Médiathèque Louis Aragon

Located in the heart of downtown Le Mans, just steps from Place de la République, the Louis Aragon library heads the Le Mans Libraries and Archives network. It oversees all the neighborhood libraries (Saulnières, Sud, l'Espal, les Vergers) as well as partner relay libraries. The building, with its cubic design around a large courtyard, covers 7,700 m², of which 4,000 m² are open to the public.

It offers a wide selection of collections (books, magazines, CDs, DVDs), access to the Inathèque, equipment for visually impaired readers, Wi-Fi, a digital space with digital-skills advisors on duty, and a 24/7 automatic book return robot. It also has an auditorium and an exhibition space that regularly host talks, screenings and cultural events. Thematic areas are dedicated to youth, music and cinema.

The library also holds the network's most precious heritage collections: about 700 manuscripts (130 of them medieval), nearly 400 incunabula printed before 1501, some 130,000 volumes printed before 1909, and specialized collections on Maine (11,000 documents), automobiles (11,700 documents) and architecture (3,300 drawings and plans). This heritage earns the institution the status of a classified municipal library (bibliothèque municipale classée).

A bit of history

Public reading in Le Mans dates back to 1789, when the first municipal library was created from the revolutionary confiscation of religious communities' property in the region. First housed in the attics of the prefecture (former Abbey of La Couture), it gained municipal library status in 1803, and a first inventory was drawn up in 1805.

In 1931, the collections moved to the former offices of the Chappée foundry on rue Gambetta, where the library kept growing: its spaces doubled, with Study and Public Reading sections added in 1962–1963, a youth section opened in 1971, and then the first neighborhood annex (Ronceray) in 1973.

In 1988, the central library moved for the first time into a building designed specifically for it, in the Halles district: the Louis Aragon library, designed by architect Jean-Louis Bertrand, which brought audiovisual media in alongside print. The number of registered members rose from 1,600 in 1965 to 16,000 today, and annual loans across the network rose from 40,000 to 900,000.