The inheritors of loss: seized libraries and bibliophily in late 18th-century Antwerp

The final decades of the 18th century were very important ones for the history of libraries in Belgium. This article describes the impact of this period on libraries and book-collecting in Antwerp and explains how significant amounts of books with an Antwerp provenance finally ended up in libraries in Brussels and abroad. It also describes aspects of the local bibliophile community at that time, and the ways in which it responded to the auctioning off of the contents of what was then Antwerp’s main private library, namely, the collection of bibliophile Jean-Baptiste Verdussen (1776). Soon after this auction, and in several stages, the libraries of the Antwerp monasteries were confiscated by the Habsburg authority, and, later, by the French Republican regime. The Jesuit libraries became state property in 1773; the same happened to the libraries of the contemplative communities in 1783, and most of the books were sold off at large-scale auctions. In 1795, all the remaining abbeys and monasteries were suppressed; their libraries were confiscated and put at the disposal of the Central School that had been established in 1797. When, not long afterwards, this school was itself closed, the books ended up in Antwerp’s City Library, which was opened to the general public in 1805.status: publishe