Overview
The French Pamphlet Collection
The Newberry purchased the French Revolution Collection (FRC) from a Parisian book dealer in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Though the Collection includes pamphlets from over two hundred years of French history, its highlights include two collections in particular, the French Revolution Collection and the Louis XVI Trial and Execution Collection.The massive French Revolution Collection contains pamphlets pamphlets that represent the opinions of all factions that opposed and defended the monarchy during the turbulent period from 1789 to 1799 and chronicle the events—both dramatic and quotidian—of the First Republic. It contains anonymously authored pamphlets as well as those with known authors, including many written under pseudonyms.
The Louis XVI Trial and Execution Collection consists of pamphlets that chronicle the events leading up to and following the abolition of the French monarchy in late 1792. The pamphlets contain evidence for and against the king, moral and political reflections on judging and executing a monarch executing a monarch, and public opinion on both sides of the issue. Included are opinions of Convention deputies (Marat, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Condorcet, Desmoulins); copies of incriminating documents seized from a safe at the Tuileries Palace in 1792; the formal accusation of the king, his defense by De Seze, the roll call of votes on sentencing; and pro and contra opinions by various writers, including American Thomas Paine and Englishman William Pitt.
You can explore digitized versions of pamphlets in the Internet Archive's Newberry French Revolution Pamphlet Collection.
Significance of the Collection
The pamphlets in the Collection are a foundation for diverse fields of study, ranging from legal history to ethnography to political theory to musicology. For research on the French Revolution, Enlightenment-era Europe, and the colonial Atlantic world, these pamphlets fill the gap between official documents and underground literature. They document the evolution of ideas big and small and chart how these ideas changed from day to day and place to place.By digitizing the French Pamphlets Collection, the Newberry has provided access to both full-text, searchable digitized pamphlets and their associated metadata. Thorough and accurate metadata for each pamphlet includes numerous subject and genre terms from standard controlled vocabularies, names of authors and others formulated according to national cataloging standards, and title and publication information. Digitization leverages this powerful combination of digital texts and value-added, standard metadata in ways that on-site access to physical materials alone cannot. In addition to making tens of thousands of primary sources available to remote scholars, students, and faculty around the world, digitization supports emerging and established forms of digital scholarship, such as data mining and spatialized data projection, which enhance and complement traditional research methods, as well as translation sites like this one.
