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God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne
God's Plagiarist is an entertaining account of the abbe Jacques-Paul Migne, one of the great entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century. A priest in Orleans from 1824 to 1833, Migne then moved to Paris, where, in the space of a decade, he built one of the most extensive publishing ventures of all time.
How did he do it?
Migne harnessed a deep well of personal energy and a will of iron to the latest innovations in print technology, advertising, and merchandising. His assembly-line production and innovative marketing of the massive editions of the Church Fathers placed him at the forefront of France's new commerce. Characterized by the police as one of the great "schemers" of the century, this priest-entrepreneur put the most questionable of business practices in the service of his devotion to Catholicism.
Part detective novel, part morality tale, Bloch's narrative not only will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French intellectual history but will appeal also to general readers interested in the history of publishing or just a good historical yarn.
"An unforgettable, Daumier-like portrait, sharp and satirical, of this enterprising, austere and somewhat crazed merchandiser of sacred learning. . . . Bloch deserves great credit for the wit and style of his effort to explore the Pedantic Park of nineteenth-century learning, that island of monsters which scholars have found, as yet, no escape."—Anthony Grafton, New Republic
"Bloch is an exhilarating guide to the methods which made Migne the Napoleon of the Prospectus, a publicist of genius, Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum rolled into one."—David Coward, Times Literary Supplement
"Mercifully, Bloch's sense of humour has none of that condescending mock-bewilderment commonly applied to the foreign or ancient. . . . It enables Bloch to promote Migne as a forerunner of the department store and to place him on a continuum running from St. Paul to the Tupperware the quality of the merchandise is increasingly irrelevant, still more the nature of its contents."—Graham Robb, London Review of Books
How did he do it?
Migne harnessed a deep well of personal energy and a will of iron to the latest innovations in print technology, advertising, and merchandising. His assembly-line production and innovative marketing of the massive editions of the Church Fathers placed him at the forefront of France's new commerce. Characterized by the police as one of the great "schemers" of the century, this priest-entrepreneur put the most questionable of business practices in the service of his devotion to Catholicism.
Part detective novel, part morality tale, Bloch's narrative not only will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French intellectual history but will appeal also to general readers interested in the history of publishing or just a good historical yarn.
"An unforgettable, Daumier-like portrait, sharp and satirical, of this enterprising, austere and somewhat crazed merchandiser of sacred learning. . . . Bloch deserves great credit for the wit and style of his effort to explore the Pedantic Park of nineteenth-century learning, that island of monsters which scholars have found, as yet, no escape."—Anthony Grafton, New Republic
"Bloch is an exhilarating guide to the methods which made Migne the Napoleon of the Prospectus, a publicist of genius, Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum rolled into one."—David Coward, Times Literary Supplement
"Mercifully, Bloch's sense of humour has none of that condescending mock-bewilderment commonly applied to the foreign or ancient. . . . It enables Bloch to promote Migne as a forerunner of the department store and to place him on a continuum running from St. Paul to the Tupperware the quality of the merchandise is increasingly irrelevant, still more the nature of its contents."—Graham Robb, London Review of Books
162 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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May 5, 2016
According to the publisher Ambroise Firmin Didot, Jacques-Paul Migne undertook “the greatest publishing enterprise since the invention of printing”; by Migne’s own account, he intended to “render to the Church the greatest service that has ever been rendered”, by publishing a complete edition of the Latin and Greek Fathers and thus reuniting a church divided by the Great Schism of 1054 and the Reformation. The quantity of material published by Migne, in Bloch’s judgement, amounted to “a book every ten days for thirty years”, and included other religious works alongside hundreds of volumes of Patrologies – and Migne also found time for newspaper interests, the sale of religious items, and an illicit traffic in masses. His Ateliers catholiques, based in Montrouge, had 596 employees by 1854, and his employees included a number of defrocked priests.
Bloch’s study takes a thematic approach, beginning by placing Migne within the context of a nineteenth-century “Catholic Enlightenment” in France. Migne, a provincial curé relocated to Paris, became an associate of Prosper Guéranger of Solesmes Abbey, who brought him into contact with the scholar Jean Baptiste François Pitra. Much of the book deals with Migne’s business practices: the publication of false and plagiarised items in his newspapers brought legal trouble, and Migne had to undertake a lawsuit when a “strawman” owner he had installed actually sought to take control. Migne’s prospectuses and adverts are bombastic to the point of absurdity, while the various ecclesiastical endorsements he touted often strangely mirrored his own rhetoric. More than once, Bloch turns to Balzac’s Illusions Perdues for general background.
As chief editor of the Patrologies, Pitra undertook numerous journeys to secure manuscripts: in 1846, he discovered that manuscripts taken from the cartulary houses of the dioceses of Metz, Toul, and Verdun during the Revolution had been taken to an artillery arsenal in Metz to serve as cartridge packaging. Moving on to Strasbourg, he discovered the Clé of Méliton. However, "in the overwhelming majority of cases… it is clear that… Migne simply reprinted wholesale the editions of others". In one instance, he threatened a classicist that unless he completed an edition of the City of God swiftly, he would simply reprint a Benedictine edition instead. In most cases, the editions were old and in the public domain, although in some cases he came close to piracy. And while Pitra and other editors went largely uncredited in the published works, an international team of proof-readers and correctors are introduced by Migne "like a ringmaster presenting great circus performers". The patrologies' Index Tables, by creating "a shortcut to the study of the Christian past", reflected the "industrial modernism" which was also implied in the entire task: Migne liked to contrast how his mechanized processes reduced years of monastic manual labour to minutes, and Bloch draws a parallel between Migne's vision of a complete set and the comprehensive consumer experience offered by the new department stores.
Just as the project neared completion, a mysterious fire struck, in 1868. This destroyed many of the printing plates, and Migne’s final years were spent in legal cases concerning insurance.
The interface between the ideals of religion and the reality of commerce is of course a ready source of ironic observation. Given the specific subject matter, was put in mind of John A.H. Dempster's The T&T Clark Story: A Victorian Publisher and the New Theology (1992). T&T Clark, which published the Ante-Nicene Fathers in English, was dismayed in the 1880s when a number of its titles were pirated in the USA by Fleming H. Revell. When the Christian Literature Company pirated the Ante-Nicene Library, with new editing by the Bishop of New York, the company was moved to ask "how Christian men – with Bishop Coxe at their head – could do such a thing. It is sheer robbery".
Bloch’s study takes a thematic approach, beginning by placing Migne within the context of a nineteenth-century “Catholic Enlightenment” in France. Migne, a provincial curé relocated to Paris, became an associate of Prosper Guéranger of Solesmes Abbey, who brought him into contact with the scholar Jean Baptiste François Pitra. Much of the book deals with Migne’s business practices: the publication of false and plagiarised items in his newspapers brought legal trouble, and Migne had to undertake a lawsuit when a “strawman” owner he had installed actually sought to take control. Migne’s prospectuses and adverts are bombastic to the point of absurdity, while the various ecclesiastical endorsements he touted often strangely mirrored his own rhetoric. More than once, Bloch turns to Balzac’s Illusions Perdues for general background.
As chief editor of the Patrologies, Pitra undertook numerous journeys to secure manuscripts: in 1846, he discovered that manuscripts taken from the cartulary houses of the dioceses of Metz, Toul, and Verdun during the Revolution had been taken to an artillery arsenal in Metz to serve as cartridge packaging. Moving on to Strasbourg, he discovered the Clé of Méliton. However, "in the overwhelming majority of cases… it is clear that… Migne simply reprinted wholesale the editions of others". In one instance, he threatened a classicist that unless he completed an edition of the City of God swiftly, he would simply reprint a Benedictine edition instead. In most cases, the editions were old and in the public domain, although in some cases he came close to piracy. And while Pitra and other editors went largely uncredited in the published works, an international team of proof-readers and correctors are introduced by Migne "like a ringmaster presenting great circus performers". The patrologies' Index Tables, by creating "a shortcut to the study of the Christian past", reflected the "industrial modernism" which was also implied in the entire task: Migne liked to contrast how his mechanized processes reduced years of monastic manual labour to minutes, and Bloch draws a parallel between Migne's vision of a complete set and the comprehensive consumer experience offered by the new department stores.
Just as the project neared completion, a mysterious fire struck, in 1868. This destroyed many of the printing plates, and Migne’s final years were spent in legal cases concerning insurance.
The interface between the ideals of religion and the reality of commerce is of course a ready source of ironic observation. Given the specific subject matter, was put in mind of John A.H. Dempster's The T&T Clark Story: A Victorian Publisher and the New Theology (1992). T&T Clark, which published the Ante-Nicene Fathers in English, was dismayed in the 1880s when a number of its titles were pirated in the USA by Fleming H. Revell. When the Christian Literature Company pirated the Ante-Nicene Library, with new editing by the Bishop of New York, the company was moved to ask "how Christian men – with Bishop Coxe at their head – could do such a thing. It is sheer robbery".
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