, 2 vols. (Paris: Lecoffre fils, 1894); Ernest Lavisse, p. 384.

2 2 From the time of Charlemagne and the later twelfth-century Investiture crises, there had been open disagreement about how much authority the papacy had over secular rulers. The question centered on papal claims of the right to grant imperium and royal authority; claims of legal jurisdiction over the church in lands outside the Vatican states; and the right to appoint powerful bishops, who could collect tithes, which represented huge revenues. When Philip the Fair (ruled ) challenged these jurisdictions in France, Boniface VIII responded with the bull Unam Sanctum (1302), which claimed church authority over the spiritual and secular swords. This in turn inspired Marsilius of Padua s foundational work on secular authority, Defensor pacis (1324), the first detailed legal defense of secular royal rights of imperium. Two hundred years later, the same issues would inspire the German princes to follow Luther (1525), and also sparked Henry VIII to break England from the authority of Holy See (1531). By the reign of Louis XIV ( ), the papacy still wielded legal and feudal rights, as well as great moral authority, but it could not exert true political or military power. Only the bishops of Pamiers and Alet resisted Louis XIV s claim to the right of Régale, and pope Innocent XI had few concrete means with which to defend these holdouts of ancient papal power. The Régale was one point on which the crown and Parlements worked together. Through royal pressure, the French clergy, during its assemblies, voted their fealty to the French monarch and his magistrates in these earthly questions of the workings of the Church. Even Bossuet downplayed the Régale, calling it, légère dans son fond. 3 In spite of the intervention of the activist pope Innocent XI, elected in 1676, the French 3 Cited by Lavisse, p. 384.

3 3 monarchy had managed a cold war with the papacy, quibbling over rights, but avoiding schism. Foucault was in Pamiers because in 1677 the formerly Jansenist bishop Caulet had sent a letter to Louis asserting his own rights and papal authority over his bishopric. Drawing on a list of documentary legal and historical justifications, Caulet questioned Louis s understanding of the canons of the church and the legality of the Régale. 4 Yet Caulet was helpless to resist Foucault, so in 1679, Innocent XI put Caulet under his special protection, sent a number of briefs to Louis asserting his rights, threatened excommunication, and waited for the French king s response. The divinely anointed Louis disingenuously remarked that he had no interest in spiritual matters, but where the temporal powers of his crown were concerned, he was forced to assert his legal, Gallican rights. 5 Of course he would refuse the pope. But he needed to do so with the appearance of respect and legality, providing unassailable documentation to avoid open conflict. Thus Louis s trusted minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, sent his agent Foucault to the County of Foix, which since the time of medieval Catharism, had been a hotbed of 4 Caulet s 1679 letter to Louis XIV is cited in Charles Gérin, Recherches historiques sur l Assemblée du clergé de France de 1682 (Paris: Lecoffre fils., 1869), pp. 47-9: ( ) d ailleurs l étude que vous avez faite des saints canons qui défendent, sous les dernières peines, aux prelates qui sont à la cour des princes de causer aucun préjudice non-seulement à leurs confrères, ou à leurs églises, mais encore aux ecclésiastiques inférieurs, ce que l on peut voir en termes exprès dans le 25e canon du concile d Avignon tenu en l an 1326 par le pape Jean XXII, renouvlé par le 30e du concile tenu en la meme ville l an 1337 sous le pape Benoît XII, sont des motifs assez puissants pour vous obliger à embarasser le parti de l Église, nonobstant tous les intérêts et les respects humains qui pourrait vous en détourner. 5 Ibid., p. 386: Louis XIV to his Ambassador to Rome, the duc d Estrées, March, 1678: Je témoigne au nonce combien j étais surpris que le Pape entrât avec moi sur une matière qui était purement des droits de ma couronne; que dans toutes celles qui regardent l Église et la religion, j écoutais toujours ce qui me venait de lui avec un profond respect, mais que je ne pouvais rien entendre sur ce qui touchait mon État et ma couronne, qu ainsi je n avais aucune réponse à lui rendre sur une affaire dans laquelle je ne pouvais entrer.

4 4 resistance to religious and royal authority. 6 With the methodical approach of an inquisitor, trained as a tax-lawyer, Foucault immediately sequestered the episcopal chapterhouse and all the papers and correspondence of the bishop and his allies. He annulled their administrative acts and took control of the diocese s finances, leaving the Bishop nearly starving. 7 The violent seizure of his bishopric apparently took a physical toll on Caulet, who published a scathing libel entitled, Traité de la Régale (Pamiers, 1680) and then died. 8 In September 1680, Foucault returned to Pamiers, arrested the printer of the Traité, and arrested clergy loyal to Caulet with lettres de cachet. 9 Foucault had fired his public volleys and reaffirmed royal authority. Now he got down to the real work of defending the crown s prerogatives against Rome. This meant sending all the relevant paperwork and literature back to Paris so that Colbert could formulate a legal framework to respond to the church. 10 The weight of divine right rested on the dusty shelves of Episcopal and legal archives. In the end, imperium and the constitutional bases of statehood were rooted not on the word of God, but on authentic 6 The famous account of the Inquisition and its archival holdings in Pamiers is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie s, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. by Barbara Bray (New York: George Braziller, 1978). 7 Nicolas-Joseph Foucault, Mémoires, ed. by F. Baudry (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1863), pp Caulet wrote Louis basically begging for food and food to be distributed to the poor. 8 Foucault calls this work a libel. Ibid., p Gérin, pp When the clergé appointed the père Cerles as Vicar General, a temporary successor to Caulet, Foucault had the Parlement of Toulouse condemn him to death in absentia, and he was forced to escape and go into hiding. With the fervor used to persecute Protestants, Foucault applied regalian rights to excommunicate renegades such as Antoine Charlas, preceptor to the Caulet family and author of an attack on the Régale, who promptly fled to Rome and stayed for the remainder of his life, vociferously defending the pope s rights against those of his king. See Colbert s letter to the Chancellier LeTellier, First President of the Parlement of Toulouse, seeking to repress Cerles, March 13 th, 1681, in G. B. Depping, Correspondance administrative sous le règne de Louis XIV, 4 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1855), IV, pp Also see Antoine Charlas, Causa regaliae penitus explicata (Toulouse, 1679). Charlas became a leading anti-gallican theologian, and died in Rome in Foucault, p. 58. Foucault lists the documents he is sending back and how he is using them to make his case against Caulet.

5 5 legal deeds, historical documents, and of course, military might. 11 The question of the Régale required a legal information apparatus for collecting authentic documents to negotiate with Innocent s canon lawyers. Tracing the paperwork trail and the archival apparatus designed by Colbert and his information managers shows the growing importance of centralized state archives in Louis XIV s innovative administrative state. The Régale was only one subject amongst many in the state archives, yet it left a particularly rich trove of documents and correspondence about archival management. It illustrates the political importance of manipulating documentary evidence for public polemics about political authority. 12 What had begun in the Renaissance and developed 11 On the rise of historical authority in the realm of politics see Herbert Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (London, 1940), p. 61. The classic account is found in Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), I, pp and Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). Also see B. L Ullman, Leonardo Bruni and Humanist Historiography, Medievalia et Humanistica 4 (1946), 45-61; Myron Gilmore, Humanists and Jurists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York: St. Martin s Press, 1969); Eugenio Garin, Leggi, diritto e storia nelle discussioni dei seculi XV e XVI, in L età nouva: Ricerche di storia della cultura dal XII al XVI secolo (Naples, 1969); Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 3 and his Humanism and History, in Albert Rabil (ed.), Renaissance Humanism, (Philadelphia, 1988), ; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 5-46, and his Barbarism and Religion: The First Decline and Fall, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3, pp. 1-4; Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (Westport, Conn, 1997); J. H. M. Salmon, Cicero and Tacitus in Sixteenth-Century France, AHR 85 (1980), , reprinted in Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1987), pp Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1978), I, ; Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. xiii; Joseph Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); and Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), and his The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 1-33, Also see Wolfgang Weber, Prudentia gubernatoria: Studien zur Herrschaftslehre in der deutschen politischen Wissenschaft des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1992), pp. 1-9; and Jacob Soll, Healing the Body Politic: French Royal Doctors, History and the Birth of a Nation Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002), pp , and The Uses of Historical Evidence in Early Modern Europe Journal of the History of Ideas 64, 2 (2003), pp On the use of documentary evidence for politics see Peter N. Miller, Peiresc s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 85.

6 6 during the Counter-Reform had, by the reign of Louis XIV, developed into a state science of information handling techniques necessary for collecting, filing and retrieving up-todate information in a massive state policy archive to be used for rapid political response. 13 Gallicanism and Archives With a long and contentious history of legally defending its interests, in particular during the Counter-Reform, by the seventeenth century the church had developed rich storehouses of legal documentation. 14 A Borghese and a canon lawyer, pope Paul V ( ) had attempted to bring all Church archives to Rome to defend against the historical and legal attacks made by the Venetian legal expert and historian, Paolo Sarpi during the Interdict crisis of This conflict over ecclesiastical legal jurisdiction in Venice ended with Paul V excommunicating the entire Venetian republic. 15 Sarpi harnessed the considerable documentary evidence available to him in the ancient Venetian archives as weapons to attack the church s claims of secular imperium, in particular attacking the secular authority of the papacy with his popular History of the 13 For earlier examples of the use of historical documentation in public polemic see J. H. Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp ; and the pioneering work of Gary Ianziti, A Humanist Historian and His Sources: Giovanni Simonetta, Secretary to the Sforzas, Renaissance Quarterly 34 (1981), pp , and Humanistic Historiography Under the Sforzas: Politics and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Also see Marcello Simonetta, Rinascimento segreto: il mondo del segretario da Petrarca a Machiavelli (Milan: F. Angeli, 2004). 14 Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), pp William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp

7 7 Government of Venice (1619). 16 Powerless to impose the Interdict, but also humiliated by Sarpi s skillful historical and legal propaganda campaign, Paul was forced to respond with his own propaganda, but also ultimately to rescind the Interdict in The church was surrounded by legal attacks from Protestants and secular rulers and in response, Paul V did succeed in creating the centralized and secret Archivio Segreto of legal documents in the heart of the Vatican, in He commissioned Michele Lonigo da Este to create the first central catalogue of the Vatican collections, making data organization innovations years before the Venetians made a first catalog of their own secret archives in Urban VIII, a learned Barbarini with a bibliophile nephew, set out not only to create the greatest humanist library in the world, but also to collect eastern manuscripts, the ammunition for ideological wars inside and outside the walls of the Vatican. 18 Jesuittrained in the Collegio Romano (an information center in its own right), Urban VIII 16 See the remarkably well-documented intellectual biography by Ivone Cacciavillani, Paolo Sarpi (Venice: Corbo e Fiore Editore, 1997). Also see Filippo de Vivo, Le armi dell ambasciatore: Voci e manoscritti a Parigi durante l Interdetto di Venezia, in Lucia Strappini, ed., I luoghi dell imaginario barocco (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1999), pp ; and La publication comme enjeu polémique: Venise au début du XVIIe siècle, in Christian Jouhaud and Alain Viala, eds., De la publication (Paris: Fayard, 2002), pp Armand Baschet, Les Archives de Venise: Histoire de la Chancellerie Secrète (Paris: Henri Plon, 1870), pp Baschet s work is a model for my own. On Paul V s government see Birgit Emich s finely documented Bürokratie und Nepotismus unter Paul V. ( ): Studien zur Frühneuzeitlichen Mikropolitik in Rom (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 2001); the original source on the Archivio Segreto is Gaetano Marini, Memorie istoriche degli archivi della S. Sede, in Monumenta Vaticana, ed. by Hugo Laemmer (Freiburg: Herder, 1861), pp ; for a basic history see M. Gachard, Les Archives du Vatican (Bruxelles: C. Muquardt, 1874); for the first catalogue of the Archivio Segreto and the finest primary source bibliography on its conception see Franceso Gasparolo, Constituzione dell Archivio Vaticano e suo primo indice sotto il pontificato di Paolo V. Manoscritto inedito di Michele Lonigo, Studi e Documenti di Storia e Diritto 8 (1887), pp. 3-64; also see Louis Guérard, Petite Introduction aux Inventaires des Archives du Vatican (Rome: Libreria Spithöver, 1901); for a fine catalogue of catalogues see Karl August Fink, Das vatikansche Archiv. Einführung in de Bestände und ihre erforschung (Rome: W. Regenberg, 1951). For a light but informative overview of information, libraries and the papacy see Maria Luisa Ambrosini, The Secret Archives of the Vatican (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969). For the most recent overview on the foundations and holdings of the Archivio Segreto see Terzo Natalini, Sergio Pagano, and Aldo Martini, eds., Archivio Segreto Vaticano (Florence: Nardini Editore, 1991). 18 On the learned information bank of the papacy see Anthony Grafton, ed., Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture (Washington: Library of Congress, 1993).

8 8 continued Paul V s reform of the Vatican library and archives, but also reformed the internal workings of the state information system and the Secretariat of Briefs. 19 The church did not realize Paul V s overly ambitious dream of bringing the world network of archives of each diocese back to the seat of St. Peter. 20 Indeed, it would have been nearly impossible to centralize even the ecclesiastical archives of Italy, France and Spain, which would have come to Rome by the thousands of tons. Nevertheless, by 1644, the papacy had managed to build a remarkable collection of books and manuscripts. Any power hoping to legally challenge the Vatican s authority would have to match its mastery of legal, historical, and geographical information. Gallicanism sought to do just this. Gallican legal historians claimed French royal precedence over the powers of the papacy and worked in earnest against the legal edifice of ultramontane church powers. In simple terms, this meant matching document with document in a historical propaganda war, and in legal and diplomatic wrangling, most of which was done not by clerics, who were lukewarm on the policy, but by nationalist French magistrates. 21 From the mid-sixteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth 19 Judith Hook, Urban VIII: The Paradox of a Spiritual Monarchy, in The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage and Royalty , ed. by A. G. Dickens (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977); and Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 20 Jean Delumeau, Rome: Le progrès de la centralization dans l État pontifical au XVIe siècle, Revue Historique 226 (1961), pp ; Wolfgang Reinhard, Papstfinanz une Nepotismus unter Paul V. ( ): Studien und Quellen zur Struktur und zu quantitativen Aspekten des päpstlichen Herrschaftssystems (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1974); Peter Partner, The Pope s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp Paolo Prodi, Il sovrano pontifice, un corpo e due anime: la monarchia papale nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982); see also the English translation, The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls, The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe, trans. by Susan Haskins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp Peter Burke is the first to have placed the church at the center of a history of the modern information state in The Social History of Knowledge: A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp Also see his earlier, Sacred Rulers, Royal Priests: Rituals of the Early Modern Popes, in his Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 21 William F. Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941); Franklin Ford, Robe and Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XIV (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1962). On Gallicanism see Donald Kelley,

9 9 century, the Gallican movement had coalesced around a group of legal scholars, librarians, and historians such as René Choppin, Pierre de Marca, Gilles Le Maistre, Charles Dumoulin, Théodore Godefroy, Pierre Pithou, and the Dupuy brothers. The most notable work to emerge from this tradition was Pithou s Les libertez de l Église gallicane, 2 vols (Paris, 1639), later re-edited by the Dupuy brothers, based on their rich archival research and document collection and their work as royal librarians. They were independent scholars, members of the parliamentary magistracy, who by tradition worked to defend the crown with their legal and historical expertise and used their great document collections to defend Gallican and royal rights. The French monarchy, with no central state archive, depended on these legal scholars. Such was the nature of feudalism and the separation of powers of the ancient constitution. Legal, ecclesiastical, and feudal document management was one of the primary functions of the Parlements, the very essence of the service provided to the crown by Gallican scholars. They not only kept royal registers; they used them as sources for defense in these national and international disputes over precedence, tax rights and dominion. Gallicanism aligned the interests of the Parlements with the increasingly absolutist monarchy. There occurred between these competing though complimentary powers an entente in the sphere of information management. Remarkably, the crown let its foreign policy, propaganda and legal policies be managed by independent scholars issued from the ranks of the magistracy a corps which often Historia Integra: François Baudouin and his Conception of History, Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (1964), pp , Jean Du Tillet, Archivist and Antiquary, The Journal of Modern History 38 (1966), pp , and Fides historiae: Charles Dumoulin and the Gallican View of History, Traditio 22 (1966), pp

10 10 resisted and rebelled against royal authority. 22 As Louis XIV competed not only with the pope and members of his clergy, but also with the nobility and the Parlements in his quest for absolute, though legally legitimated power, he could no longer rely on this potentially critical and self-interested ally. Like the church, in the quest to achieve absolute power, the French crown would need its own central and secret policy archive. Colbert had sought to remedy this situation, not only by creating an archive which could be used to defend the state s interests, but also by replacing the independent Gallican historians with a corps of internal, bureaucratic scholars, men such as Foucault. 23 He built a massive library system that connected his collection and the Royal Library, which he essentially managed. Over twenty years, Colbert built these joint collections into one of the four biggest in Europe (along with the Vatican, the Austrian Imperial Library, and the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel). By 1683 at the height of the conflict over the Régale, the Royal Library, which was also a state archive, contained around 36,000 printed books and 10,500 manuscripts, and Colbert s own collection numbered some 23,000 printed books and 5,100 manuscripts. 24 Aside from sincere scholarly curiosity and prestige, the focus of this new collection was to defend national interests: the Dutch annexations, the Régale, and Spanish rights as well as the assertion of royal prerogative over the Parlements. Colbert thus set out to create a 22 Sylvie Daubresse, Le parlement de Paris, ou la voix de la raison (Geneva: Droz, 2005), p James E. King, Science and Rationalism in the Government of Louis XIV (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1949), pp On the relationship between Colbert s library and the Bibliothèque Royale see Jean Boivin, Mémoire pour l histoire de la Bibliothèque du Roy, , B. N. Ms. Fr , fols Simone Balayé, La Bibliothèque Nationale des origines à 1800 (Geneva: Droz, 1988), pp Denise Bloch, La bibliothèque de Colbert, in André Vernet, ed., Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, 4 vols. (Paris: Promodis, 1988), 2, pp The most nuanced study of Colbert s library and its relationship to policy is Stewart Saunders, Public Administration and the Library of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Libraries and Culture 26 (1991), pp

11 11 national, legal and financial database going to the various forms of document depots: charterhouses, Parliamentary registries, monasteries, and episcopal document collections, literally bringing tons of copied and often seized documents to his central policy archive. 25 Foucault played a major role in collecting documents; in their streamlining into legal codification; and in conceptualizing what the state would need to know by writing glossaries, and outlining state and legal paperwork, much of it feudal, canonic and arcane. 26 This made him all the more effective as a paperwork commissar, able to enter into archives and understand their workings, while finding the most pertinent documents for the master of the state s information web, Colbert. 27 In Colbert s quest to create a state archive for his own uses, he had his outside men: the collectors, copiers and even triage masters, such as Godefroy, a scholar from an old legal family who had served as royal documentarists for generations. 28 Godefroy was stuck with a massive triage of the Chambre de Comptes of Lille, looking for, copying, and bundling all the documents he could find on the topics of French claims to annexed 25 On the centralization of administrative archives see Nico Randeraad, ed., Formation and Transfer of Municipal Administrative Knowldege, Yearbook of European Administrative History 15 (2003), in particular, Wolfgang Weber, Herrschafts- und Verwaltungswissen in oberdeutschen Reichsstädten der Frühen Neuzeit, pp Nicolas-Joseph Foucault, Mémoires, ed. by F. Baudry (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1862), pp. cxviiicxxi. See Étienne Baluze s 1680 memo to Foucault: Mémoire sur les livres à retirer de l Abbaye de Moissac, in Colbert, Lettres, VI, pp Henri Omont, La Collection Doat à la Bibliothèque nationale, documents sur les recherches de Doat dans les archives du Sud-Ouest de la France de , Bibliothèque de l École des Chartes 77 (1916), pp ; Lothar Kolmer, Colbert und die Entstehung der Collection Doat, Francia 7 (1979), ; Jean-Loup Le Maitre, Les catalogues médiévaux et le pillage des bibliothèques languedociennes, in Jean-Louis Biget, ed., Livres et bibliothèques XIIIe-VIe siècles, in Cahiers de Fanjeaux 31 (Paris: Privat, n.a.), pp at Also see A. M. de Boislisle, Correspondance des Contrôleurs Généraux des Finances avec les Intendants des provinces, 3 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1874), I pp. i-xxiv. On the work of Peiresc, see Peter N. Miller, pp It was his personal expertise in the question of the Régale that also led him to collect all documents pertaining to it, thus leaving a particularly rich paperwork trail. 28 D. C. Godefroy-Menilglaise, Les Savants Godefroy: Mémoires d une famille (Paris: Didier, 1873), pp

12 12 Dutch territories, precedence over Hapsburgs, and regalian rights over ecclesiastical holdings and sending these sealed, secret portfolios back to Colbert. 29 More famous was Dom Jean Mabillon, who went through the Benedictine holdings at St. Germain-de-Près, writing inventories, identifying useful documents for the crown s interests in a documentary, legal and historical science which he called the re diplomatica: the proper handling of medieval paperwork. 30 While the Church, Spain, Venice, and the Austrians all possessed massive centralized archival holdings, only Colbert built a state archive from the ground up. No state had ever created from scratch an archive to mirror its political policy needs. To be sure, there were pro-active precedents. Philip II had attempted to manage all the paperwork of his planet kingdom, building a state archive at Simancas. But this project was one of containment. 31 It was an archival reaction to the mass of papers coming to the monarchy, and it ignored key financial data which was housed in separate archives. 29 On Godefroy s mission and the archival papers concerning it, see Jacob Soll, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp Colbert asked Godefroy to find him ecclesiastical documents pertaining to the Régale. See Colbert to Godefroy, 12 August, 1675, in Lettres, VII, pp Jean Mabillon worked for Colbert as a state medievalist, through his close relationship with Baluze. See for example B.N. Ms. Baluze 214, fol. 10. Émile Fage, Étienne Baluze. Sa vie, ses ouvrages, son exil, sa defense (Tulle: Crauffon, 1899), p. 91; Emmanuel de Broglie, Mabillon et la Société de L abbaye de Saint- Germain des Près, 2 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1888), I, pp. 55-7; Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Les historiens et la monarchie. Jean Mabillon, 4 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), I, pp Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp ; Burke, A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 119; Fernando Bouza Álvarez, Leer en palacio. De aula gigantium a museo de reyes sabios, in María Luisa López-Vidriero and Pedro M. Cátedra, eds., El libro antiguo español (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1996), pp On Simancas archives, their origins, and organization see José Luis Rodríguez de Diego and Francisco Javier Alvarez Pinedo, Los Archivos de Simancas (Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, 1993); and Rodríguez de Diego, ed., Instrucción para el gobierno del archivo de Simancas (año 1588) (Madrid: Dirección General de Bellas Artes y Archivos, 1989), and La formación del Archivo de Simancas en el siglo xvi. Función y orden interno, in López Vidriero and Cátedra, El libro antiguo español IV ( Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1998), pp Richard Kagan, Arcana Imperii: Mapas, Sabiduría, y Poder a la corte de Felipe IV, in El atlas del Rey Planeta, eds. Fernando Marías y Felipe Pereda (Madrid: Editorial Nerea, 2002), pp And David C. Goodman, Power and Penury: Government, Technology and Science in Philip II s Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 4.

13 13 Philip II s archive was not organized as a political war room, where information was instantaneously interpreted by a large team, followed by rapid propaganda and management response. During the same period of the sixteenth century, the great merchant Fugger family had created an up-to-date information and news archive, housed alongside its library in their house on the Maximilianstraße in Augsburg. 32 It had regularized account books and newsletters, as well as learned works and reports brought from its trading empire. As bankers, they needed to be able to respond to volatile financial and trade markets. No large state, however, had built an effective archive for daily government and overall state administration. That was Colbert s innovation. 33 He merged his personal library with that of the king and began filling the dual collection with relevant documents from the great archival campaigns of Foucault, Doat, and Godefroy. Like the Fuggers, Colbert kept account books, news reports and learned documents together. He kept around one hundred policy notebooks on topics such as trade with England, Spanish nobles, foreign policy under Mazarin, and the Régale. 34 The end of the seventeenth century is associated with the rise of Enlightened skepticism and even Spinozist atheism as philosophical tracts spread across Europe, 32 See Victor von Klarwill, ed., The Fugger News-Letters, 2 vols., trans. by L. S. R. Byrne (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1926). On the remarkable humanist Fugger library and its network see Paul Lehmann, Eine Geschichte der alten Fuggerbibliotheken (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1956), pp. Johannes Kleinpaul, Die Fuggerzeitungen (Walluf bei Wiesbaden: M. Sändig, 1972). For an outline of the giant Fugger network, see Richard Ehrenberg, Le siècle des Fugger, trans. and ed. by Lucien Febvre (Paris: SEVPEN, 1955). On the Fugger knowledge and information network, see Hermann Kellenbenz, Die Fugger in Spanien und Portugal bis 1560: Ein Großunternehmen des 16. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Ernst Vögel, 1990). Mark A. Meadow, Merchants and Marvels: Hans Jacob Fugger and the Origins of the Wunderkammer, in Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. Also see the light but useful compilation, George T. Matthews, ed., News and Rumor in Renaissance Europe: The Fugger Newsletters (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959). 33 Depping, I, p. ii. 34 Charles de La Roncière and Paul-M. Bondois, Catalogue des Manuscrits de la Collection des Mélanges de Colbert (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1920), pp

14 14 eating away at royal and religious authority, while Newton created the building blocks for natural deism and the rise of scientific authority. 35 Colbert s library took into account of the importance of the natural sciences: Colbert founded the Académie Royale des Sciences and he hired the mathematician, Pierre Carcavy, to manage to the Royal Library. And while Colbert was not concerned with skeptical philosophy, he was fascinated by one of its primary tools. Antiquarianism was both an archeological and documentary science based on authentic proofs. 36 Colbert shared the antiquarian preoccupation with proof, the foundation of experimental, Baconian science. His primary concern, aside from war and taxes, was the relationship between religion and royal authority a relationship that hinged on legal and historical documentation. 37 Carcavy had managed Colbert s private library until 1666, and during this time, Colbert often asked him for documents pertaining to religious rights and exemptions within France. 38 Once royal librarian, Carcavy helped organize the collection of monastic documents, as well as eastern manuscripts, many of which pertained to papal rights and Protestant claims. 39 To manage his own library, the hub of his information 35 See the defining work, Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Martin Mulsow, Moderne aus dem untergrund: radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 2002). 36 For the most detailed history of antiquarianism and state building, see Miller, chapter 3, The Ancient Constitution and the Antiquarian, pp ; and Grafton, The Footnote, pp Also see the classic work, Arnaldo Momigliano, Ancient History and the Antiquarian, in his Studies in Historiography (London: Harper, 1966), pp Also see Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp Colbert had had early dealings with the papacy, negotiating papal bulls in 1671, before he had the use of his full archive. See Colbert to the Bishop of Laon in Rome during the year 1671, in Depping, IV, pp Lettres, VI, p Ibid., VII, pp Henri Omont s rich source collection, which contains all of Colbert s correpondence on the topic: Missions archéologiques. Pierre Burger, Quand il en trouve qui savent quelque chose. Sur les informateurs orientaux en Europe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, in Alain

15 15 web, and the seat of his political power, in 1666 Colbert hired Étienne Baluze, a scholar skilled in copying and cataloguing medieval documents, but also expert in questions pertaining to the Régale. Actively overseeing Baluze and his research assistant, the abbé Gallois, Colbert became a master of ecclesiastic law and history, and wrote Louis XIV s Déclaration pour la Régale in Étienne Baluze and the Mechanics of Searching for Information in a Policy Archive Baluze had worked as the secretary of Bishop Pierre de Marca. A Gallican par excellence, de Marca was from an old legal family, versed in ecclesiastical erudition. He was President of the Parlement of Pau, in the Protestant Béarn region on the Pyrenees, where he worked against the Reformed faith with such zeal that Richelieu appointed him royal Intendant of the region in An expert on canon law, Louis XIII and Richelieu had asked de Marca to defend Gallican claims. He became a member of the Conseil d État in 1639 and finally bishop of Couserans in The same year, he published his learned defense of regalian rights and an explanation of the relations between the church and the French state, the Concordia sacerdotii et imperii seu de libertatibus ecclesiae gallicanae (1641), which formed the basis of Louis s future Gallican declarations. De Marca was not only politically astute, rising through the ranks of Parlement, the Church and royal hierarchy; he was also an avid collector of manuscripts, which he used to formulate his historical and ecclesiastical treatises, a necessity in the litigious world of Counter-Reformation theological and legal sniping, as well as in relation to Rouaud, ed., Les orientalistes sont des aventuriers: Guirlande offerte à Joseph Tubiana par ses élèves et ses amis (Paris: INALCO, 1999), pp

16 16 episcopal land-holdings. De Marca hired Baluze to manage his papers and help him compose his works. When de Marca died in 1662, Colbert hired Baluze to bring the papers and his expertise to the service of Colbert s burgeoning information apparatus in the new library complex. 40 Baluze had helped write de Marca s Concordia sacerdotii et imperii, doing the archival labor for the great prelate, and managing his library and papers. 41 It was this work that caught Colbert s eye. The book bore Baluze s erudite mark, and mustered detailed documentary evidence; clear textual references; and citations of capitularies, charters, and eastern and Hebrew manuscripts in defense of royal rights. This was precisely the sort of legal and historical scholarship that Louis XIV needed to defend his rights. Arthur de Boislisle called it erudition d état. 42 Colbert now needed Baluze to do for him what he had done for de Marca on a much larger scale. He needed Baluze to carry out document searches in the archives to assure that French documentation of claims was superior to all others. He also needed internal inventories and secret histories, glossaries, and reading guides which would not only inform Colbert in his negotiations and reports to the king, which also allowed him to weed through the tons of ecclesiastical diplomatica in his new archives A few de Marca documents are found in the Colbert collection, but the rest are in the Collection Baluze. It is clear that Baluze used his collection integrally with that of Colbert as long as he worked for the Colbertine until the death of Seignelay in In B. N. Ms. Mélanges Colbert 3, fols. 310 onwards are documents from the time of Seignelay. 41 He makes detailed reference to it on a number of occasions. See Colbert, Lettres, VI, Mémoire au roi sur la Régale, 1675, pp at Boislisle, pp. xxi-ii. 43 Lettres, Mémoire au roi, VI, p. 116.

17 17 As Stewart Saunders meticulously illustrated, Colbert organized his library into an up-to-date information and propaganda machine. 44 Baluze managed the library in its finances, acquisitions and staff, down to the purchasing of reams of paper (the greatest expenditure besides books, used for copying, the main process of manuscript acquisition), as well as brooms, maps, locks, coal, rags, rugs, cabinets, armoires, maps, orbs, curtains and most importantly, repairs on the clock, for Colbert, trained as an accountant, liked all his employees to clock their hours. 45 Like the Fuggers, he insisted his collection be upto-date. The library was to acquire all new publications and archival discoveries, in particular in relation to topics of immediate concern, such as Jansenism. 46 Baluze s job was to be familiar enough with this library to find documents at short notice: In my library there must be a portfolio in which are found the treaties made between our kings and England, with diverse memoirs written in my hand on these treaties and on commerce. I beg Monsieur Baluze to find me this portfolio and to send it to me; in the case that he does not find it, he must nonetheless send me all the treaties concerning England See Saunders in general. 45 See Fage in general. 46 Ibid, VII, p. 73, Colbert to Baluze, 18 October, 1673: Je prie M. Baluze de verifier si j ay dans ma bibliothèque tous les livres qui ont esté annoncés par le Journal des Savans, depuis cinq ou six ans, et de m en envoyer un mémoire bien exacte Je serais ayse aussy d avoir une copie du catalogue de tous les livres qui sont dans ma bibliothèque qui ont esté faits pour et contre le Jansénisme, avec un mémoire de tous ceux qui me manquent, en cas qu il le sçache. 47 Colbert to Baluze, March 23, 1672, in Lettres, VII, p. 59: Il doit y avoir dans ma bibliothèque un portefeuille dans lequel sont tous les traités faits entre nos rois et l Angleterre, avec divers mémoires, écrits de ma main, sur ces traités et sur le commerce. Je prie M. Baluze de chercher ce portefeuille et de me l envoyer; au cas qu il ne le trouve point, il faut toujours m envoyer tous les traités d Angleterre. This request was related to the legal, historical minutiae of trade negotiations with England in See the Demandes faites pas les commissaires de la Grande-Bretagne pour le traité de commerce, et réponses du Roy de France, Lettres, II, part 2, p The portfolios Colbert refers to are B.N. Ms. Mélanges Colbert 11, fols ; 34, 38, 39 and 40. The Projet du traité de commerce entre la France et l Angleterre, avec les remarques de l ambasssadeur de France à Londres et quelques notes de Colbert, October 9, 1669, is a working copy of the trade treaty written from these documents, in Lettres, II, pp ; For Colbert s correspondence with Baluze concerning bibliographical references see B. N. Ms. Baluze 362, fols

18 18 Colbert became angry when documents he needed were not readily available. And he railed at Baluze when books were not on their place on the shelves. 48 Every three months, reprimanded Colbert, you must give me a memoir of all the books that have left my library. 49 He then asked Baluze to track every book and manuscript that had left his library, even those lent to his brother, the ambassador to England. Colbert even put a coach an early form of the company car at Baluze s disposal to expedite the project. 50 The demand that the collection be constantly intact was mixed with the desire for totality. If Colbert was to create the most complete and up-to-date information archive, it had to be usable, and total. Therefore nothing could be missing and all references had to be immediately accessible. Colbert sent Baluze to find relevant legal documents that pertained to specific religious and legal questions, such as in 1672, when Colbert sent Baluze document hunting in two of the richest monastic archives in Paris to find materials for Foucault: I beg Monsieur Baluze to research with care all the papal bulls and letters of patent from the two congregations of Sainte-Geneviève and Saint-Maur, and put them in my library. I will send him those that I already have, so he can look for similar ones, and when he finds them, he will give them to Monsieur Foucault Colbert reprimands Baluze for lending manuscripts to Colbert s son Seignelay without express permission and without noting this fact. Colbert to Baluze, July, 1672, Lettres, VII, p. 63: Vous jugerez vous-mesme assez facilement qu il faut qu une bibliothèque périsse avec le temps, si elle n est pas mieux et plus soigneusement conservée. 49 Ibid, VII, p. 63, note Ibid., p Colbert, Lettres, VII, p. 62, Colbert to Baluze, June 14, 1672: Je prie M. Baluze de rechercher avec soin toutes les bulles et lettres patentes des deux congrégations de Sainte-Geneviève et de Saint-Maur, pour les mettre dans ma bibliothèque. Je luy envoye celles que j ay, pour en chercher de pareilles; et quand il les aura trouvées, il rendra celles-cy à M. Foucault.

19 19 Baluze s mission was different from past Gallican document collectors working for the crown. Figures such as the Dupuy brothers had created large collections. Colbert, however, did not want to farm out the administration of state information to extra-royal institutions and scholars. Indeed, to his bane, in the realm of finance, Colbert was obliged to rely on external and unreliable tax-farmers. 52 In the realm of the state archives, however, he could impose direct field administration. He wanted a total collection controlled and sealed by the state; and he wanted the scholars to answer directly to his orders. If Colbert could not possess papers, he asked Baluze to go find the documents, copy, or catalogue them. In 1677, when Baluze published his study of medieval royal capitularies, History of the Capitularies of the French Kings of the First and Second Dynasties, he boasted about the new totality of the collection which outstripped the efforts of earlier Gallican scholars, listing all the libraries and archives he had visited to research, and explaining how he verified and collated as many documents as he could. 53 He only complained that the Austrians had not let him into the Imperial Library of 52 Charles Woolsey Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 2 vols. 9New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), I. p. 425; Daniel Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société au Grand Siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1984), pp Étienne Baluze, Capitularia regum Francorum (Paris: François Muguet, 1677). I refer to the translation: Histoire des Capitulaires des Rois François sous le premier et seconde race sur l édition de 1677 (La Haye, 1755), pp : Manuscrits des Bibliothèques du Roi, du Vatican, de Colbert, de Thou, Bigot, Mazarin, du Tillet, Alby, Poitiers, Corbye, Moissac, St. Lomer, St. Gal, S. Vincent de Metz, S. Vincent de Laon, S. Remi de Reims, des Monastères d Aniane et de Rivipullensis, de Philibert de la Marre, Conseiller à Dijon, du Collège de Navarre à Paris, de l Académie d Helmsted, de laquelle Hermand Conringius, Joachim, Jean Maderes ont ces varietés, et m en ont gratifié, j ai disséqué plusieurs excellens Manuscrits du Collège de Louis le Grand; j ai profité de ceux de Pierre Pithou et Jerôme Bignon; l exemplaire de ce dernier avait d abord appartenu à Jean-Antoine l Escure et acheté de ses heritiers par Claude d Expilli: plusieurs passages de du Tillet décélent qu il lui a été fructueux, son habitude étant d écrire de sa main au dessus des lignes les corrections qu il substituait au texte. J ai enfin mis au jour et purgé les Réglemens de Charlemagne et Louis le Debonnaire, accordés aux espagnols à l aide d un Manuscrit antique qui repose dans les Archives de Narbonne.

20 20 Vienna, which is not surprising considering their conflicts with Louis and their obvious awareness of Colbert s archival project. 54 Baluze used this mastery of the archives to enter into a long historical argument. His history of French capitularies attacked the great defender of papal authority, the Vatican Librarian and historian, cardinal Caesar Baronius ( ). Baronius had designed his Annales ecclesiastici ( ) to fend off the earlier heavily documented attack on Church rights made by Mathias Flacius s archival research team which had put together the massive Protestant historical work, The Magdeburg Centuries ( ). 55 Working for the Catholic French king, Baluze attacked Baronius and justified the claims of the Régale while insisting that the publication of laws was the secular prerogative of princes. 56 He also made a point about information, one which had become clear in the struggle around the Magdeburg Centuries: Capitularies, he maintained, were the legal essence of imperium, the arms with which to win such disputes, and therefore had to be preserved by kings in response to the archival mastery of the papacy. 57 The legal and historical information arms race sparked by the Reformation and Counter-Reform had now evolved into the basis of modern state administration and a cornerstone of centralized state archival systems. This is precisely the reason Leibniz, now head 54 Ibid., p Grafton, The Footnote, p On the same page, also see Grafton s footnote 23 on the Magdeburg Centuries. Also see Gregory B. Lyon, Baudouin, Flacius, and the Plan for the Magdeburg Centuries, Journal of the History of Ideas 64, 2 (2003), pp Baluze, Capitulaires, pp Ibid., p. 97.