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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
During her thirty years at the Bibliotheque Nationale (BN), Suzanne Briet (1894-1989) made important theoretical, organizational, and institutional contributions to the documentation movement in France. This article attempts to place her documentation work within the context of the far-reaching reform of French libraries, with special attention to the transformation of the BN. Like her colleagues in special libraries, Briet embraced modernity and science. Because of her strong orientation toward humanistic scholarship, however, she viewed documentation service and bibliographic orientation as an enhancement rather than a rejection of the scholarly traditions of the national library. This article will focus on her efforts to integrate the innovative ideas of the documentation movement into the practice of librarianship at the Bibliotheque Nationale.
INTRODUCTION
Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties.... They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. (Woolf, 1985, p. 65)
Suzanne Briet appreciated the need to leave behind a memoir that would offer some record of what she was like as a person, a work that would express her thoughts and beliefs. Reflecting back on her long life, Briet wrote, "At the age of twenty, I had as my motto: 'To weep perhaps, but never to hate.' At forty it was: 'To serve.' At eighty it could be: 'To return to the Spirit'" (l'Esprit) (1976, p. 30). (1) These three mottoes succinctly express what she felt mattered most in her personal life and her career--a dedication to service and a deep commitment to humanistic values and to the Catholic faith. In 1976 when she was 82, Brier published Entre Aisne et Meuse et au-dela, (2) a memoir that is most unusual in content and form. Abandoning ordinary narrative structure, Briet instead presents her recollections under key words alphabetically arranged. In her preface entitled "On Opening the Alphabet," she declares that she has no intention of writing an autobiography nor of providing documentation placed within a chronological framework. In fact, she completely dispenses with dates. It is with intentional irony that this woman who held a degree in history (licence) and who devoted her entire career to the rational organization of information chose to present her own life "without any systematic order" (1976, p. 30).
At first glance Entre Aisne et Meuse looks like a reference work, made up of a sequence of records arranged in letter-by-letter alphabetization. Briet's choice of entry words is completely idiosyncratic, however: she includes proper names, places, an occasional proverb, and ordinary words (like house, hand, and light) that evoke deeply personal memories. Some close friends and family members are entered under their first names, other people are introduced in specific anecdotes, and some appear only as initials. Even though her choice of entries defies logic, Briet engages the reader with passages of pure poetry intermixed with prose that is often moving or profound; some entries recount ordinary events that left an impression on her, while other terms provide a springboard for whimsy, biting wit, or humor. Believing that in old age "the past is more present when life is less pressing," Briet's goal is to evoke "some of the most extraordinary hours and the most significant human contacts." (3) She concludes her preface by declaring "I would be happy if some readers catch sight of my gaze (mon regard) through the pointillism of this serf-portrait" (1976, pp. 9-10). (When citing this work below, reference will be made to the keyword entry as well as the page number.)
Drawing on Suzanne Briet's highly original self-portrait as well as her professional publications, this article will attempt to place her contributions into both a personal and an historical context. Born in 1894, Briet was part of a generation of young women who came of age in a nation struggling to confront enormous loss, significant social change, and new challenges left in the wake of the Great War. While she was never explicit as to why she chose the first motto, the goal "never to hate" probably reflects her experience of World War I. Born in Ardennes, she grew up in Paris but remained very attached to the region where she and her sister Alice spent vacations with their extended family. Ardennes was also the pathway of German armies, and during the hostilities her uncle was deported, his village was invaded, and her grandfather's house was destroyed. Suzanne Briet was just twenty at the outbreak of the war, and she recalls a close childhood friend who was killed, along with nearly two-thirds of his classmates (1976, Kolkhose Manque, p. 59; Maison, p. 71; Marcel, pp. 76-77). Despite these losses--or perhaps because of them--Suzanne Briet took an early interest in the League of Nations and sat in on some of the sessions held in Paris (1976, S.D.N., p.103). Briet's interest in international exchange seems to have developed at an early age; she recounts fond memories of her three trips to England--for vacations when she was fourteen and sixteen, and then at nineteen as a French teacher for the children of a Hindu princess (1976, Inde, pp. 52-53; Londres, pp. 65-66). Because her mother considered Suzanne destined to be a teacher, she was sent to the Ecole de Sevres, an elite school for the training of women secondary school teachers; there she continued her study of English in addition to taking a degree in history. Briet taught for a few years, but she makes little reference to this time in her life other than recalling that in the classroom she felt like she had been "delivered up to the beasts" (1976, Livre aux Fauves, p. 64). Although Briet does not explain why she chose to study for the national library examinations, she credits her success to Louis Barrau-Dihigo, a distinguished bibliographer-librarian at the Sorbonne who gave a course in bibliography to students preparing for the certificate. Not only did he offer her special encouragement, but when Briet explained that she could only participate on Saturday, he changed the time of the course to accommodate her (1976, Parrains, p. 90).
EARLY YEARS AT THE BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE: A MAN'S WORLD
When Suzanne Briet began her career at the Bibliotheque Nationale (BN) at the age of thirty, she entered a field that would soon be reshaped by the convergence of two movements in France--the "modern library" movement and the emergence of documentation as a distinct profession with its own techniques, standards, and training. It was also a time when the first generation of French women began to enter traditional professions that were in the process of being redefined by radically altered social and economic conditions. At the BN, Suzanne Briet was at the very beginning of a demographic shift--when women went from barely 10 percent of the professional staff in 1927 to over 50 percent by World War II (Maack, 1983, p. 434). In her thirty-year career, Briet also witnessed and participated in a series of reforms and innovations that would eventually transform the BN from an institution constrained by elitist traditions and an insufficient budget into a national library with a vital leadership role in France and beyond. During this time, technological innovation also played a significant role in Briet's career and in the nature of work at the Bibliotheque Nationale. In 1924, the year of her appointment, electricity was first installed in the seventeenth-century building on the rue de Richelieu. Under the entry "Lumiere" (light), Briet wrote: "I attended the birth of electricity at the BN. ... During winter season, and under cloudy skies, all work was impossible in the reading rooms and offices after three in the afternoon.... It was an unforgettable spectacle to see the green lamps burst into flower on the tables" (1976, p. 66). While the advent of electricity signaled a new era, the changes in technology and facilities as well as services came gradually--and it was not until 1931 that stacks were wired, enabling the library to continue paging books for readers in the late afternoon (Cain, 1936, p. 8).
Modernization of the library was the first priority for Pierre-Rene Roland-Marcel, who became administrator-general of the BN in 1924. Although he had had no prior experience with libraries, he brought to the post considerable background in public administration as well as close ties with leading political figures. He immediately initiated legislative reforms that would put the library on a firmer financial basis, while at the same time extending its authority over several of the great research libraries of Paris. To accomplish his ambitious goals, Roland-Marcel needed to recruit personnel with a new vision that would revitalize a staff whose orientation was toward tradition and scholarship rather than modernization. Roland-Marcel was eager to hire Suzanne Briet when he learned that she had obtained first place on the national certification examination for librarians and came highly recommended by her professors. After interviewing her, Roland-Marcel wrote to the minister of public instruction and fine arts in July 1924 and requested authorization to hire immediately Mlle. Briet, who he believed would be a valuable member of the staff because she spoke English fluently and had practical knowledge and an outstanding intellect. Although Roland-Marcel agreed to wait for the passage of pending legislation on the BN before naming a new staff, he went ahead with Briet's appointment "as an exceptional case" (Roland-Marcel, 1924).
Briet's only direct reference to Roland-Marcel in her memoir concerns an incident early in her career when she was one of just three women on the professional staff. She notes that the administrator-general "did her the honor" of bringing to her attention a motion presented to him by delegates from an informal club (amicale) of male staff members who urged that the number of women librarians be limited. Their reason was that if a woman were promoted to a managerial position (conservateur-adjoint) she would have no authority over her male colleagues or subordinates. Roland-Marcel then "confided" to her that the attitude of these delegates was so displeasing to him that he intended to take the opposite course of action (Briet, 1976, Amicales, p. 14). During the six years he headed the library, Roland-Marcel did manage to appoint several other women professionals even though he had few salary lines available.
While not all of the male librarians were hostile to the appointment of women, some, like E. G. Ledos, who headed the cataloging department, acknowledged that there had been considerable skepticism and ambivalence about the growth of "the feminine element" on the professional staff. Ledos wrote in 1936:
Although the [library] career has been open to women abroad for a rather long time, in France one was barely accustomed to the idea, and there was no lack of apprehension as to what would result from this experience. By their intelligence, their industry and their conscientiousness, the first two women who were assigned to the General Catalog ... dissipated all these fears and caused idle prejudices to be silenced" (p. 243).
Although she was not employed in the cataloging section, Ledos also alluded to Suzanne Briet and praised her work (1936, pp. 247, 251). During the early years of her career, Briet must have been quite aware of the need to prove herself, and she much later acknowledged that for a long time she regretted not having been born male because she felt that women were "handicapped in social life" (1976, Femmes, p. 39).
Barely over a year after her appointment at the BN, Suzanne Brier married Ferdinand Dupuy, a professor of liberal arts from Toulouse. The couple had no children, and like many other French professional women of this generation, she continued to work full-time after her marriage. In addition to her duties at the BN and her professional association activities, she also authored several studies related to the history of Paris as well as articles for the library press that were published under Briet, Dupuy, or Dupuy-Briet. After eight years of marriage the couple divorced. Little is known about this part of her life, and Briet's memoir offers no mention of her husband and no entry under marriage. Under Femmes (women), however, she recounts an incident toward the end of her career when the subject of women and work was brought up at a...
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