The British colleges and seminary established in Paris in the seventeenth century had rich and important libraries. While following the models of library management observed in other Paris collections, they also shared the characteristics of the British institutions to which they belonged, which were gathering places for both Parisians and British immigrants. As this comparative study shows, the different libraries served different functions. After they were dispersed during the French Revolution, their later reunion in a single institution provides yet another, hitherto little-known instance of the process of « library building » that took place during the First Empire.