The Bibliothèque bleue of Troyes: Popular Books in Blue Covers

For almost two and a half centuries, in the French countryside, the most widespread book was not a volume bound in leather but a thin booklet, printed on poor paper and wrapped in a cover of bluish paper. These booklets, produced mainly in Troyes, in Champagne, make up what historians call the Bibliothèque bleue. Among chivalric romances, saints' lives and almanacs, they also found room for some of the most widely read texts of popular magic in Europe.

The Oudots and the invention of a market

At the origin of the phenomenon is the Oudot family of printers, active in Troyes from the early seventeenth century, later joined by other dynasties such as the Garniers. Their idea was simple and successful: to reprint texts that were already known, often adapted and shortened, with worn type and old woodcuts reused many times, and to sell them at very low prices. The blue paper cover, of the same kind used to wrap sugar loaves, became the distinctive mark of this production.

Its success was such that the model was imitated in Rouen, Limoges and other towns. The booklets travelled in the baskets of pedlars and reached villages where there were no bookshops. They were often read aloud, during evening gatherings, before an audience that was partly unable to read, and this made them an instrument of shared culture rather than of private reading.

Knights, saints and calendars

The catalogue of the Bibliothèque bleue was surprisingly varied. Alongside the stories of knights such as the Four Sons of Aymon or Pierre de Provence, it included devotional tales, saints' lives, manuals of good manners, collections of songs, comic texts and above all almanacs, with weather forecasts, fairs, phases of the moon and advice for work in the fields. One of the longest-lived titles was the Calendrier des bergers, the shepherds' calendar, which combined astronomy, morality and popular medicine.

The Grand Albert and the Petit Albert

Among the most successful titles were two collections of secrets attributed to Albertus Magnus. The Grand Albert derived from medieval Latin texts on the powers of stones, herbs and animals, which tradition had placed under the name of the great Dominican theologian without any foundation. The Petit Albert, which appeared at the beginning of the eighteenth century, added secrets of natural and cabbalistic magic and soon became a byword for the forbidden book.

These two texts were viewed with suspicion by the clergy and sometimes seized, but they remained in great demand until the nineteenth century. In peasant culture, owning a Petit Albert could be enough to start rumours about a neighbour: the book itself was perceived as an object charged with power, regardless of what it actually contained. For the historian, by contrast, it is a valuable document on the beliefs and fears of the countryside.

The Bibliothèque bleue declined in the mid-nineteenth century, with state control over the pedlar trade and the spread of the periodical press. Its study, begun in the twentieth century by historians such as Robert Mandrou, has shown how much these booklets helped to shape the French popular imagination, including the enduring fascination of books of magic.