Graham Robb has written biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud. His most recent book is The Discovery of France.
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Vol. 16 No. 15 · 4 August 1994
pages 22-23 | 2954 words
Migne and Moody
Graham Robb
- God’s Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne by R. Howard Bloch
Chicago, 162 pp, £19.95, June 1994, ISBN 0 226 05970 7
‘The day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night’ (I Thessalonians 5.2). In 19th-century France, it came in the shape of the abbé Jacques-Paul Migne. Between 1840 and 1870, with the help of several hundred poorly-paid workers and the latest in steam-powered printing, Migne undid the effects of the French Revolution, reversed the Reformation, created ‘the two most beautiful historical monuments to be found anywhere in the world’ and directed ‘the greatest publishing enterprise since the invention of printing’.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 17 · 8 September 1994
From Christopher Howse
If, as Graham Robb claims (LRB, 4 August), the abbé Migne offered as an incentive to buyers of his series of patriotic texts a free life of ‘St Theresa of Lisieux’, he was a more remarkably far-sighted man than has previously been realised, for Thérèse was born only two years before Migne died blind in 1875.
Christopher Howse
<em>Sunday Telegraph</em>, London E14
Vol. 16 No. 18 · 22 September 1994
From Graham Robb
I, too, was surprised to find myself saying that Migne gave away a free life of St Theresa of Lisieux two years before she was born (Christopher Howse, Letters, 8 September). That was an editorial lapse that occurred after the proof stage. It was, of course, St Teresa (or Theresa) of Avila (1515-82).
Graham Robb
Oxford
