BnF Richelieu

Historic · Vivienne / Bourse (2nd)Paris,France

The historic home of France's national library, its 43-metre oval reading room under a glass dome now open to anyone who walks in.

BnF Richelieu is the historic home of the French national library, and since 2022 anyone can walk into its great oval reading room and sit down. Stand at one end and the room runs 43 metres away from you under a glass dome, with three tiers of iron balconies ringing the walls above the desks. Curved shelves run right round; you can pull out whatever you like without asking anyone. Students, children and visitors read side by side, and quiet conversation is allowed. The buildings were Cardinal Mazarin's palace, and the king's library moved in during 1721, taking over a wing that a Scottish banker's failed bank had left empty. The library grew through the whole block and built two reading rooms. Henri Labrouste finished the first in 1868 and roofed it with nine domes on slender cast-iron columns; that one is a research library, and the public may only look in from outside. Jean-Louis Pascal designed the Oval Room as a public reading room. Work began in 1897 and it did not open until 1936, after his death.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The only ticket is for the museum — The Oval Room, the courtyard, the paper garden and the crossing between the two streets are all free; only the old galleries charge.
Use the door at 5 rue Vivienne — It opens onto the free reading room, the garden and the museum. The older door on rue de Richelieu serves the research library.
Come in the morning if you want a desk — The room seats about 160 and fills through the day, so by late afternoon you may be standing and looking instead of reading.
Look at what holds the room up — Mosaic-lined arches rest on paired cast-iron columns, so a room that looks like stone is really carried on an iron frame.
The printed books left in the 1990s — Most of them moved to a new library site across the river, and that move freed the space you are standing in.

Things to do

1
Take a book down without asking anyone
Walk in at 5 rue Vivienne and go to the Oval Room, where curved shelves run right round the walls. Pull out whatever book you like; nobody checks who you are or why you came. Then take one of the long desks under the dome, sit down and read it for an hour. Leaving, keep going to the door at 58 rue de Richelieu: the library put a public entrance at each end of the block, so you can walk right through it.
2
Find the plants that paper is made from
Step into the courtyard garden on the rue Vivienne side, the Hortus papyrifer. The gardener Gilles Clément planted it with the species people have used to make writing surfaces: paper mulberry, bamboo, papyrus. Read the labels, then look up at the library windows above the beds.
3
Look up at Cardinal Mazarin's ceiling before the display cases
The museum route runs through Cardinal Mazarin's long upper gallery. The Roman artist Giovanni Francesco Romanelli painted its vault in the 1640s. Stand at one end and follow the painted scenes the length of the room, and only then look down at the display cases. They hold pieces such as the Grand Camée de France, a Roman scene cut into a single stone.