Volume 41, Number 15 · September 22, 1994
The Tycoon Priest
By Douglas V. Johnson
God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne
by R. Howard Bloch
University of Chicago Press, 152 pp., $24.95
The Reverend Father Jacques-Paul Migne, who was born in the Auvergne in 1800, has been compared to Napoleon, Balzac, d'Alembert, and Diderot; to Raspail the scientist and politician, to Girardin the newspaper proprietor, to Boucicaut who founded the Bon Marché store, and to Larousse the publisher. Migne compared himself to a Balzacian character (a Rastignac in surplice?) and to Hercules. He published an estimated 1,095 volumes in his lifetime, he created the greatest publishing house since the invention of printing, he revived patristic theology in France and sought to establish a science of Catholicism. Migne was a man of unlimited ambition whose achievements were solidly real. Yet we know little about this indefatigable priest. A discreet plaque on the wall of 189 Avenue du Maine tells us that it was there that he lived and there that he died in 1875. It is the catalogs of the great libraries of Europe which are his monument. But it is only the catalogs. Like the 265 volumes of a nineteenth-century Bishop of Norwich, Migne's Encyclopédie Théologique with its 168 volumes dominates the catalog of the British Library but only in the space it takes up. He is, as has been said, a forgotten continent.
Review, 2681 words
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