Jacques-Paul Migne

In the small hours of February 12, 1868, a fire started in a room between the plate store and the presses of the largest religious publishing house in the world.¹ By morning the Ateliers Catholiques of Petit-Montrouge had lost its steam presses, its stock, and more than six hundred thousand stereotype plates — the engraved metal memory of every page it had ever set.² Among the losses was a volume that existed nowhere else: tome 162 of the Patrologia Graeca, printed and plated but not yet published, carrying forty-five letters of Michael Apostolius edited for the first time from a single codex, and fourteen works never printed at all. It was never reassembled. The Greek series of the Fathers stops at volume 161 to this day because of that night.³

The founder of the house was a sixty-seven-year-old priest from the Auvergne named Jacques-Paul Migne. By his own signed account, written six weeks after the fire, his two Patrologies — 391 volumes of the Latin and Greek Fathers, the largest single body of Christian writing ever assembled — stood three printer's sheets from completion when the plates melted. Forty-eight pages.⁴ A journalist found him in the ruins the next morning. His first recorded words were not about the Fathers: "My accounts are intact. No one will lose anything."⁵ Three days later he told a trade paper, "I am very old, and I will finish my life's work before being myself finished."⁶

Both sentences were characteristic, and between them lies the whole problem of his life. He was a priest and a businessman, a man of one idea and a hundred schemes, remembered by his French biographer as a benefactor of the Church and by his American one as God's plagiarist. The remarkable thing is that both were describing the same facts.

Saint-Flour

Migne was born on October 25, 1800, in Saint-Flour, a cathedral town in the Cantal, to a family of cloth merchants.⁷ The shop mattered. Decades later the Maison Delcros-Migne of Saint-Flour was still functioning as a provincial branch office of his empire — taking subscriptions for the Cours complets from country priests who came to town to be fitted for their cassocks, his sister's firm shipping the cloth north for soutanes while his own receipts, printed on the Ateliers presses, went south.⁸ He was a merchant's son who became a priest, and he never saw a contradiction in remaining both.

He left at seventeen for the seminary at Orléans, brought there by a priest of the diocese, knowing — says the earliest account of his life — "little French and less Latin still."⁹ He was ordained at Trinity, 1824, and after brief first postings became curé of Puiseaux, a market town in the Gâtinais, in 1825. He was an effective country pastor of the combative Restoration type. Civil marriages in Puiseaux stood at twenty-six when he arrived; he preached and pursued until they fell to three. "The curé is tenacious," Hamman writes, "and he succeeds."¹⁰

Tenacity ended his pastorate. In 1831, in the raw aftermath of the July Revolution, the new regime's tricolor intruded on the Corpus Christi procession — draped, by one account, on the street altars over his objection; planted, by another, on the altar of his own church as a provocation.¹¹ Migne would not bless the flag of the Revolution, walked out of his own procession, and was denounced for lacking civic spirit. Stung, he wrote a two-hundred-page pamphlet, De la liberté, par un prêtre — and here his life turned. His bishop, Jean Brumauld de Beauregard of Orléans, confiscated the pamphlet without reading it.¹² Migne obtained his exeat and left for Paris in 1833, nearly penniless.

Hamman's sentence about this episode has become the master key to the whole biography, and it deserves its fame: Migne could not tolerate defeat, "and his revenge would consist in publishing no longer a brochure, but whole libraries."¹³

Paris: scissors

What he did first was invent a kind of newspaper. L'Univers religieux, first issue November 3, 1833, gathered eight hundred subscribers in three weeks; it was cheap, and it was largely cut from other papers.¹⁴ The charge of plagiarism arrived within a year — "Quick, a pair of scissors!" wrote the veteran Catholic editor Picot in 1834; "such a fine discovery deserves to be cited in the annals of plagiarism"¹⁵ — and Migne, in a late letter to the police ministry, cheerfully adopted the instrument as his self-description: "the editor is a pair of scissors."¹⁶ In 1835 he was convicted, with a two-hundred-franc fine, in a small bribery affair; in 1836 he sold the paper that would later, under Louis Veuillot, become the most famous Catholic daily in Europe under a shortened form of the name he gave it.¹⁷ He was done with daily journalism, though never quite with newspapers: he bought, founded, or ran a string of them for the rest of his life, down to buying one at auction.¹⁸

He had found his idea, though it took the failure to show it. France's parish clergy — the generation formed in the ruins of the revolutionary church, educated from a single dogmatic manual, in seminaries where, by Montalembert's count, not five in eighty taught any church history¹⁹ — could not read the Fathers of the Church because no priest could afford them. The great folio collections of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sat in cathedral libraries and auction rooms. Lamennais had called in 1808 for someone to give the clergy back their books. Migne, who had the shopkeeper's eye, saw that the calling was a market.

He turned publisher with about five thousand francs, issuing his first volumes from an address by the Sorbonne; by 1838 he had built his own house in the market-garden suburb of Petit-Montrouge, on the chaussée du Maine just outside the Paris toll wall. He called it the Imprimerie Catholique, and then, with growing accuracy, the Ateliers Catholiques — the Catholic Workshops.²⁰

Petit-Montrouge: the workshops

Everything about the place ran to scale. Three hundred workers by 1842; five hundred ninety-six by 1854, tended by five steam presses.²¹ Interior streets named rue de la Bible and place des Pères de l'Église, so that visitors walked through a small industrial city of God.²² A workforce the police ministry's informers described as salted with ex-convicts, revolutionaries, and defrocked priests dodging their bishops — the Goncourt brothers relished the detail that at the very sight of a police inspector, workers jumped for the doors.²³ A rule of silence in the shops. Wages below the Paris rate, offset by a bounty of twenty-five centimes for every typographical error a worker caught.²⁴ Migne himself worked the hours of legend — sixteen a day in every account, though the accounts all descend from his own advertising²⁵ — and refused, twice, the Légion d'honneur, on the stated ground that a priest's work needed no ribbon.²⁶

From these shops, in a little over thirty years, came more than a thousand volumes: the twin Cours complets on Scripture and theology (fifty-odd volumes); the Démonstrations évangéliques of the apologists; the collected Orateurs sacrés, ninety-nine quarto volumes of French pulpit eloquence; the Encyclopédie théologique in 171 volumes of dictionaries on everything from heresies to heraldry; and the two Patrologies.²⁷ His slogan, printed as a manifesto in 1849, was du bon, à bon marché — the good, cheap. "Our Catholic Workshops were founded above all to produce what no publisher would dare undertake... Let the clergy therefore close ranks around confrères who have sacrificed for it rest, position, and honor."²⁸ A Latin Patrologia volume cost five francs; a Greek one eight — cheaper, Hamman noted a century later, than a paperback.²⁹

He sold as aggressively as he printed. Subscription pyramids: ten subscriptions gathered earned an eleventh set free. Prepayment discounts that were, on Bloch's arithmetic, disguised interest rates; and behind them an actual private bank, taking the "sleeping savings" of country clergy at five to eight percent to finance the presses.³⁰ Above all, an unending storm of prospectuses — forty thousand copies of the first Patrologia circular alone — thick with endorsements from bishops, cardinals, and learned bodies. How many of those voices were real is the central question of Bloch's book. The one documented case is damning enough to quote: in February 1858 Migne offered the journalist Veuillot three hundred francs' worth of books to slip his advertisement into the paper "between a head and a tail of your hand," so the readers would take the publisher's list for the editor's opinion.³¹ Bloch reads the whole archive this way — the self-reviewed prospectuses, the planted press tours, the promised ten or twelve volumes of fifty thousand congratulatory letters — as one voice speaking through a hall of mirrors.³² Perhaps. Migne's own papers burned with the house in 1868; what survives to check him by — the ministry files, the police reports, and above all the printed noise — is exactly the record a promoter leaves behind him.

The Patrologia

The great work began at the door of a monastery. Migne went to Solesmes, on Guéranger's counsel — "it is at your instigation and by your counsels," he wrote to the abbot in 1855, "that I undertook the Patrologia"³³ — and Guéranger gave him a young monk, Jean-Baptiste Pitra, who in three days of 1843 drew up the Conspectus: the master plan of a complete library of the Fathers from the apostolic age to Innocent III.³⁴ Pitra became the scholarly engine of the enterprise — hunting manuscripts, recruiting an editorial network from Louvain to Glasgow to Würzburg, correcting proofs for three hundred francs a volume under a contract whose third article kept the names of the monks of Solesmes, individually and collectively, out of the work.³⁵ What the volumes carry instead, at their head, is one name in the ablative: ACCURANTE J.-P. MIGNE.

That arrangement has been read two ways, and the two ways are the two biographies. For Bloch it is erasure: the scissors that cut the digest also cut the scholars out, so that a collective work could wear one man's name; he quotes the Belgian bishop Malou, who dealt with Migne for years: "the man's interest in money is greater than memories or promises even."³⁶ For Hamman it is the refutation of the ingratitude legend: the anonymity was contractual, monastic in spirit, and agreed on both sides — and Pitra, who ended a cardinal, never repudiated the work.³⁷ The reader may hold both thoughts; Migne would not have minded either, so long as the volumes sold.

About the editing itself there is less argument. The Patrologia was, by design, a reprint. Its texts came from the great early-modern collections — the line that runs from la Bigne's Bibliotheca of 1575 through the Maxima of Lyon, 1677, through Galland — and from the Maurist editions of the seventeenth century, reproduced entire; where those failed, from whatever the nineteenth century had printed, including editions still in copyright. Sued once for pirating a newspaper, he was never caught in court over the Patrologia; he covered his tracks instead. The Leo VI volume of the Greek series reproduces Zachariae von Lingenthal's 1857 edition under an invented provenance — and, as the philologist Alphonse Dain observed, "without missing a single typographical error."³⁸ Against this stands the house's genuine apparatus of correction — five stages of proof, the error bounty, six hundred francs of corrections sunk into the first Tertullian volume alone³⁹ — and the verdict of the century that used it. The judgment scholars still trade was written by Hergenröther in 1867: Germany would have done it with more critical rigor, "but never in ten years, and never at so modest a price"; taken whole, the collection is "a truly remarkable achievement, never before accomplished."⁴⁰ The Latin series ran to 217 volumes in eleven years (1844–1855), 297,567 double-column pages of 2,614 authors, with four index volumes to follow; the Greek series to 161 volumes (1857–1866), 235,724 pages, thirty-six volumes in the year 1857 alone.⁴¹ No critical corpus begun since — Vienna's, Berlin's, or Turnhout's — has finished, a century and a half on. Migne finished. That was Hamman's final defense of the reprint strategy, and it is hard to answer.⁴²

Rome came around slowly — the enterprise had a whiff of commerce the Curia distrusted, and in 1857 a scare over heterodox authors on the Index nearly stopped the Greek series ("farewell the Patrologia!" Migne wrote)⁴³ — but Pius IX sent his brief of commendation in 1870, and at the Vatican Council the bishops of the world worked from Migne's volumes. Hamman calls it the official consecration.⁴⁴ Würzburg had given the cloth-merchant's son an honorary doctorate in 1861.⁴⁵

The archbishops

His troubles in his own diocese were older and stranger. Archbishop de Quélen had ruled from the start that a priest could not run a commercial house, and withdrew his faculties; his successor Affre held the line, then lifted the interdiction in November 1847; under Sibour came rehabilitation and even a subsidy.⁴⁶ The last quarrel was the worst. Migne ran, among everything else, a clearinghouse for Mass stipends — collecting intentions and their fees at the going Paris rate, farming the Masses out to poor priests at a lower one or paying them in books from the catalog, and holding the difference.⁴⁷ To the chancery this was traffic in the sacrifice of the altar. The Archbishop of Paris ordered it stopped, and when Migne resisted, suspended him from his priestly functions; Rome followed, under Pius IX, with a decree condemning the exchange of stipends for books and naming Migne — a public humiliation that stood over his last years.⁴⁸ It is a hard scene to look at: the man who had rearmed the French clergy with the Fathers, ending under his archbishop's censure over the small change of country Masses. It should be said plainly, because the polemics of the time said otherwise: no one, then or since, showed that Migne kept the money for himself. The scandal was the system, and the system was the man — he could not see a sacred thing without also seeing its ledger line.

For that is the paradox his own court records settled. When the tribunal inventoried his personal effects after the fire, the furniture of the man whose workshops were valued at six million francs came to six hundred sixty-two.⁴⁹ "This wheeler-dealer is honest," Hamman concluded; "he lives poorly and does not enrich himself. Of the millions that pass through his hands, nothing sticks."⁵⁰ Hamman's other summary sentence is the one everyone quotes, and it belongs here: "The abbé Migne has something of the bulldozer: he advances, he charges, he cares nothing for the flowers or the beetles on his path."⁵¹

The fire and the blindness

The fire of February 1868 was never explained. The story that a disgruntled worker set it, which still circulates, has no contemporary support; the diocesan weekly that reported the disaster judged malice unlikely, and the cause was officially left open.⁵² What is documented is the ruin: the plates — 627,855 of them by the count printed in Le Figaro the next day, more than five hundred tons of engraved metal — melted where they stood; two hundred thousand printed volumes were touched by the flames; the manuscripts and proofs of the almost-finished index volumes burned with the plates, so that the last three sheets of the Latin tables, forty-eight pages, would have had to be rebuilt from nothing. "Everything, then, was to be begun again," Hamman writes. "Migne had not the heart for it."⁵³ A colleague who had held the advance sheets of the lost Greek volume 162 put the cruelty of the timing in one sentence: had the disaster come only two or three days later, everything would have been saved.⁵⁴

Migne was insured, but not enough, and not simply: eighteen companies stood at the trial — the newspapers had counted more than thirty — against claims that ran past five million francs, in litigation that outlasted the Empire itself, delayed by the Prussian siege and the Commune and finally heard in December 1871.⁵⁵ The house of Firmin Didot — the first name in French printing, no friend the court could dismiss — testified that what had burned was "the greatest publishing enterprise since the invention of printing," and the tribunal awarded Migne two and a half million francs for the plates alone, though with no interest for the four years his presses had stood cold.⁵⁶ It was a victory that repaired nothing. He was past seventy, and he had gone blind in the interval. Hamman's catalogue finds a single new volume published after the fire; Migne himself, indomitable on paper to the end, wrote in 1872 that he was about to re-set the fifth volume of the Tables.⁵⁷ He died in Paris on October 24, 1875, the eve of his seventy-fifth birthday, suspended, sightless, and unrepaid, and the business passed the following year to Garnier Frères — whose head later called it the best deal he ever made, and whose house sold the dead priest's stamped envelopes to collectors.⁵⁸

One consequence of that sale still touches every scholar who cites these books. Garnier reprinted the Patrologia from new, hastily made plates, and the reprints do not always match the originals — even the column numbers drift, so that a text standing at column 45 of a true Migne printing may stand at column 41 of a Garnier one. The "Migne" on most library shelves is a Garnier.⁵⁹

The verdict

Judgment on Migne has always come in pairs. The philologist Eduard Schwartz called the Patrologia a cloaca maxima — the main sewer of Rome — and Hamman, reporting the insult, permitted himself one dry sentence: "He was, happily, the only one."⁶⁰ Bloch's judgment gives his book its title and its close: Migne "invented less than he assimilated"; he was the Bon Marché of Christian tradition, the draper's son who built a department store of the Fathers in the same decade that built the department store itself, out of the same steam, rails, cheap paper, and wholesale nerve.⁶¹ Hamman — who spent his own scholarly life compiling supplements to the Latin series, and so knew its faults better than any critic — answered with the purpose rather than the method: the return to the Fathers was never an archaeological excursion but a climb back toward the Source; his book's last words are Sobria ebrietas, the sober drunkenness of the Fathers themselves.⁶² And the twentieth century quietly took Migne's side. The ressourcement that remade Catholic theology, the Sources Chrétiennes, the modern critical corpora that still cite by his columns — all of it stands on the shelves he sold for five francs a volume.

He told Pitra his own epitaph, in a letter of 1863, twelve years before the end: "I confess to you in closing that my ambition is to die as the priest who will have been the most useful to the Church."⁶³

His plan, interrupted at its midpoint by the fire, had called for two thousand volumes.⁶⁴ This site is built inside the half he finished — and, in its small way, on the half he did not. The columns are his; the map is his; the ambition, du bon, à bon marché, carried to its limit — the good, free — is one he would have recognized, advertised, and undersold by Tuesday.

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A note on sources and legends

This life rests on two books that disagree fruitfully: A.-G. Hamman, Jacques-Paul Migne: le retour aux pères de l'Église (Paris, 1975), sympathetic, written by the compiler of the Patrologia Latina Supplementum; and R. Howard Bloch, God's Plagiarist (Chicago, 1994), ironic, built on the surviving ministry and police archives — Migne's own business archive burned in 1868. Nearly everything known of his early life descends from a single 1841 notice (Barbier); readers should hold all colorful detail with corresponding lightness. Claims this page treats as legend or leaves aside: the arson story (contradicted by contemporary sources); the sixteen-hour day and the Oxford convert anecdote (advertising in origin); the exact night of the fire (both biographies put the outbreak between one and two in the morning of February 12 — the night of the 11th–12th — while several contemporary papers and later references give the 12th–13th); the identity and date of the archiepiscopal suspension (see note 48); the count of insurers (eighteen at trial per Bloch; thirty-odd in the contemporary press); and the precise stipend rates (accounts differ). The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia misspells the bishop of Orléans ("Brunault" for Brumauld); the standard French reference misprints the date of Affre's clemency (1817 for 1847). Both errors are silently corrected above — a small, fitting tribute to a man who paid twenty-five centimes a typo.