At 02:39 PM 2/3/98 +0100, you wrote:
>>Dear George: the French assuredly took the inquisitorial archives to
>>Paris, but who actually destroyed them and when? John
>
>Dear John,
>
>apparently (according to the fount of knowledge, the *Times Higher*), they
were
>destroyed between 1815 and 1817 by order of Monsignor Marino Marini, who
had been sent from Rome to recover them. Why, if on a mission from Rome, he
would destroy them, I do not know; does anyone out there?
>
> --George
Leonard BOYLE, A SURVEY OF THE VATICAN ARCHIVES (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute, 1972), 85, confirms the 1817 deliberate destruction of part of
the PROCESSUS series by the papal commissioners, but does not guess why.
I do not know. The obvious scenario of a bureaucrat seeking to
protect his organization by destroying potentially compromising documents
seems doubtful if the earlier records were destroyed and the more recent
ones kept.
It is possible that Rome, which may not have been rolling in money
after the French occupation, was hard pressed to find funds to ship
everything home again. In a triage decision, perhaps the later records were
judged more potentially useful to and compatible with the contemporary
inquisition. Perhaps the inquisitors knew they had limited archival storage
space back in Rome?
There are other anomalies in Rome's repatriation of Napolean's
archival loot. Some odd volumes of early modern hagiographical enactments
are still at the Bibliotheque nationale.
It is fairly rare that national and ecclesiastical custodians have
to make universal decisions about what to save and what to neglect. Has any
historian systematically examined exactly not only what Napoleon chose to
remove to Paris but also how the restored regimes went about reclaiming
their heritages?
John Howe
Texas Tech
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|