About the Jesuits of Paris and Their Coin Collections: A Study of the 1763–64 Auction Catalogs

Abstract The two seats of the Paris Jesuits, the professed house and the Clermont college, each had a separate library, both of which owned books on coins as well as a numismatic collection. The discovery of their respective catalogs, annotated with auction results—prices and buyers’ names—has enabled an analysis of their contents and fates. The auction catalogs describe around fifteen thousand and thirteen thousand “medals” over just a few pages, but the descriptions are too brief to identify individual items, save for a Roman weight now preserved in the Louvre Museum. The Paris Jesuits owned many more ancient coins than modern ones, and their commercial value was much higher than modern coins. However, in both cases, the value of the coin cabinets was only a fraction of the total value of the libraries themselves.