God's Plagiarist

This is an account of Jacques-Paul Migne, an entrepreneur of the 19th century. A priest in Orleans from 1824 to 1833, Migne then moved to Paris, where, in the space of a decade, he built one of the most extensive publishing ventures of all time. His assembly-line production and marketing of the massive editions of the Church Fathers placed him at the forefront of France's new commerce. Characterized by the police as one of the great "schemers" of the century, this priest-entrepreneur put the most questionable of business practices in the service of his devotion to Catholicism. Part detective novel, part morality tale, Bloch's narrative should interest scholars of 19th-century French intellectual history and also general readers interested in the history of publishing.