A four-year fight to keep the contents of the country’s national library in French hands ended in defeat yesterday as it was announced that Google would take control of the archive.

The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) was reported to be on the verge of a deal with the Californian giant under which Google’s digital library would get even larger. “Google has won,” said the front-page headline in La Tribune.

The library had led the fight against what France saw as American imperialism ever since President Chirac issued a battle cry over the affair in early 2005. Paris mustered support for a European Union virtual library called Europeana, which has had a shaky existence since it went online last year.

According to Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the head of the library at the time, Europe’s literary and historic heritage was under threat from an Anglo- Saxon takeover. France faced the prospect of being force-fed such progaganda as the English-language version of its revolution in which “valiant British aristocrats triumphed over bloodthirsty Jacobins and the guillotine blotted out the rights of man”, he claimed.

Yesterday Pierre Assouline, a writer with a popular Paris literary blog, pronounced an acid verdict on the surrender: “It will thus have taken four years for the library to pass from resistance to collaboration.”

The decision was purely financial, said Denis Bruckmann, director of collections at the library — which will be joining 29 other leading libraries in opening its shelves to Google’s project, including Oxford’s Bodleian. France provided only €5 million a year for digitising books for Gallica, the national digital library, yet the national library needed up to €80 million (£68 million) just for its works from 1870 to 1940, he said.

“We will not stop our own digitising programme, but if Google can enable us to go faster and farther, then why not?”

Google scans items for free and has so far added about ten million works to its Books Search database, the great majority of them out-of-copyright works. Non-copyright books can be read for free, while only extracts are available from the rest. In a development that could upset the dominance of Amazon, Google now plans to start charging for e-books online.

After a long legal battle, Google last year reached a settlement with publishers in the United States over copyright infringement, but resistance continues. The US Justice Department and the European Commission are reviewing Google's US deal on several ground, including its possible creation of a monopoly over millions of copyright-protected books that are no longer in print. The UK Booksellers' Association voiced similar concerns. In June, the German Government said that Google Books threatened European culture and media.

In France, which still has 12,000 bookshops and tight restrictions on pricing, publishers and booksellers want to create a national "digital distribution platform" to sell e-books. Alain Kouck, the chief of Editis, the No 2 publisher, called for a united front as the only way of blocking Amazon and Google.