Terry Gilliam's Brazil: la Bibliothèque nationale de France (François Mitterand campus)

Le Nerd Librarian
Apr 15, 2019
2 min read

Welcome to the Breathtaking Bookshelves series!

The goal here is to showcase some cool libraries, French or otherwise.

We all have this one place in Paris that makes us wish we were able to teleport elsewhere. For me, this is the Bibliothèque nationale de France (François Mitterrand campus).

It gives me Terry Gilliam's Brazil vibes. For the life of me, I can never tell where I am, with all the underground passages and the general 3-halls-in-a-row, hidden-doors-that-look-like-walls madness.

Plus I can’t fathom why anyone would build a primarily-underground library: we need light! Our glasses are thick enough!

The building: The François Mitterrand campus is located in the south-east of Paris, right on the Seine. The building opened in 1995 in presence of the then-President François Mitterrand.

The architect behind this scary-as-sh*t nightmare of a maze is Dominique Perrault, and for this he won the Mies van der Rohe Prize that is awarded to “quality architectural production in Europe”.

One of their central missions is the legal deposit, which dates back to François Ier who invented the concept in 1537 (well, he didn’t do it out of the goodness of his heart, he wanted to control publications!). They’re basically in charge of collecting, cataloguing and archiving all of the documents published in France.

The BnF is also a cultural institution: they organize symposiums, conferences, readings, etc. all year. And it’s all free!

The collections: the François Mitterand site holds 13.3 million documents (11 million books!). It now hosts the National Center for Children’s Literature, where they keep most of the documents published for children since the 1950’s.

Fun fact! The trees in the middle are “rescue trees” from a quarry in the Eure region of France.

All photos mine except for the Brazil screenshots

Source: Imdb, Bnf.fr