Polish Library in Paris

The Polish Library in Paris occupies a seventeenth-century townhouse at number six Quai d'Orléans on the Île Saint-Louis. Founded in eighteen thirty-eight by Polish exiles, it served as an intellectual refuge for those who fled after the failed November Uprising against the Russian Empire. The library was established to preserve a national heritage that was being systematically dismantled at home, functioning as a substitute national library for a nation that had lost its sovereignty.