The Online Books Page

presents

Biographie Nationale

This is a French language biographical dictionary of notable Belgians, published by the Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique. The original version was published in 27 volumes between 1866 and 1932. Volume 28 was an index volume, published in 1944. There are then Supplement volumes published between 1957 and 1986. Following this, 13 volumes of "Nouvelle Biographie Nationale" have been published to date between 1988 and 2016.

The Académie has the set on their website, with 3 links:

At this writing, it can be difficult to access the individual digitized volumes via the official website. Below we link directly to their scanned PDF files, as well as to independent scans of some volumes at the Internet Archive, and transcriptions in progress at Wikisource. (We only link to volumes at those other sites published prior to 1922, not being sure of the US copyright status of later volumes.)

Original set

Supplement set

Nouvelle Biographie Nationale


This is a "meta-book", which stitches together separate files elsewhere on the Web as they appeared in a previously published book. It is subject to removal if someone produces an integrated edition. If that happens, The Online Books Page will point to the integrated version.