Des archives à l'entretien et retour : une enquête en Nouvelle-Calédonie

Abstract

Historians and Archives. An introduction to the publication of the report by Philippe Bélaval on the French National Archives: "Towards a future strategy for the National Archives" The archives are "in a turmoil", wrote Alain Erlande-Brandeburg, the Director of the French national archives. His successor, Phih'ppe Bélaval. appointed six months later by the Council of Ministers, sized up this indefinable, protean crisis in a report submitted to the Minister of Culture in November 1998 and made public in February 1999. The text. entitled Towards a future strategy for the National Archives, not only reviews twenty years of chaotic archive policy in France: it also proposes specific, ambitious solutions to equip the country with archives capable of responding to the democratic issues involved in the : "duty to remember" as well as the scientific requirements pertaining to the . use of sources. The reflection on the future centre of the modern and contemporary archives (posterior to 1789) allows Ph. Bélaval to take a broad , look at the entire system of archives in ' France in relation to their fundamental purposes and to launch a process of modernisation starting at top of the national archive network in connection -, with the : bill to reform archive regulations. The report is therefore important insofar -as it highlights directions for renovating the archive network. . It is equally important with regard to the method used in analysing both problems and solutions. Finally, it is important in its wish to underscore the political nature of the issue of archives, . which represent one of the main dynamic forces in social science research and a major source of democratic expression at the dawn of the 2b century. All of these aspects should give researchers in~ contemporary history an incentive to read the Bélaval report, and beyond that, to take up the challenges of archive policy. For them, it will involve abandoning a strictly utilitarian conception of the archives and, on the contrary, considering what would appear to be a technical domain as a place for thinking and experimenting in historical practices, as a . means of learning and of renewing the : historian's social functions, and as an occasion to widen the field of political history by questioning the complex system of relationships among the state, its archives and its citizens. This critical call to mobilise historians on the "French archive issue" does not release political authorities and archive officials from- assuming their own responsibilities, which in this case means turning f an administrative, technical and scientific segment of the state into an open issue shared by everyone, in line with what Ph. Bélaval has proposed in his report which : is published here for the first time with an introduction bv Vincent Duclert.