A Guide to Research in Archives of Active French Women's Orders

Abstract

The archives of French Catholic secular women's orders have been known to historical scholars, if at all, as an inaccessible treasure or as a forbidding labyrinth. Now a guide to them has become availableCharles Molette's Guide des sources de l'histoire des congregations feminines franraises de vie active (Paris: editions de Paris, 1974), and it will be an indispensable tool to scholars interested in the history of French education, social work, Catholic proselytism, and delivery of health care. The French diocesan archives were inventoried in the 1960s, and a guide published in 1971 (Jacques Gadille, Guide des archives diocesaines frangaises [Paris, 1971]), but work on secular archival material lagged. The holdings of secular women's orders, the Abbe Molette believed, were most urgently in need of a survey, for the lack of qualified personnel-the lack of a scholarly appreciation of their holdings, in fact-threatened the loss of these treasures to the fireplace, the dustbin, the mice. Some 400 secular women's orders, with about 100,000 members, now hold the keys to this source material. In the preface to Molette's volume Guy Dubosq, director general of French Archives, appeals to religious houses and persons to preserve their documents, considered as private property since the separation of Church and state, to inventory them, and to render them accessible to scholars. He promises the government's perfectly objective collaboration to ensure the preservation of this segment of the historic French patrimony. In Molette's Guide an Historical Introduction of 100 pages precedes the 270-page Sources and Bibliography. This learned introduction explains the astounding multiplicity and variety of active women's orders in France. In 1860, for example, there were 4,932 communities attached to 922 authorized congregations, . . . and 2,870 unauthorized communities attached to some 250 unauthorized congregations. Local initiative in founding orders was encouraged throughout the centuries by men of the regular clergy, members of