A storm in a glass of water. The discovery of a stamp in Polish on the book of Immanuel Kant offered by French President Emmanuel Macron to Pope Francis has provoked an avalanche of sometimes hostile comments in Poland. A hostility that is not justified, according to information collected by AFP from the Parisian bookseller who sold the book at the Elysée.
The photos of the first page of the first French edition of Towards perpetual peace of the Prussian philosopher, dating from 1796, indeed reveal a stamp of the “Academic Reading Room of Lviv”. Polish media and Internet users immediately suspected that the book could have been stolen by the German Nazis who occupied this city, which had belonged to Poland until the Second World War and now belongs to Ukraine.
The affair has gone viral on the web and the gesture of the French president has been described as‘”odd”, “annoying”, even insulting for Poland, according to the most aggressive Internet users. The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs took a reserved position, limiting itself to saying that it was “aware”.
Agence France-Presse contacted Patrick Hatchuel, a Parisian bookseller specializing in old and rare books, whose name was given in the context of this affair by a Swiss journalist, Arnaud Bédat.
“The history of this volume shows that it cannot come from Nazi looting. I have no doubts about that and, being of the Jewish faith, I am sensitive to the question. a library in Lviv, from which it came somewhere between 1850 and 1870, probably on the occasion of a sale”Patrick Hatchuel, who sold the German philosopher’s book to the French presidency, told AFP.
“He then arrives in France. And he is in Paris around 1900 with a bookseller with a well-known history, Lucien Bodin, who was a specialist in esotericism. A printed label attests to this. The last provenance is a private collector who bought it half a century ago. And his son sold it to me. There is no problem about it, everything is verifiable”added the bookseller.
Patrick Hatchuel has indicated “to have made a price” at the Elysée, lower than the catalog price of 2,500 euros, and specified that he had been questioned by the Polish government to specify the origin of the book. According to a specialized website on Lviv consulted by AFP, the “Academic Reading Room” was not part of the University of Lviv, but was an important society of students and researchers of Polish nationality, founded in 1867 and active until 1939.