Armorial =?ISO-8859-1?Q?g=E9n=E9ral_de_France_at

For those of you who are interested in French heraldry, I thought I
would mention that all most all the colored drawing manuscripts of the
1696 Armorial général de France are available at Gallica, the online
ebook site of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Just point your

Denis Beauregard...

The way Gallica is organized, you have to go to the web page to search
for a book, then to the FTP site to dowlonad it. It would save a lot
of time if you already have the FTP name of the file so as to take
what is already available (it is kept for 2 days).

Also, I rename the files I download so I can see the content without
opening it. Fore example, I have:

N0111471_pdf_1_1007-vol23-Paris-1.pdf
which is the vol. 23 of the armorial and covers Paris.

So, John, since you already have downloaded those files, can you
publish a message with the list of files of the armorial ? I think
this will be helpful to many readers interested in that series.

This armorial is the result of a tax scheme to raise money for Louis
XIV's wars. Basically, everyone with arms were supposed to register
them and be taxed. But the clerks got a little over enthusiastic and
started assigning arms to people who they thought could afford to pay
the taxes. So some farmers, craftsmen, and merchants were assigned
arms. The result is that some of the arms are bogus and pretty ugly. I

Joseph McMillan...

John,

Thanks for posting this information--it is a terrific resource.

But I'm puzzled by your use of the term "bogus." Ugly, yes, but isn't
the normal meaning of "bogus" in connection with heraldry "assumed
without legal authority?" My impression from reading Michel Pastoureau
is that there is no such thing as bogus heraldry in France, since, with
the exception of a couple of very brief periods, there's never been any
legal barrier to free assumption. In any case, how could arms assigned
by the royal juge general d'armes be considered bogus--do you mean that
they were probably never used by the person to whom they were assigned?

John P. DuLong...

You are of course correct. Bogus is not the right word. But what
should we call arms forced on a person by a legal authority?

Joseph McMillan

noticed that some of the clerks just put person's initial on a shield
and then taxed them for the privilege. You can also see when the clerks
issued similar patterns of arms over and over again in a district.
Lastly, not all nobles, especially the more prominent ones bothered to
register their arms. Still, with all these drawbacks, it is still an
amazing armorial of about 120,000 arms organized in 35 volumes by
generalities (like provinces). It is like an imperfect census of
armigers at the end of the seventeenth century.

There are two issues with what Gallica has offered to us. First, they
do not provide the index to the drawings. There is Louis Paris's
Indicateur du Grand armorial général de France, 2 vols, 1865, available
at the site, but that is for the blazon manuscript volumes, which are
not on Gallica. So you have to know the generality your ancestors lived
in and then hunt through hundreds of pages (unless of course you have an
exact citation). There is a manuscript index for the colored drawings
at the library. Hopefully, they will eventually make the index available.

Secondly, vol. 24, the second part of the series for Paris is missing.
Again, I hope they eventually add this volume to the offering as I have
many Parisian ancestors.

I was amazed to find this freely available online. In the past I have
paid to have single pages copied, but now I have the whole armorial,
except for vol. 24, downloaded and on my server. I just love paging
through the volumes and looking at the vivid drawings of the arms.

Armorial =?ISO-8859-1?Q?g=E9n=E9ral_de_France_at_Gallica?=