Making a modern archive: The Archives Nationales of France, 1850--1887.

摘要

The Archives Nationales is a central institution for the study of the history of France. The Archives are not merely an important source of documentation; its development was itself bound up with the contested institutionalization of the modern French nation-state. This dissertation examines the history of the French Archives Nationales from 1850 to 1887, proposing that the modern French National Archives did not (and thus do not) merely contain evidence of France's past. Indeed, the Archives emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as vital to modern French political culture. Nominally and fundamentally a national institution beholden to the interests of both the state and citizens, the Archives contained, represented, and negotiated the contract that purported to hold the French nation and state together. This period's particular conflicts over the extent and shape of public access to the institution, the boundaries between Archives and Library, the foundation of documentary authenticity, and the questionable ownership of papers by public figures, revealed in the Archives the intimate and tangled ties between history and the politics of the nation-state.; Specifically, this dissertation examines the French National Archives, the central depository for the papers of the French state during the Second Empire and the first tumultuous decades of the Third Republic. It was during this period that the Archives Nationales—called the Imperial Archives during the Second Empire—acquired the legal, material, and philosophical armature that made the Archives into the institution that historians frequent and recognize today. The spaces, practices, and texts that make the Archives a premier institution for the study of French history—the regularized movement of papers and personnel, published inventories, a cadre of archivists trained to serve a scholarly public—are products of the self-conscious archival policy of the Second Empire. The dissertation looks specifically at the central Archives in order to examine the idea of a “national archive” and its relationship to the state, citizen, and the epistemology of history as the Archives emerged within the tense and often bloody conflicts that marked the making of the modern French polity.