BU Richter Fund

The Antonelli Fund

This collection brings together 14,000 books, brochures, and periodicals from the^19thand^20thcenturies, mainly on law and economics, bequeathed by Étienne Antonelli to the Faculty of Law of Montpellier, along with archives from 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 theses in 1905 and 1906 and began an academic career at the Faculty of Law in Montpellier, which continued in Paris and then, in 1913, in Poitiers. He quickly became interested in economics in its mathematical form and in 1914 published a work entitled Principes d'économie pure (Principles of Pure Economics). He was a professor in Lyon from 1919 to 1924, when he was elected to the French 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 Comité de Démocratie Sociale (Social Democracy Committee) in 1906. In 1924, he was elected deputy for Haute-Savoie on the Cartel des Gauches list and joined the SFIO group. He specialized in social issues and was the driving force behind the first law on compulsory social insurance in 1928. Defeated in the 1932 elections, he left political life.

A legacy with varied contents

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

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

This collection includes works and archives belonging to French economists Auguste Walras (1801–1866) and Léon Walras (1834–1910), which were entrusted to Étienne Antonelli by Léon Walras's daughter Aline after her father's death so that he could publish his correspondence. To do this, she took some of Léon Walras' archives and manuscripts that had been entrusted to the University of Lausanne and gave them to Professor Antonelli.

This sub-collection contains:
– works by or belonging to the Walras family, including De la nature de la richesse et de l’origine de la valeur (On the Nature of Wealth and the Origin of Value), Paris, 1831, annotated byJean-Baptiste Sayand Léon Walras;
– manuscripts, lecture notes, and correspondence from Auguste and Léon Walras
– correspondence from Étienne Antonelli concerning the scientific publication of Walras's papers.

The Academy Fund

The fund

The Library of the Academy of Sciences and Letters of Montpellier

The Interuniversity Library safeguards the exceptional scientific and cultural heritage of this illustrious institution with its rich history, comprising 50,000 books, brochures, and periodicals dating from^{the 18th century}to the present day. The variety of topics covered reflects the three sections of the Academy itself, and more than half of the documents are in foreign languages. This collection is kept at the Law, Economics, and Management Library (BU Richter).

Website of the Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters

A distinguished institution

First established as the Royal Society of Sciences by Louis XIV in 1706, forty years after its predecessor,the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, it played an active role in the intellectual life of its time, notably contributing to the development 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 part was scattered or stolen, while some books were reverently recovered by academics. The remainder, made available by the State to the city of Montpellier in 1806, is currently housed inthe Emile Zola central media library.

From this period, only the minutes of public meetings and the two volumes of the History of the Royal Society of Sciences published in 1766 and 1768 are preserved at the Richter University Library. The BU Historique de Médecine (History of Medicine Library) has five handwritten volumes of memoirs, 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 (Free Society of Science and Literature of Montpellier) and added the humanities to its fields of research. Despite the presence of illustrious figures in its ranks (Jean-Antoine Chaptal,Jean-Jacques de Cambacérès,Augustin Pyrame deCandolle, and Paul-Joseph Barthès), it ceased to exist in 1816.

His short life, in a troubled historical context, did not allow him to build up a large collection. The fate of his modest library, which was evidently dispersed, remains unknown. All that remains today is the catalog preservedin the Hérault departmental archives in Pierresvives andthe complete series of the Society's publications from 1803 to 1814 in six volumes, available at the Richter University Library.

The Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters was foundedunder its current name in 1846. Covering science, literature, and medicine, it built up a library which, in 1921, was deposited at the Central Library of the University of Montpellier by agreement, updated in 2014 with the Interuniversity Library.

Since then, the collections have been managed by the Academy's two librarians and the head of specialized collections at the Richter University Library, where they are stored, cataloged, shared, and promoted.

The Geddes Fund

Originating from the Libraryof the Scottish College, the collection held at the Richter University Library comprises approximately 360 books out of the 1,350 that made up the initial donation. This collection, which deals with politics, consists mainly of works in French and English dating from the 1850s to the 1940s; it is available in the BIU catalog. The other works are held at the Sciences University Library and, above all, at the Letters University Library in Montpellier.
An exhibition on this collection, entitled "Patrick Geddes, portrait of a traveling mind through his library," was held in 2012 at the Richter University Library.

A man of many interests
Patrick Geddes(Ballater, Scotland, 1854 – Montpellier, 1932) was a biologist who pioneered the theory of symbiosis, to the point of being referred to as the "Scottish Darwin."
A political activist, he was also a theorist of active education, environmental concepts in urban planning, and urban programming. Designer of the Tel Aviv plan and founder of a highly influential school of urban thought, of whichthe National School of Architecture of Montpellier(ENSAM) is one of many heirs, he spent the last eight years of his life in Montpellier, where in 1924 he founded an international higher education institution called the Collège des Écossais.

The optical views collection

86 Parisian and London optical views, to which magnifying lenses give an impression of depth, depicting urban or rural landscapes, monuments, and events.
An exhibition on this collection, entitled "The World in Perspective: Optical Views and Recreations in the Age of Enlightenment," was held in 2014 (September 20-October 31).

Remains of the physics cabinet of the Faculty of Sciences of Montpellier
There is no certainty about the history of this collection. It is believed to have belonged to the physics cabinet ofthe Faculty of Sciences of Montpellier. It would have been 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 for Cultural Affairspublished a book in the Duo collection entitled:Le monde en perspective. Vues d’optique au siècle des Lumières. Les collections montpelliéraines de vues d’optique au château de Flaugergues(The worldin perspective. Opticalviews in the Age of Enlightenment. The Montpelliercollections of opticalviews at the Château de Flaugergues).

86 original engravings from^{the 18th century}
This collection consists of 86 optical views of Paris and London dating from 1740 to 1760. These views are intaglio engravings colored by hand with gouache or watercolor.
Half of them (views of English origin) were mounted on cardboard so that they could be viewed in optical devices such aszoetropes orfairground boxes. They were displayed in very different settings: aristocratic salons and public squares where peddlers set up shop. The caption, located below the image, was cut out and glued to 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" images: the cardboard backing is hollowed out to allow light to pass through in certain places and enable viewing in "fairground boxes" with backlighting.
The other half, consisting mainly of views taken in Paris, is colored but neither trimmed nor mounted. The title can therefore be seen upside down, which is characteristic of optical views.
The themes of these views are very varied: urban or rural landscapes, monuments and events (the plague of 1720 in Marseille, fireworks during festivities, etc.).
This collection has been restored and reconditioned by the conservation-restoration workshop of the Interuniversity Documentary Cooperation Service, and cataloged individually in the collective catalog of higher education (Sudoc).
These views have also been digitized by the photography workshop and the digitization workshop, and the reproductions can be viewed via the Foli@ digital library of the Universities of Montpellier.

The Barthélémy Fund

2,500 works from^{the19th and20th centuries}, often 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 of the time.

Man of the church and academician:
Henri Auguste François Barthélémy (Béziers, February 3, 1871-Montpellier, June 11, 1942) was first ordained as a priest (June 1901), vicar at Saint-Joseph de Sète, then at Saint-Nazaire de Béziers; then chaplain of Sacré-Cœur in Montpellier (1920), parish priest of Olonzac (1925) and Saint-Joseph de 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 Letters section (but he never took his seat).
This highly cultured man collected 2,500 documents from^{the19th and20th centuries}on religion, philosophy, literature, history, and art history.
In his eulogy for Abbé Barthélémy, delivered by his successor to his seat atthe Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters in1942, Paul Rimbaud said, "The collection as a whole reveals the eclecticism of a scholar whose erudition was crowned with piety."

The Wehrmacht Fund

This collection consists of 700 books, mainly in German, published between 1829 and 1944. It includes light reading and leisure literature that was in line with the regime, as well as a few works of Nazi propaganda.

A legacy of World War II history:
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 leisure library. François Pitangue, curator of the University's Central Library, obtained permission from the French Forces of the Interior to dispose of it.
Excerpt from a letter from Mr. Pitangue to the rector of the Academy, October 23, 1944: "The majority, given their propaganda nature, will of course be placed in the Reserve of the central section and will not be made available to readers until circumstances or a sufficiently long period of time allow it."
The current collection probably does not correspond to the entire original corpus of this Soldatenbücherei. Although there is no evidence to confirm this, it is possible that some titles were lost after the collection was abandoned by the German army at the Liberation, but also subsequently.

A rare exampleof a Soldatenbücherei(soldiers' library):
This collection consists of around 700 books, mainly in German, published between 1829 and 1944. Apart from the usual items (dictionaries, glossaries, and language learning methods), most of the works are novels or short stories, some of which are very well known, including works by Goethe, Theodor Storm, and Joseph Martin Bauer. This is literature for entertainment and leisure, but in line with the regime: the "Blut und Boden" ("blood and soil") orientation seems to dominate. However, works of Nazi doctrine proper are rare, but we find in particular that of Rosenberg (call number W 560), orHitler's Mein Kampf(reference number W 437).
Furthermore, it can be assumed that certain titles in this collection, written by opponents of the regime or considered as such, could not have been included in a Soldatenbücherei organized by the Wehrmacht (for example, the great writer Thomas Mann, who was stripped of his German nationality and emigrated to the United States).
The only titles that can be confirmed as having been part of the "Wehrmacht Library" are those bearing stamps of origin from the Nazi regime or from public libraries of the time, whose titles were filtered and approved by the regime's authorities.

There are several stamps of origin:

•     Bremen District of the NSDAP
•     North Station Library
•     "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 bookssuch as Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts(The Myth of the 20th Century). Appointed Minister for the Eastern Territories during the war, he nevertheless had no influence, as he had no real political or military power.

To ensure mobility, this library was stored in numbered transport crates specially designed for this purpose by the German navy. Examination of the crates led to the hypothesis that they had been shipped by the naval high command in Berlin and then transferred from Berlin to the library of the naval station command in Wilhelmshaven (a port on the North Sea in Germany), passing through Leipzig and then possibly by ship, probably to Sète (where the German navy was stationed).
The preserved works and four of their original shipping crates (probably ten in number originally) are a rare testimonyto a Soldatenbücherei.