A new reading room for the library, with an innovative iron frame supporting the roof, was built between 1838 and 1851 by architect Henri Labrouste.

The abbey was said to have been founded at the beginning of the 6th century at the suggestion of Saint Genevieve, who selected the site, across from the original Roman forum.

[3] By the 9th century, the basilica had been transformed into an Abbey church, and a large monastery had grown up around it, including a scriptorium for the creation and copying of texts.

The texts created or copied included works of history and literature, as well as theology, However, in the course of the 9th century, the Vikings raided Paris three times.

The doctrines originally taught by Saint Augustine, and promoted by Suger (1081–1151), the influential religious advisor to the King, required the reading aloud of scriptures, and specified that each monastery have a workshop to produce books and place to keep them.

[5] From 1108 to 1113, the scholar Peter Abelard taught at the Abbey school, challenging many aspects of traditional theology and philosophy.

The early holdings of the library from this time are listed in a 13th-century inventory (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat.

The library possesses a text of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili published in 1499, with engravings after the drawings of Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini.

[7] The library was brought back to life beginning in 1619, during the reign of Louis XIII, by Cardinal Francois de Rochefoucauld.

Du Mollinet founded a famous small museum, the Cabinet of Curiosities, with Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities, medals, rare minerals and stuffed animals, within the library.

[10] During the late 18th century, the library acquired copies of the major works of the Age of the Enlightenment, including the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert.

He traveled to Rome, following Napoleon's army, and arranged for the transfer to Paris of books confiscated from the papal collections.

It had originally been occupied by the medieval Collége de Montaigu, where Erasmus and Ignatius of Loyola, John Calvin and François Rabelais had been students.

Since the Lycée wanted the space as soon as possible, all the books had been moved in 1842 to a temporary library in the only surviving building of Montaigu College.

The base and facade resembled Roman buildings, with simple arched windows and discreet bands of sculpture.

[18][15] The large (278 by 69 feet) two-storied structure filling a wide, shallow site is deceptively simple in plan: the lower floor is occupied by stacks to the left, rare-book storage and office space to the right, with a central vestibule and stairway leading to the reading room which fills the entire upper story.

The vestibule was designed to symbolize the beginning of a journey in search of knowledge, the visitors arrives through a space decorated with murals of gardens and forest and passes busts of famous French scholars and scientists.

Between 1851 and 1930, the library's collection grew from one hundred thousand volumes to over a million, requiring a series of reconstructions and modifications.

In the new plan, the central bookshelves were removed and tables crossed the room, increasing the seating but reducing the linear effect.

[23] Notable users of the library included the paleontologist Georges Cuvier, the botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, the historian Jules Michelet, and Victor Hugo.

The artist Marcel Duchamp was employed in the book reserve in 1913, at the time he was enjoying his first public exhibition in New York,[24] and in his notes for his most famous sculpture Large Glass, he recommends that those seeking to understand him "read the entire section on perspective in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.

"[25] The library's interior was used as the Film Academy Library for scenes of Martin Scorsese's Academy Award-winning 3D film Hugo, based on Brian Selznick's Caldecott Medal-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, where the title character and Isabelle go to find more information about a film which Hugo did not remember its name (A Trip to the Moon), later both finding out to their surprise that its creator is Georges Méliès, Isabelle's godfather.