Archiving the French Revolution

Archives have a history, and their history matters.

The condition of possibility of what we know about the French Revolution lies in its archival practices. Uncovering and recreating those practices therefore also allows us to learn more about the Revolution itself. I therefore trace archival practices and archival institutions from the Ancien régime to the contemporary day. 

To study archival practice, I analyze archival labor. My dissertation focused on archival workers broadly defined; that is to say, I study official archivists as well as a whole host of other people who gathered, organized, and inventorying documents in personal and public archival repositories. Studying labor brings the history of archival institutions to life, and it provides a way to explain for the vast differences between archives despite state pressures to standardize. Human error, the inherent messiness of archives, and the myriad obstacles that archival workers faced all contribute to institutional specificity. 

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, more and more departmental archivists were drawn from the alumni of the École des Chartes. This was encouraged by the French state, who sought to standardize the organization of departmental archives. During this process, the Chartists undid the more idiosyncratic organizations created by earlier archivists. Even as the Chartists dismantled those structures and critiqued them for being illogical, they could not fully undo the earlier archivists’ choices, especially those of which documents to collect or not. I analyze how those decisions directly impact our contemporary interactions with archival collections through examining the creation and revision of inventories.

Inventories are an entry point to analyzing archival labor as they reveal vast differences in how archival workers arranged and rearranged their collections over time. These differences have had reverberating effects, leading to vast differences between departmental archives despite the French state's pressures to standardize. Variations between inventories are crucial to understanding historical scholarship because theise documents are how visitors access and thus engage with an archives' holdings.

Just as there is no single way to interpret a document, there is no single way to classify a document. Consciously or not, historians' interpreations of documents is often influenced by how archivists classified and arranged them, by which documents they grouped together. Understanding the alternatives available to archivists and constructing alternative constellations of the same group of materials expands the interpreative possibilities. Any analysis of hisstorical documents is fundamentally circumscribed by the prior and ongoing decisions of archival workers. Archival labor does not fully determine the focus or results of archival research, but it does circumscribe the possibilities for historical knowledge.