Arcane erotica and national 'patrimony' : Britain's Private Case and the Collection de l'Enfer of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France

Across the twentieth century, a tremendous mystique surrounded the erotica collections housed in European research libraries - most infamously, since the late nineteenth century, the Collection de l'Enfer in the Reserve of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and, in the twentieth century, the Private Case of the British Library (once British Museum). That such collections were created and preserved during historic eras characterised by strict state censorship reflected the ambivalent cultural status that erotic representation held throughout this time. On the one hand, erotica collections and their management were part of that shift toward sexuality as a discourse ('la "mise en discours" du sexe'), neither repressive nor liberationist, outlined famously by Michel Foucault as entailing a new medicalised view of sex in opposition to previously florid erotica cultures. The late nineteenth- century scientia sexualis represented both an increase in talk about sexual matters, alongside an elaborate categorisation and pathologisation of different desires. Erotica collections followed this pattern of simultaneous validation and regulation of publications through censorship also preserved them as historic treasures and created a space for them as revered objects within a cultural or national heritage.