Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève

Sainte-Geneviève Library (French: Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève) is a public and university library in Paris, which inherited the collection of the Abbey of St Genevieve. The library contains around 2 million documents.

The required reading of scripture set forth in the Rule of St Benedict sanctioned the formation of monastic libraries, which typically consisted of volumes either donated to the monastery or copied in its scriptorium. Ste Geneviève, one of the largest and oldest abbeys in Paris, had amassed a large library by the 12thc, the holdings of which are listed in a thirteenth century inventory (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 16203, fol. 71v). The 226 titles and authors included in the inventory show that the monastic library at Ste Geneviève consisted of the core texts essential to monastic life, including bibles, exegetical commentaries and glosses, patristics, ecclesiastical history, customaries and service books. Only a small number of those 226 volumes collected in the twelfth-century library are in the collection of the Bibliothèque Ste Geneviève today.

During a period of decline in the seventeenth century, the library was dispersed in the 17th century and its contents sold, sometimes for the value of their paper alone. In the next century, efforts were made to reconstitute the library by buying back what books remained on the market Later reform resulted in the foundation of the Royal Library Sainte-Genevieve, inherited by present institution.

Between 1838 and 1850, a building for the Sainte-Geneviève Library was designed and constructed under the direction of the architect Henri Labrouste. He was given the project in 1838, but construction did not commence until 1843. The glass and iron reading room has been described as "magisterial" and the building itself as a seminal work in the creation of the modern library as "a temple of knowledge and space for contemplation". The names of 810 illustrious scholars are inscribed on the building's facade.

In one scholar's estimation:

One of the greatest cultural buildings of the nineteenth century to use iron in a prominent, visible way was unquestionably the Bibliothèque Ste.-Genevieve in Paris, designed by Henri Labrouste. He presented the design on December 19, 1839. It took six to seven years to complete the construction, from 1843–50. The large (278 by 69 feet) two-storied structure filling a wide, shallow site is deceptively simple in scheme: the lower floor is occupied by stacks to the left, rare-book storage and office space to the right, with a central vestibule and stairway leading to the reading room which fills the entire upper story. The ferrous structure of this reading room—a spine of slender, cast-iron Ionic columns dividing the space into twin aisles and supporting openwork iron arches that carry barrel vaults of plaster reinforced by iron mesh—has always been revered by Modernists for its introduction of high technology into a monumental building.

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