Whereas most people who travel to France bring back a postcard or keychain, a former Marquette professor visiting the country in the 1980s took home a different souvenir — a copy of the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, former history professor John William Rooney was convicted of conspiracy to transport stolen property in 2002, after his friend attempted to auction the treaty off. The treaty, which Rooney admitted to the Journal Sentinel that he took from the French National Archives in Paris, is the historical document that formally exiled Napoleon Bonaparte to Elba.

Rooney's name resurfaced in the news recently because a French court announced in November it plans to try him on charges of receiving stolen goods, the Journal Sentinel reported.

James Marten, chair of the Department of History, said he first found out about Rooney's actions through an e-mail from History News Network, an online history news resource run out of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

"We found out about it not through any relationship we had with him through Marquette," Marten said, adding that he also remembered hearing bits and pieces of the story from colleagues.

Rooney left Marquette in the early 1990s, long before anyone found out about his Parisian souvenir. Marten said he did not know what kind of action the history department would have taken if Rooney was still employed by the university.

"As far as I'm aware, the department is not required to have a sort of code of ethics," he said. "Of course, with the legal ramifications, it would probably be dealt with on a university level."

Questions surrounding how universities handle faculty members accused or convicted of crimes have been plentiful recently, following stories published last year about jailed professors who were not immediately fired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Marquette has faced similar inquiries surrounding Antony Periathamby, whose next court hearing regarding a felony charge of using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime is Jan. 30.

Mary Pat Pfeil, senior director of university communication, told the Tribune in August that Marquette's policy is to "follow state and federal employment laws," under which a criminal conviction in and of itself is not automatic grounds for termination.

But none of this ever mattered for Rooney, who was not employed by the university when word of his illegal actions surfaced. Marten said his initial reaction to the news was not wonderment about what would have happened to Rooney if he was still at Marquette, but wonderment at how Rooney got away with what he did in the first place.

"It's a little shocking that you could get away with it," Marten said. "Security is pretty good at most archives; I'm surprised it happened at all."

Richard Shenkman, editor and founder of History News Network, said he remembered cases in which a researcher and an archivist were accused of stealing. But Rooney's is the only case he knows of involving theft by a professional historian, or an "academic with a Ph.D. in history."

"I have not seen any cases in the five years I've been running (History News Network) about a professional historian who has been accused of stealing from archives," Shenkman said. "I think I would've remembered that."