Another page of the Histoire de ma vie manuscript from the BnF's Fonds Casanova — The manuscript's second book — BnF, Fonds Casanova (public domain). The Brockhaus family kept these pages from 1820 until the BnF acquired them in 2010.

Publication History

The book Casanova wrote was not published for 160 years. What circulated instead was censored, rewritten, and translated from a translation.

The manuscript changes hands

Casanova died in 1798 with the manuscript unpublished. It passed to his nephew Carlo Angiolini, who in 1820 brought it to the Leipzig publishing house of F. A. Brockhaus. The Brockhaus family kept the manuscript for nearly two centuries — through the 1943 bombing of Leipzig, when it was secured in a bank vault, and the firm’s move to Wiesbaden in 1945.

In February 2010, with the support of an anonymous donor, the manuscript was purchased by the Bibliothèque nationale de France for approximately €7 million — the institution’s most expensive acquisition at the time. It is catalogued as NAF 28604 and has since been digitized (Gallica). A page of it illustrates the memoirs page.

The bowdlerized editions

1822–1828, German. The first publication: a German translation by Wilhelm von Schütz, published by Brockhaus in Leipzig as Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de Seingalt. Heavily abridged and censored.
1826–1837, French. The Paris editor Victor Tournachon, with no access to the manuscript, translated the German version back into French — a translation of a translation, heavily censored. Brockhaus responded with a rival French edition edited by Jean Laforgue (1826–1837, twelve volumes), which rewrote Casanova’s religious and political views and censored the sexual passages. Laforgue’s text became the basis of nearly every edition for the next 120 years.
1894, English. Arthur Machen’s English translation, The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, made from the Laforgue text. It remained the standard English version for decades and is the public-domain source quoted on this site — with the caveat that it is Machen’s rendering of Laforgue’s bowdlerization, not of Casanova’s French.

The complete text, at last

1960–1962. The Brockhaus–Plon collaboration (Wiesbaden–Paris) published the first edition from the original manuscript: twelve volumes, restoring what the nineteenth century had cut. The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition followed in 1958–1960 (ed. J. Rives Childs), and a new Pléiade edition appeared in 2015 (ed. Gérard Lahouati and Marie-Françoise Luna), now the scholarly standard.

From 1838 to 1960, every edition in every language derived from the censored nineteenth-century texts. Readers before 1960 were, in a real sense, reading a different book.

Source notes

The publication sequence (German 1822–28, Laforgue 1826–37, Machen 1894, complete text 1960–62, BnF acquisition 2010) follows the Wikipedia article “Histoire de ma vie” and the Goodreads/WorldCat bibliographic record, cross-checked against the BnF’s published account of the 2010 acquisition.
The manuscript shelfmark (NAF 28604) and the c. €7 million price are from the BnF’s 2010 announcement, as reported at the time.
The Pléiade first edition (1958–60) was edited by J. Rives Childs; the 2015 edition by Gérard Lahouati and Marie-Françoise Luna.