Archives are places of loss and silence, of allergy and hay fever. They are dwellings and, most famously, a site, even a cause, of fever. Historians and scholars have used these metaphors as a way of challenging the archive as a repository of objective historical truth, revealing the power structures and violences that have fed into it and upon which the archive is built. Drawing from the interventions made by postcolonial scholarship, feminism and gender studies, historians have broadened our understanding of what an archive is, what it does to our historical subjects, and how we—as historians—can read archival sources.
- Jane Freeland (December 21, 2020). "The Allure of the Archive: On Frustration and Comfort in the Historian’s Craft." German Historical Institute London Blog.
If you only accept the archive as the way to tell history, a huge part of the human experience is lost - and it's the history of the oppressed and the marginalized that disappears. (Not to mention, you wouldn't be able to do the history of Antiquity or that of oral societies.)
I don't know if i read this article badly, but did she only read administration papers ?
Because if you talk to an archivist, he can tell you what was his most freaky discovery. From the doodles, the lingeries revue with sticky pages to agent A telling to agent B in a letter that agent C is an asshole.
The vision about archives is biaised. She's only saw the archives via historians and students point of vue.
Some people enters in the Archives, looking for their past. An old man reads his adoption files because he was too young to remember what was the reason he was abandoned. A woman wants to learn about her family who arrives in her country several decades ago.
Historians aren't the only one who goes to the Archives, they're mostly be the ones who will published something. But they arent the only one.
Sometimes, you have one visitor who is reading court records because he want to write a book about crimes who happenned in the department. Another one is reading and collecting all informations about his sport club. Later, the archivist can ask for a copy of their studies. He can also make an inventory about polish immigration because he has a lot of visitors who ask for it.
Also it seems to be implying that if you want to make a study about something, you had to go to the archives. But all archives doesnt ends up in the Archives. Sometimes, you had to collect them. Especially personnal archives and entreprise archives.
In France, when a company is closing, its archives doesnt automaticly go to the archives (especially middle and little company). Generally, it stays in the building and the one who bought the building burn everything. If the Archives Départementales or Municipale knows a company is closing and was there for a long time (+50yrs), they know it's a matter of time before you lost everything. You lose the memory. You can collect the archives but you dont have a lot of time. You ends up with a part of what the company produced. If you want to keep the memory, you have to ask ancient workers if they have keep something made by the company (goodies, uniform, salary bill,...). You can take interviews too.
Historians cant go to the Archives and expecting everything is here. Space is limitate. Some archives will be prioritize. And even if it's here, you can have limitations. Imperial countries still have limitated access over what they did in their colonies (good luck having acces to the archives of the Service historique de la défense).
Sometimes you have to look somewhere else. Nicolas Offenstadt studied east germany by doing urbex. And sometimes, you had to make your own collect center : Collectif Archives LGBTQI+.
Oh, to be a member of the secretive association for the Study of the Writings of Maximilien Robespierre who covers up ritual murders to summon an ancient demon
He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart.
How to request a document reproduction on the French National Archives website (without paying anything)?
Setting the scene: I'd like to obtain a digital version of this file, because online, only a brief unhelpful description is shown and the visual is not available.
If you don't know how to navigate through the website to get to the archive you want, I've explained in this post how to search for a specific item in the French National Archives' virtual reading room. You really should read it before this post, because there are many details I won't go into again.
You're ready? Okay, let's get into it.
Once again, you don't go to the official website, but to the virtual reading room. This is systematically the place to go to search for documents and leaf through inventories. You can access it here.
In real life, if you go to the Paris or Saint-Denis sites and ask to consult the archives, you'll be required to register by filling in a form with your information (not much personal details, they often just want to know if you're here for personal stuff like genealogy, or if you're studying documents for university-related works), and you'll be given a card.
Here, online, it's basically the same thing. You'll need to create an account. Don't worry, it's completely free. Be careful to go to the Espace personnel" (personal account) and not the "Accès sécurisé" (secured access).
Once you have clicked, the website will inform you that creating an account will give you access to the following options:
Order or reserve a document
Request document reproductions
Request search assistance
Save your search results
So really, I insist, this is a step you shouldn't neglect. And of course, this also works if you live in a different country!
Okay now, let's get back to our document.
I'm not going to explain a second time what a class mark is and how to find it, once again I refer you to my other post which explains everything in detail. Just know that the item that interests me has F/7/6712 as its class mark.
There's a lot of information. Just know that the first thing to do is to set aside your document in what we call the “panier” (the cart). Yep, the shopping cart, just as if you were buying clothes on a website. There is also an option to “reserve” the document, but this implies that the archivists will put aside the physical version of the document and wait for you to come and consult it directly in Paris or Saint-Denis. Yeah, no. Let's save ourselves a shit ton of money, all of us are way too poor for this.
This is what the cart looks like (image below ↓). This is where you will store all the class marks that interest you, but which you can't or don't want to have reproduced immediately, so you can easily find them later. As you can see, I've already put aside a few. You need to look at the access conditions right away to check whether you can make your request or not. If you look carefully, you'll see that some of the Carnot family archives I wanted to obtain are blocked because they're in such poor condition that the archivists don't want to risk damaging them further by scanning or even opening them.
However, for the document I want to get today (the last one on the list), there's nothing written in this section, which means that everything is fine and I can proceed.
So we click on "Demander une reproduction" (ask for a reproduction) :
In this space, you need to be as specific as possible about what you want. For example, if the class mark is linked to a file with... let's say 600 items (and this often happens), you specify that you only need the documents associated with the numbers 4, 96 and 546, so that the archivist doesn't have to scan 600 documents one by one for nothing and cry all day.
Then here, you specify why you want this document and what you're going to use it for (for me, this will be personal and private use because this specific research of mine isn't related to work or university, but you can see the “professional use” option also exists).
And this is where you need to listen to me very carefully, because in the price list for document reproductions, there's only one free option, and that's the jpeg or pdf scan. Trust me, I systematically ask for this option, and the scans are always of excellent quality. Currently I got +1000 Fouché-related documents without paying anything and without needing to move from my couch.
Of course, the prices aren't exponential, in fact they're quite reasonable (for example, if you want a paper photocopy sent by regular mail, it'll cost you between 15 and 30 eurocents. That's fine for a single sheet, but if, like me, you need files with more than 300 pages, it quickly becomes a problem).
And finally, you submit your request and you wait for 3 to 6 months.
They will most likely send you an email with a password-protected link they'll give you, to a site where you can send very large files (they often use WeTransfer), and you'll have a limited time to open it so be careful to use an email adress you check regularly when you create your account.
Ok “the crime of collecting taxes” needs to be put back into context. The “fermiers généraux” were more than just tax collectors. They were part of an incredibly messed up institition rife with corruption and arbitrary rule, like most Ancien Régime institutions.
Was it fair to guillotine him over this position with which he built a fortune that enabled him to pursue his scientific pursuits (when many other scientists could not)? Well, I’ll let you think about that one.
How to search for a specific document on the French National Archives website?
I'm going to use this post by @montagnarde1793 as an example because it's very convenient for me: she perfectly noted the archive's class mark and she chose a document that requires going through several files.
Here we have a letter from the Comité de Salut Public by Barère, Prieur de la Côte d'Or and Billaud-Varenne and adressed to Prieur de la Marne. The details are as follows:
There is a lot of informations. They have to be decoded one by one. For now, only those details are important :
"AN" means "Archives Nationales". So the virtual reading room of the Archives Nationales is the most suitable website to conduct researches if you live far away from Paris and cannot go directly. This is what their home page is supposed to look like.
Okay now, remember the following numbers provided by montagnarde1793 right after the "AN" ? "AF II 37" ? This is the archive's class mark, its identity card. Now, we are going to use it.
Now, we see that that we put the right number and it is giving us the following information : the letter comes indeed from an archival fund produced by the Comité de Salut Public, it is stored in Saint-Denis, and it is available to be "Reserved" or "Added to the class marks cart". For now, we ignore those. We only click on the number.
And here appears a problem: the number exists twice, in two different places. I started by looking at the first fund, but it soon became clear that it didn't contain what I was looking for (here, the AF/II/37 call mark referred to naval affairs, which doesn't correspond to the document published by montagnarde1793), so the right link must be the second one.
So we click on the second link and we end up on this page.
We don't care about the general presentation of the fund because we are searching for a specific item so we directly go to dig into the details.
Okay. We know we have to click on the last link titled "Comité de Salut public. Cartons." because we already know the letter we are looking for is a CSP document and AF/II/37 is obviously somewhere between AF/II/20 and AF/II/42. And now we keep searching for AF/II/37 until we find it.
Now, remember the informations provided by montagnarde1793 ? The rest of the numbers is finally going to be useful.
AAAHHH this is SO USEFUL ive never known of this before and how to access the difital archives nationales before this is so helpful thank you for putting this together!!
looking for any particular letter and minutes was always so painful this makes it way easier and goes straight to the primary source too AUGGGHH 😭😭😭
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