Saint-Maur · 1730-1745

Histoire générale de Languedoc

dom Claude Devic and dom Joseph Vaissète · Paris, Jacques Vincent · five volumes in folio

The history of one French province, built out of that province’s own archives and printed with them attached. Each volume has three parts: a narrative, a body of notes, and a set of pièces justificatives — the charters, letters and acts it rests on, printed in full, so that a reader can test the story against them. The account runs from antiquity to the death of Louis XIII in 1643.

Paid for by the Estates

The work began with a province deciding to pay for its own history. The idea was put to the Estates of Languedoc in January 1708 by Charles Le Goux de La Berchère, archbishop of Narbonne. The Benedictines of Saint-Germain-des-Prés were approached, and in 1715 the task went to two of them. The arrangement is printed at the foot of the title page above: Chez Jacques Vincent, Imprimeur des Etats Generaux de la Province de Languedoc, at the sign of the Angel in the rue Saint-Séverin.

The two worked through holdings scattered the length of Languedoc — churches and abbeys, royal fortresses, town libraries, private hands — and in Paris through the Trésor des Chartes and the library of Colbert. The documents they gathered and copied are said to fill 131 volumes, today in the Department of Manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Two men, neither named

The title page names no author. It says only Par deux Religieux Benedictins de la Congrégation de S. Maur. The first was dom Claude Devic, born at Sorèze in 1670, professed at seventeen at the priory of La Daurade in Toulouse, afterwards a teacher of rhetoric at Saint-Sever and, in 1701, sent to Rome to collate Vatican manuscripts. He died at Saint-Germain-des-Prés on 23 January 1734, two volumes in.

The second was dom Joseph Vaissète, born at Gaillac in April 1685, a doctor of theology and of civil and canon law who had stood in for his father as procurator general at Albi before entering the order at La Daurade in July 1711, at twenty-six. He carried the last three volumes alone — 1737, 1742, 1745 — and how much of them Devic had drafted before his death is not recorded.

Set-piece scenes were engraved for the volumes by Charles-Nicolas Cochin the elder (1688-1754) after designs by the painter Pierre-Jacques Cazes (1676-1754); a preparatory print of the series survives at the Musée Carnavalet. Both names sit under the vignette above, in type small enough to be missed: Cazes in. at the left — invenit, he devised it — and C. N. Cochin at the right. The plates run the length of the province’s history: the rebels of Nîmes submitting to Wamba, king of the Visigoths, after the revolt of Septimania; the founding of the Jeux floraux at Toulouse; the peace of 1229; Louis XIII before Montpellier.

What came after

The fifth and last volume appeared in 1745, carrying the story to the death of Louis XIII. In 1746 the Estates struck a medal to mark the finished history, thirty-one years after they had begun paying for it. Vaissète published a four-volume Géographie historique, ecclésiastique et civile in 1755 and died at Saint-Germain-des-Prés on 10 April 1756.

The nineteenth century took the work up twice. An edition brought out at Toulouse between 1840 and 1846 by Alexandre Du Mège with the publisher Jean-Baptiste Paya, and carried down to 1830, is commonly described as unreliable and often faulty. The second attempt went further. Édouard Privat had a new edition made at Toulouse from 1872, eventually running to sixteen quarto volumes, with fresh dissertations and notes, a collection of the province’s inscriptions, and a continuation to 1790 by Ernest Roschach; Auguste Molinier superintended the reprinting of the text and added studies of the province’s feudal administration from 900 to 1250 and of the historical geography of medieval Languedoc.

Why it is here

The abbey of Saint-Pierre at Mas-Grenier, in the diocese of Toulouse, belonged to the Congregation of Saint-Maur from 1645: while Devic and Vaissète were at work, this house was one of theirs. Whether its papers were among those they used is not established; the sources say only that abbeys and churches across the province were consulted. The order the book keeps is the order kept here, in the archive and in the research programme — the document first, named and given in full, and the account after it.

SourcesThe title page above is reproduced from a digitised copy of the second volume, Paris, 1733. The two plates come from Wikimedia Commons and are in the public domain; the Commons records name Cochin the elder as engraver and give the volume and year, while the museum record of the Carnavalet print names Cazes as author of the designs. One caution for anyone following the trail: the Gallica link on the Commons page for the 1229 plate resolves to volume one, not volume three, so the attribution of that plate rests on its credit line and its category rather than on the linked digitisation. The first volume, Paris 1730, 919 pages, may be read at the Internet Archive.