The French Revolution and the Materiality of the Modern Archive

Abstract

Historians of vandalism and conservation during the French Revolution have treated the archive as an idea, an expression of modern political culture, and have largely ignored its material history. When revolutionaries “attacked” Old Regime depots, however, they were spurred on by necessity: locating valuable property titles, or paper for use as gunpowder funnels. Moreover, it was only when limited space in ministry buildings forced New Regime administrators to discard documents from their own holdings that archivists embraced historical conservation. Through ministerial deposits in the Archives nationales, the archive as a lieu de memoire—legitimized by a respect des fonds—took shape in nineteenth-century France. In recent years, attention has been focused on the political and intellectual operation of the archive rather than on the specifics of its material or institutional embodiment. Historians have followed Foucault’s reinterpretation of the archive as a system of forming and transforming statements, of differentiating and specifying discourses, and of determining the “law of what can be said.” 1 They have built on Jacques Derrida’s disquisition on the mal d’archive—the sickness of the archive—and documents “hidden or destroyed, forbidden, misappropriated, ‘repressed’” during the twentieth century. 2 In doing so, they have associated the archive with some of the most negative (and destructive) aspects of modern political culture. For the French historian Pierre Nora, for instance, the archive is a lieu de memoire, a site where history conquers, mutates, and eradicates cultural memory. The creation of any archive—it does not matter whether documents are written, audiotaped, or born digital—is always an “expression of the terrorism of historicized memory.” 3 However, while Foucault has claimed that the archive can be viewed independently of “the dust of statements,” historians should realize that the dust of the archive is not that easy to brush off. 4 For the archive is *In recognition of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society of American Archivists in 2011, Libraries & the Cultural Record is pleased to open this volume with this study of the formative years of modern archival enterprise in France.