The E-Sylum:  Volume 8, Number 20, May 15, 2005, Article 26

FEATURED WEB PAGE

This week's featured web page is a 17-page article about
Alexandre Vattemare by Suzanne Nash of Princeton University

"The extraordinary life of Nicolas-Marie-Alexandre Vattemare
(1796-1864), known today by a handful of bibliographers as
the founder of the American Collection at the Bibliothèque
Administrative de la Ville de Paris and for his role in the creation
of the Boston Public Library, deserves to be told, not only as
a revealing page in the history of Franco-American relations,
but as a window onto the rapidly changing cultural history
of nineteenth-century France."

"The tragi-comic events of his peripatetic life are the material
for a Bildungsroman worthy of Stendhal, Dickens, and,
ultimately of Flaubert, reflecting in their protagonist#39;s
achievements and failures the powerful social, economic and
political changes that underlay opportunities for individual
advancement after the French Revolution. Actor, publicist,
entrepreneur, collector, philanthropist, and writer, Vattemare
was, in many respects, a distorting mirror of the Enlightenment
idealism which a progressivist middle class, bent on self-
advancement, liked to see in itself. Its reflection in Vattemare
was ultimately too much of a caricature, too ambitious, in short,
too quixotic to be acceptable by the official representatives of
the social order."

Featured Web Page

The Boston Public Library web site has a photo of
Vattamere here: Photo

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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