Paul, librarian

After Paul failed twice the competition to be come a "professeur agrégé" of philosophy, his father Léonce suggested he should become a librarian.
Paul decided to give it a go and in 1943 he started to work as a librarian in the city of Nancy, in Lorraine. Before they were English first names, Nancy and Lorraine were the French names of a city and a duchy.
I believe Paul worked in the Bibliothèque municipale de Nancy.

Bibliothèque municipale de Nancy
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After the end of World War II, in 1945, Paul came back to the Parisian region and got a job at the library of the Institut de France.
The Institut de France groups five "académies", the most famous of which are the Académie française (French Academy) and the Académie des sciences (Academy of Sciences).
These five academies were created in a form or another during the XVIIth century. For example, "Académie des sciences" was created in 1666 by Louis XIV, six years after the founding of the Royal Society.
The academies were abolished in 1793 during the French Revolution, but basically recreated with the creation of the Institut in 1795.
The Institut de France is located on the quai de Conti, in Paris, in a magnificent building.

Institut de France
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The library of the Institut is not a public library, it is a research library. To access it, if you are not a member of the five academies, you must be recommended by at list two members. Its collections include more the 1.5 millions of items and 10,000 manuscripts, including some from Leonardo da Vinci.

Reading Room at the library of Institut de France
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Paul will stay as a librarian at the Institut until his retirement in 1975. He was not an ambitious man and remained a simple librarian during all of his career, but he was appreciated.

In the software company I work for, AdaCore, the engineer who was naming the computers where the main software libraries were stored gave them the name of famous world libraries: alexandria, then congress. So, I asked him to name the next "library" computer "institut", in honor of my father. What he did instead is to name the computer "conti", as the Institut is located on the "quai de Conti".

Continue to Part 17

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A Brief History of my Family in France - Part 16 - Paul, librarian

Paul, librarian