BU Richter fund

The Antonelli Fund

This collection comprises 14,000 books, brochures and periodicals from the ^19th and ^20th centuries, mainly on law and economics, bequeathed by Étienne Antonelli to the Montpellier Law Faculty, along with archives on French economists Auguste Walras and Léon Walras.

Professor and politician

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

After brilliant studies in law, he defended his two theses in 1905 and 1906 and began an academic career at the Montpellier Faculty of Law, which continued in Paris and then, in 1913, in Poitiers. He quickly became interested in mathematical economics, and in 1914 published a work entitled Principes d'économie pure. He was a professor in Lyon from 1919 to 1924, when he was elected Member of Parliament. 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 of theMontpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters from 1942 to 1971.

He also took an interest in politics, and was one of the founders of the Comité de Démocratie sociale 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 real father of the first compulsory social insurance law, in 1928. Defeated in the 1932 elections, he left political life.

A varied legacy

Law and economics professor Étienne Antonelli bequeathed his personal library to Montpellier's Faculty of Law on his death in 1971.

The collection includes some 14,000 documents (4,000 books, 1,700 brochures and 8,300 periodical issues) from the ^19th and ^20th centuries (1694 to 1971), in the legal, economic 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 by French economists Auguste Walras (1801-1866) and Léon Walras (1834-1910), entrusted to Étienne Antonelli by his daughter Aline after the latter's death to edit her father's correspondence. To this end, she took over part of Léon Walras' archives and manuscripts, which had been entrusted to the University of Lausanne, and handed them over to Professor Antonelli.

This subfonds contains:
- works by or belonging to the Walras family, including De la nature de la richesse et de l'origine de la valeur, Paris, 1831, annotated by Jean-Baptiste Say and Léon Walras;
- manuscripts, lecture notes and correspondence by Auguste and Léon Walras
- correspondence from Étienne Antonelli concerning the scientific publication of the Walras papers.

The Academy fund

The fund

The Library of the Academy of Sciences and Letters of Montpellier

The Interuniversity Library looks after the exceptional scientific and cultural heritage of this illustrious institution with its rich past: 50,0000 books, brochures and periodicals, from the ^18thcentury to the present day, whose variety of themes reflects the three sections of the Academy itself, and more than half of which are in foreign languages. The collection is housed in the BU de Droit Economie Gestion (BU Richter).

Website of the Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters

An illustrious institution

Originally a Royal Society of Sciences created by Louis XIV in 1706, forty years after its predecessor, theRoyal Academy of Sciences of Paris, it played an active role in the intellectual life of its time, contributing in particular 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. Many of them were dispersed or stolen, while some books were piously recovered by academicians. The remainder, made available by the State to the city of Montpellier in 1806, is now housed atthe lamédiathèque centrale Emile Zola.

From this period, the BU Richter holds only the minutes of public sessions and the two volumes of the Histoire de la Société royale des Sciences published in 1766 and 1768. The BU Historique de Médecine holds five manuscript volumes of memoirs, known as "recueils Poitevin", after their author Jacques Poitevin, covering the period 1777 to 1782.

In 1795, the institution was clandestinely reborn as the Société libre des Sciences et Belles-lettres de 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 de CandolleouPaul-JosephBarthès), it died out in 1816.

Its short-lived existence, in a troubled historical context, did not allow it to build up a significant collection. We don't know what happened to his modest library, which was obviously dispersed. All that remains today is the catalog, kept in theHérault departmentalarchivesat Pierresvives, andthe complete six-volume series of the Société's publications from 1803 to 1814, available at the BU Richter.

TheAcadémie des Sciences et Lettres de Montpellier was foundedunder its present name in 1846. Dealing with science, literature and medicine, it built up a library which, in 1921, was deposited with the Bibliothèque centrale de l'Université de Montpellier by agreement, updated in 2014 with the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire.

Since then, the collections have been managed by the Academy's two librarians and the head of specialized collections at BU Richter, where they are preserved, catalogued, communicated and promoted.

The Geddes fonds

Originating from the Library of the College ofScots, the collection held at BU Richter comprises around 360 of the 1,350 books originally donated. This collection, which deals with politics, is mainly made up of works in French and English dating from the 1850s to the 1940s, and is available in the BIU catalog. Other works can be found in the BU Sciences and, above all, in the BU Lettres de Montpellier.
An exhibition on this collection, entitled "Patrick Geddes, portrait d'un esprit voyageur à travers sa bibliothèque" (Patrick Geddes, portrait of a travelling spirit through his library), was held in 2012 at the BU Richter.

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 hailed 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, founder of a highly influential school of urban planning thought, of which theEcole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Montpellier(ENSAM) is one of the many heirs, he spent the last eight years of his life in Montpellier, where in 1924 he founded an institution of higher education with an international vocation, called the Collège des Écossais.

The optical fund

86 optical views of Paris and London, to which magnifying lenses give an impression of depth, depicting urban or rural landscapes, monuments and events.
An exhibition on this collection, entitled "Le monde en perspective. Vues et récréations d'optique au siècle des lumières" was held in 2014 (September 20-October 31).

Remains of the physics cabinet at the Montpellier Faculty of Science
The history of this collection is not certain. It is assumed to have belonged to the physics cabinet of theMontpellier Faculty ofScience. It would have been kept as part of an educational program to teach the laws of optics and perspective. The visualization device that was supposed to accompany it has not been found.
In 2014, the Directionrégionale des affaires culturelles Occitaniepublished 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.

86 original ^18th-centuryengravings
This collection comprises 86 optical views of Paris and London, dating from 1740-1760. The views are intaglio engravings hand-colored in gouache or watercolor.
Half of them (English views) were mounted on cardboard to enable them to be viewed in optical devices such as zograscopesor fairground boxes. They were presented in very different settings: the aristocratic salon and the public square where the peddler set up shop. The caption below the view was cut out and glued to the back of the cardboard, or copied by hand. A thick black border has been painted around the edges to accentuate the contrasting effect. Two of these are "transformation" views: the supporting cardboard is hollowed out to allow light to pass through in certain places, enabling viewing in "fairground boxes" with backlighting.
The other half, made up mostly of views taken in Paris, is colored but neither trimmed nor mounted. The upside-down title, characteristic of optical views, can therefore be seen.
The themes of these views are very varied: urban or rural landscapes, monuments and events (the plague of 1720 in Marseille, fireworks during festivities...).
The collection has been restored and reconditioned by the conservation-restoration workshop of the Service de Coopération Documentaire Interuniversitaire, and catalogued individually in theSudoc catalog of higher education.
These views have also been digitized by the photography workshop and the digitization workshop, and the reproductions can be consulted via the Foli@ digital library of the Universités de Montpellier.

The Barthélémy fund

2,500 19th ^and20thcentury books, 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 integrated into the Bibliothèque centrale de l'Université de Montpellier on November 12, 1942, according to the handwritten register of the time.

Churchman and academician:
Henri Auguste François Barthélémy (Béziers, February 3, 1871-Montpellier, June 11, 1942) was first ordained priest (June 1901), curate at Saint-Joseph de Sète, then at Saint-Nazaire de Béziers; then chaplain at Sacré-Cœur in Montpellier (1920), curate at Olonzac (1925) and Saint-Joseph de Sète (1932).
Appointed vicar-general of the bishopric of Montpellier and titular canon (1939), he was also a member of theAcadémie des Sciences et Lettres de Montpellier from1941 to 1942, in the Lettres section (but never took his seat).
This highly cultured man collected 2,500 documents from the ^19thand20thcenturies on religion, philosophy, literature, history and the history of art.
During the eulogy of Chamoine Barthélémy, by his successor to his seat at theAcadémie des Sciences et Lettres de Montpellierin1942, Paul Rimbaud said: "The whole is revealing of the eclecticism of a scholar whose erudition was crowned with piety."

The Wehrmacht collection

This collection comprises 700 books, mainly in German, published between 1829 and 1944. The literature is for entertainment and leisure, but conforms to the regime, and includes a few works of Nazi propaganda.

A legacy from the history of the Second World War:
When it left in 1944, the German Military Circle installed in the Montpellier Institute of Biology during the Second World War abandoned its leisure library. François Pitangue, curator of the University's Central Library, obtained permission from the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur to use it.
Extract from a letter from M. Pitangue to the Rector of the University of Montpellier. Pitangue to the Rector of the Academy, 23/10/1944: "The majority, given their propaganda tendency, will of course be placed in the Reserve of the Central Section and will not, until circumstances or a sufficiently long time allow, be made available to readers."
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 titles were lost after the collection was abandoned by the German army at the Liberation, but also afterwards.

A rare testimony to aSoldatenbücherei(soldiers' library):
This collection comprises around 700 books, mainly in German, published between 1829 and 1944. Apart from the usual dictionaries, lexicons and language-learning methods, most of the books are novels or short stories, some of which are very well known, and include works by Goethe, Theodor Storm and Joseph Martin Bauer. This was literature for entertainment and leisure, but in line with the regime: the "Blut und Boden" ("race and soil") orientation seemed to dominate. However, works of Nazi doctrine as such are rare, but we do find Rosenberg's book (call number W 560), or Hitler's MeinKampf(call number W 437).
We can also assume that certain titles in this collection, written by opponents of the regime or considered as such, may not have been part of a Soldatenbücherei organized by the Wehrmacht (for example, the great writer Thomas Mann, who lost his German nationality and emigrated to the USA).
The only titles that are certain to have been part of the "Wehrmacht Library" are those bearing Nazi regime provenance stamps, or from public libraries of the period whose titles were filtered and approved by the regime's authorities.

There are several stamps of origin:

•     "Kreis Bremen der NSDAP
•     "Stationsbücherei Nord
•     "Städtische Volksbücherei (Berlin)
•     "Alfred Rosenberg-Spende für die Deutsche Wehrmacht 1939/1941". This is a gift from Alfred Rosenberg, a high-ranking member of the Nazi regime and a close friend of Hitler. Party ideologue, he wrote doctrinaire books such asDerMythus des 20. Jahrhunderts; appointed Minister for the Eastern Territories during the war, he had no influence, however, as the reality of both political and military power eluded him.

In order to be mobile, this library was stored in numbered transport crates specially designed for this purpose by the German Navy. Examination of the crates has led to the hypothesis that they were shipped by the German Navy's higher command to Berlin, and then transferred from Berlin to the command library at the Wilhelmshaven naval station (a port on the North Sea coast of Germany) via Leipzig, and then possibly by ship to Sète (where the German Navy was stationed).
The surviving books, together with four of their original shipping cases (probably originally numbering around ten), are a rare example of aSoldatenbücherei.