Lucien Herr: Socialist Librarian of the French Third Republic

Abstract

Lucien Herr may not be a household name, but his influence in Third Republic France was considerable. This book examines his professional career at two important Parisian cultural institutions, the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and Musée pédagogique (MP), as well as his commitment to socialism.The author, Anne-Cécile Grandmougin, is the deputy director of the library at the University of Paris 8 (Vincennes-Saint-Denis). This work is her thesis for her library curator diploma (DCB) at the French National Library and Information Science School (Enssib). Tegan Raleigh is a freelance translator, who holds an MFA in Literary Translation and a PhD in comparative literature.Grandmougin explains that Herr’s socialist activism has overshadowed his pioneering roles as a librarian at the prestigious ENS from 1888 to 1926 and the Pedagogical Museum from 1916 until 1926. Following a humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, the nascent Third Republic was anxious to close the perceived gap with Germany, orienting the grandes écoles system, of which the ENS was a part, toward a greater focus on the burgeoning social sciences. Although surviving primary sources are sparse, she argues that it is important to assess his contribution to the ENS Library and to French education more broadly. Further, she uses the available sources to reconstruct how he selected materials for the library, and what functions he believed it should serve.Herr’s devotion to the library was exceptional, and while he never explicitly stated his idea of what the role of a library ought to be, the author uses his extant papers, including correspondence, official reports, and book reviews and other scholarly articles, to sketch out his activities and principles. Beyond selecting books, Herr read prodigiously, actively guided students’ research by tracking down and suggesting materials, and set up and maintained international scholarly exchange networks to facilitate the acquisition of foreign materials.Against the backdrop of significant social and political reforms, Herr sought to broaden access to information. This meant not only the kinds of materials collected, but their intended audience. Grandmougin shows that whether Herr was opening up the stacks at the ENS, or sending films and slides to schools in the provinces, his work was closely aligned with his ideological principles.However, this devotion did not mean that Herr only acquired materials with whose contents he agreed. Grandmougin presents evidence that his concern for the library was more focused on quality, usefulness, and innovation. Further, given financial constraints and the sheer volume of works being produced, Herr needed to be selective. So his stated aim was that the collection should contain “the primary, essential instruments . . . for all works . . . I knew it would always be impossible to complete a special scholarly work with our resources alone, but I thought that it should be possible to undertake and begin all works with our resources” (55).Based on his letters, Grandmougin aligns Herr’s outlook with positivism. His role as the librarian at the ENS, instead of an academic position, was truly in the service of furthering the ideal of progress. The author demonstrates that although Herr was appreciated by most of the students, he did at time come into conflict with other intellectuals, for instance when he left the Revue de Paris. What emerges from this reconstruction is the portrait of a passionate, knowledgeable, and complicated man, whose career touched on many issues which continue to be of importance in LIS to this day.The main utility of the book is that there are no other modern works on Herr’s work as a librarian, despite his legacy. Several relatively recent works do examine his role in the Dreyfus affair, including Birth of the Intellectuals, 1880–1900 by Christophe Charle, The Dreyfus Affair and the Rise of the French Public Intellectual, by Tom Conner, and Savoir et engagement: Écrit normaliens sur l’affaire Dreyfus, a volume edited by Vincent Duclert. While they acknowledge his position at the ENS Library, they are more concerned with his political activism. Further, the existence of the English translation widens the potential audience considerably, especially in considering the trans-national history of libraries. Nevertheless, as Grandmougin makes clear, reconstructing Herr’s career is difficult because of the lack of primary sources.To fill in these gaps, and to attempt to interpret the existing sources, the author takes great care in explaining the wider context in which Herr worked. Using major works, such as Michel Winock’s Le siècle des intellectuels and Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli’s Histoire des intellectuels en France, de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, she traces the development of intellectuals’ public role, which took on greater importance during and after the Dreyfus affair. Interestingly, despite Herr’s instrumental part played in rallying intellectuals to support Dreyfus, he remained very much behind the scenes. He adopted a similarly self-effacing attitude in relation to the ENS Library and the MP.While the lack of primary sources certainly presents a challenge, the research work involved in the creation of this book may add an extra layer of interest for librarians and archivists. The volume includes several of the key primary sources in the appendix, as well as a bibliography and index. Other additional material includes a General Introduction by Judith Crews, including Herr’s biography and a chronology of the Third Republic, and the translator’s introduction explaining the choice of certain terms. Raleigh’s excellent translation, while remaining faithful to the original text, ably handles situations where concepts have no exact equivalent in English. It is particularly useful, given Herr’s ongoing interest in German intellectual life and particularly in Hegel, that Raleigh also has experience in German.This careful attention to the historical context and its clear explanation mean that this book will be useful even to students and librarians without extensive knowledge of France. Modern readers may also be interested in Herr’s strong commitment to Socialism and his activism during the Dreyfus affair. While Herr was careful to draw a distinction between his role as a librarian and his political convictions, his exceptional professional dedication was inseparable from his beliefs about the importance of democratizing education. Grandmougin suggests that these ethical dilemmas concerning a librarian’s role, beyond their significant influence at the time, remain relevant to modern debates about the values of the profession.