A Royal Library Made National

The Bibliotheque nationale de France descends from the personal library of the French kings, traceable to collections assembled under Charles V in the fourteenth century and greatly expanded under later monarchs, most notably through legal deposit requirements introduced from the sixteenth century onward that obliged publishers to supply copies of new books to the royal collection. The Revolution nationalised the library along with other royal property, and its holdings were further swelled by the seizure of church and emigre libraries in the 1790s, transforming a royal collection into the core of a national one within a single turbulent decade.

Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the library also became a major repository for antiquities and manuscript collections acquired from private scholars and collectors, distinct from its legal deposit function of collecting contemporary French publishing. The Cabinet des Medailles, its coin and antiquities department, absorbed numerous such collections, including that of the German epigrapher Wilhelm Froehner, purchased for the library in 1878, which is the route by which the Nazareth Inscription entered French national custody rather than through any French excavation in the Holy Land.