France buys Casanova manuscript for record $9.5 mn

PARIS/FRANKFURT - The French government bought the manuscript of the autobiography of the legendary Italian womaniser and adventurer Giacamo Casanova for a record price, art advisor Christoph Graf Douglas told DPA Thursday.

Douglas said that France paid the German Brockhaus publishing family more than 7 million euros ($9.5 million), a world’s record for a written manuscript.

The previous record for such a purchase was the 3.6 million euros, including fees and commissions, that was paid for the manuscript of Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism in 2008.

Douglas said the negotiations over the conditions and price of the sale lasted two and a half years.

French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand, who personally signed the contract Thursday, said, “Thanks to this purchase, which delights me profoundly, we will finally be able to issue a critical edition.

“As a result, everyone will have access to this basic text of our literature.”

Mitterand said that the work would be digitalised and that an exhibition based on the Casanova autobiography would be held in 2011. According to Douglas, the exhibition will also be shown in Venice and perhaps Berlin.

The manuscript, which runs to 3,700 pages, had been in the possession of the Brockhaus family for some 180 years.

“I wanted to make (the manuscript) accessible to the public,” Hubertus Brockhaus said. “I’m delighted to be able to transfer this world-famous literary work to the (French) National Library”.

Although Casanova was born in Venice, he spent many years in Paris and wrote his autobiography in French because it was more widely used than Italian.

Casanova died in 1798 in what is now the Czech Republic. He bequeathed the manuscript to his nephew. The Brockhaus family bought it in 1821 and stored it in a basement in Leipzig, where it survived the ravages of time and the Allied bombings of World War II.

The book was published in English under the title “Story of My Life” and is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of European social life in the 18th century.