'An Eight-Months’ Harvest: Book Seizures in Belgium and the Netherlands and on the Left Bank of the Rhine during the French Occupation, 1794-1795'

In 1794 and 1795, the young French Republic mercilessly confiscated large numbers of precious books and manuscripts in libraries in occupied Belgium, Holland and Germany and had them transferred to the major Parisian libraries. This paper will describe the instructions governing the seizures and briefly indicate the route followed by the small team of French commissioners. By studying these confiscations, it will explore the issues associated with heritage transfers and explain the presence of volumes of (mainly) Belgian provenance in French libraries.

Pierre Delsaerdt is professor at the University of Antwerp and part-time professor at KU Leuven. Among other things, he teaches on book and library history and on the history of the Low Countries. His research focuses on the design of early printed books and on the history of libraries and bibliophily, especially in the Southern Low Countries in the early modern period and the nineteenth century. Recent publications include a monograph, together with Elly Cockx-Indestege, on the book-collecting activities of the Arenberg family (Brepols 2022).