Richter BU Collection

The Antonelli Collection

This collection comprises 14,000 books, brochures, and periodicals from the^19thand^20thcenturies, primarily on law and economics, bequeathed by Étienne Antonelli to the Montpellier School of Law, along with the archives of the French economistsAuguste WalrasandLéon Walras.

Professor and politician

Étienne Antonelli(Valencia, Spain, August 24, 1879 – Montpellier, March 7, 1971) was a French professor and politician.

After excelling in his law studies, he defended his two dissertations in 1905 and 1906 and began an academic career at the Montpellier Law School, which continued in Paris and then, in 1913, in Poitiers. He quickly developed an interest in economics as a mathematical discipline and published a book in 1914 titled *Principles of Pure Economics*. He served as a professor in Lyon from 1919 to 1924, when he was elected to the National Assembly. After his defeat in 1932, he resumed his academic career at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris (1932–1934), then in Montpellier from 1934 to 1952. He was also a member ofthe Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Lettersfrom 1942 to 1971.

He was also interested in politics and was one of the founders of the Committee for Social Democracy in 1906. In 1924, he was elected to the National Assembly from Haute-Savoie on the Cartel of the Left ticket and joined the SFIO caucus. He specialized in social issues and was the true architect of the first law on mandatory social insurance, passed in 1928. After losing his re-election bid in 1932, he left politics.

A legacy with diverse content

Étienne Antonelli, a professor of law and economics, bequeathed his personal library to the Montpellier School of Law upon his death in 1971.

The collection comprises approximately 14,000 items (4,000 books, 1,700 brochures, and 8,300 periodical issues) from the^19thand^20thcenturies (1694–1971), covering the fields of law, economics, and the social sciences, as well as literature (occupying 140 linear meters of shelving), along with a portrait of Professor Antonelli, likely painted by Ernest Touard.

This collection includes works and archives by the French economists Auguste Walras (1801–1866) and Léon Walras (1834–1910), which were entrusted to Étienne Antonelli by Léon Walras’s daughter, Aline, after his death so that he could edit his father’s correspondence. To this end, she retrieved part of Léon Walras’s archives and manuscripts—which had been entrusted to the University of Lausanne—and handed them over to Professor Antonelli.

This subcollection contains:
– works by the Walras family or that once belonged to them, including *De la nature de la richesse et de l’origine de la valeur* (Paris, 1831), annotated byJean-Baptiste Sayand Léon Walras;
– manuscripts, lecture notes, and correspondence by Auguste and Léon Walras
– Étienne Antonelli’s correspondence regarding the scholarly publication of Walras’s papers.

The Académie Fund

The fund

The Library of the Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters

The Interuniversity Library safeguards the exceptional scientific and cultural heritage of this illustrious institution with a rich history; it holds 50,000 books, brochures, and periodicals dating from^{the 18th century}to the present day, whose wide range of subjects reflects the three sections of the Academy itself, and more than half of which are in foreign languages. This collection is housed at the Law, Economics, and Management Library (Richter Library).

Website of the Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters

A distinguished institution

Originally founded by Louis XIV in 1706 as the Royal Society of Sciences—forty years after its predecessor,the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris—it played an active role in the intellectual life of its time, notably by contributing to the compilation ofDiderot and D’Alembert’s *Encyclopédie*.

It was dissolved in September 1793, and its collections (2,500 to 3,000 volumes) were confiscated. A large portion was scattered or stolen, while some books were carefully salvaged by members of the academy. The remainder, made available by the government to the city of Montpellier in 1806, is currently housed atthe Émile Zola Central Library.

From this period, the Richter University Library holds only the minutes of the public meetings and the two volumes of the *History of the Royal Society of Sciences*, published in 1766 and 1768. The Historical Library of Medicine, for its part, holds five handwritten volumes of papers—known as the “Poitevin collections,” named after their author Jacques Poitevin—covering the period from 1777 to 1782.

In 1795, the institution was secretly revived under the name Société libre des Sciences et Belles-lettres de Montpellier and expanded its research areas to include the humanities. Despite counting illustrious figures among its members (Jean-Antoine Chaptal,Jean-Jacques de Cambacérès,Augustin Pyrame deCandolle, andPaul-Joseph Barthès), it ceased to exist in 1816.

Its short-lived existence, set against a turbulent historical backdrop, prevented the accumulation of a substantial collection. It is not known what became of its modest library, which was evidently dispersed. All that remains today is the catalog, preservedat the Hérault Departmental Archives in Pierresvives, and the complete six-volume series of the Society’s publications from 1803 to 1814, available at the Richter University Library.

The Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters was foundedunder its current name in 1846. Focusing on the sciences, the humanities, and medicine, it established a library that, in 1921, was transferred to the Central Library of the University of Montpellier under an agreement, which was updated in 2014 with the Interuniversity Library.

Since then, the collections have been managed by the Academy’s two librarians and the head of special collections at the Richter University Library, where they are preserved, cataloged, made available, and promoted.

The Geddes Collection

Originating from the Libraryof the Collège des Ecossais, the collection held at the Richter University Library consists of approximately 360 books out of the 1,350 that made up the original donation. This collection, which focuses on politics, consists mainly of works in French and English dating from the 1850s to 1940; it is available in the BIU catalog. The remaining works are located at the Sciences Library and, primarily, at the Humanities Library in Montpellier.
An exhibition on this collection, titled “Patrick Geddes: Portrait of a Traveling Mind Through His Library,” was held in 2012 at the Richter University Library.

A man with many interests
Patrick Geddes(Ballater, Scotland, 1854 – Montpellier, 1932) was a biologist and pioneer of the theory of symbiosis, to the point of being hailed as the “Scottish Darwin.”
A political activist, he was also a theorist of active education, environmental concepts in urban planning, and urban development. As the designer of Tel Aviv’s master plan and the founder of a highly influential school of urban thought—of whichthe École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Montpellier(ENSAM) is one of many heirs—he spent the last eight years of his life in Montpellier, where he founded an internationally oriented institution of higher education in 1924 called the Collège des Écossais.

The "Vues d’Optique" Collection

86 optical views of Paris and London, in which magnifying lenses create an impression of depth, depicting urban and rural landscapes, monuments, and events.
An exhibition featuring this collection, titled “The World in Perspective: Views and Optical Illusions in the Age of Enlightenment,” was held in 2014 (September 20–October 31).

Remains of the physics collection from the Faculty of Sciences in Montpellier
The history of this collection is unclear. It is believed to have belonged to the physics collection ofthe Faculty of Sciences in Montpellier. It was likely preserved for educational purposes to teach the laws of optics and perspective. The viewing device that would have accompanied it has not been found.
In 2014,the Occitanie Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairspublished a book in the Duo collection titled*The World in Perspective: Optical Views in the Age of Enlightenment. The Montpellier Collections of Optical Views at the Château de Flaugergues*.

86 original^18th-centuryengravings
This collection consists of 86 Parisian and London optical views dating from the 1740s to the 1760s. These views are intaglio engravings hand-colored with gouache or watercolor.
Half of the views (those of English origin) were mounted on cardboard to allow viewing in optical devices such aszoetropes orfairground viewing boxes. They were displayed in very different settings: aristocratic salons and public squares where street vendors set up shop. The caption, located below the image, was cut out and pasted onto the back of the cardboard or copied by hand. A thick black border was painted around the edges to accentuate the contrast. Two of them are “transformation” views: the backing boards are hollowed out to allow light to pass through in certain places, enabling viewing in “fairground boxes” with backlighting.
The other half, consisting mainly of views created in Paris, is colored but neither trimmed nor mounted. The title can therefore be seen upside down, a characteristic of optical views.
The themes of these views are very varied: urban and rural landscapes, monuments, and events (the 1720 plague in Marseille, fireworks during festivities, etc.).
This collection was restored and reconditioned by the conservation-restoration workshop of the Interuniversity Documentary Cooperation Service and individually cataloged in the collective catalog of higher education (Sudoc).
These views have also been digitized by the photography and digitization workshops, and the reproductions are available for viewing via the Foli@ digital library of the Universities of Montpellier.

The Barthélémy Collection

2,500 works from^{the19th and20th centuries}—many of them bound—on religion, philosophy, literature, history, and art history.

A religious collection—and much more
This collection was donated after the death of Henri Auguste François Barthélémy and added to the Central Library of the University of Montpellier on November 12, 1942, according to the handwritten register from that time.

Clergyman and Academician:
Henri Auguste François Barthélémy (Béziers, February 3, 1871–Montpellier, June 11, 1942) was first ordained a priest (June 1901) and served as an assistant pastor at Saint-Joseph in Sète, then at Saint-Nazaire in Béziers; then as chaplain at Sacré-Cœur in Montpellier (1920), parish priest of Olonzac (1925), and of Saint-Joseph in Sète (1932).
Appointed vicar general of the Diocese of Montpellier and titular canon (1939), he was also a member ofthe Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters from1941 to 1942, in the Literature section (though he never took his seat there).
This highly cultured man amassed 2,500 documents from^{the19th and20th centuries}on religion, philosophy, literature, history, and art history.
In his eulogy for Barthélémy, delivered by his successor to his seat atthe Academy of Sciences and Letters of Montpellierin 1942, Paul Rimbaud said, “The collection as a whole reveals the eclecticism of a scholar whose erudition was crowned by piety.”

The Wehrmacht Collection

This collection consists of 700 books, mostly in German, published between 1829 and 1944. It consists of light reading and leisure literature—though in line with the regime’s ideology—as well as a few works of Nazi propaganda.

A legacy of World War II:
When it left in 1944, the German Military Circle—which had been based at the Montpellier Institute of Biology during World War II—abandoned its recreational library. François Pitangue, curator of the University’s Central Library, then obtained permission from the French Forces of the Interior to take possession of it.
Excerpt from a letter from Mr. Pitangue to the rector of the Academy, October 23, 1944:“The vast majority, given their propagandistic nature, will of course be placed in the Reserve section of the central library and will not, until circumstances or a sufficiently long period of time permit, be made available to readers.”
The current collection likely does not represent the entirety of the original corpus of this Soldatenbücherei. Although there is no evidence to confirm this, it is possible that some titles were lost after the German army abandoned the collection following the Liberation, as well as at a later date.

A rare exampleof a Soldatenbücherei(soldiers’ library):
This collection consists of approximately 700 books, mostly in German, published between 1829 and 1944. Apart from standard reference works (dictionaries, glossaries, and language learning guides), most of the books are novels or short stories, some of which are very well-known; the collection includes works by Goethe, Theodor Storm, and Joseph Martin Bauer. This is literature intended for entertainment and leisure, but it conforms to the regime: the “Blut und Boden” (“blood and soil”) ideology appears to dominate. However, works of Nazi doctrine proper are rare; notable exceptions include Rosenberg’s work (call number W 560) andHitler’s *Mein Kampf*(call number W 437).
Furthermore, it is reasonable to assume that certain titles in this collection—written by opponents of the regime or considered as such—could not have been part of a Soldatenbücherei organized by the Wehrmacht (for example, the great writer Thomas Mann, who was stripped of his German citizenship and emigrated to the United States).
The only titles known with certainty to have been part of the “Wehrmacht Library” are those bearing provenance stamps from the Nazi regime or from public libraries of the time, whose titles were screened and approved by the regime’s authorities.

There are several origin stamps:

•     "Bremen District of the NSDAP"
•     "Stationsbücherei Nord"
•     "Städtische Volksbücherei (Berlin)"
•     “Alfred Rosenberg Donation to the German Wehrmacht, 1939–1941.” This refers to a donation made by Alfred Rosenberg, a high-ranking official in the Nazi regime and a close associate of Hitler. As the Party’s ideologue, he wrote doctrinal workssuch as *Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts*; although appointed Minister for the Eastern Territories during the war, he had no real influence, as actual political and military power eluded him.

To ensure its portability, this library was stored in numbered transport crates specially designed for this purpose by the German Navy. An examination of the crates led to the hypothesis that they had been shipped by the Navy High Command in Berlin and were subsequently transferred from Berlin to the library of the naval base command in Wilhelmshaven (a port on the North Sea in Germany), passing through Leipzig and then perhaps by ship, likely to Sète (where the German navy was stationed).
The preserved books, along with four of their original transport crates (there were likely about ten originally), are a rare testament toa Soldatenbücherei.