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Introduction

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00161071-3761571

1527-5493

Sarah A. Curtis, Stephen L. Harp,

Cultural Identity and Heritage

We all have our archive stories. Eavesdrop at the annual meetings of the Society for French Historical Studies or any other French history conference, and you'll hear scholars and students alike recount anecdotes about working in the archives: the gustatory (where to eat lunch), the revealing (a homemade G-string, trial evidence of exhibitionism), the pecuniary (twenty-dollar bills from the 1930s, never-pilfered evidence in a bribery trial), the parsimonious (being charged for electricity in a private archive), the ironic (excrement from a literal archival rat), and so on. The stories can be so much fun that one of us has long fantasized about collecting them all into a book of short archival anecdotes. Traveling to France (for overseas scholars) and working at the Archives Nationales or in “Aix,” not to mention the alphabet soup of departmental archives, is a rite of passage for PhD students (of any nationality) and remains an important scholarly credential even for established professors. It is little wonder archive stories result.Indeed, the two of us first met in William Cohen's modern French history research seminar at Indiana University where Bill, an enthusiastic “archival rat,” regaled us with archive stories and advice, noting that smart historians learn how to be friendly as well as professional with the archivists on whom we depend. “If you get a chance to buy them a drink or even lunch, do so.” As he plugged away at research on nineteenth-century French cities, Bill himself had spent innumerable lunches with a municipal archivist in Lyon who was a diehard royalist, politely listening to royalist analyses of French politics under François Mitterrand. (Bill kept his impeccable leftist credentials to himself.)Sometimes it can help to be an outsider. Bill said that he didn't need to say he wasn't a royalist, as there hadn't been a homegrown American monarchy. Sarah was repeatedly told by French scholars that her unusual access to the archives of French nuns was due to her American nationality, far removed from French church-state politics. Steve was once told by a Michelin archivist that he got more access to Michelin archives than French scholars because François Michelin assumed that he couldn't possibly be a communist as an American (“Par contre, tous les historiens français sont des communistes”—this in 1997!). For this special issue, we expected multiple submissions from France as well as North America, but virtually all submissions came from scholars in North America. Perhaps this was merely a reflection of the main audience of French Historical Studies, but we also wonder if outsider status and the need to adapt to French cultural norms with each research trip encouraged reflections about access, organization, and use.1In recounting our own stories, we are obviously not alone. Few of us have been able to resist what Arlette Farge has called “le goût de l'archive” or, even more persuasively in English translation, “the allure of the archive.” We might even have succumbed to Jacques Derrida's “archive fever” (mal d'archive).2 Historians have depended on archives and their archivists at least since the professionalization of the historian's craft in the nineteenth century, so it is no surprise that we have our little victories and petty frustrations in locating and getting access to the material we need to do our work. Personal experience in the archives undergirds all the articles presented in this issue. However, moving beyond entertaining stories, particularly after the cultural turn the past few decades, historians have become much more conscious of our use of archives. Our reflections have become deeper, more often tying the very existence, let alone the organization, of various archives to the historical contexts in which the archives themselves have evolved. As these articles make clear, archives are a subject as well as an object of study, not simple depots for boxes containing unambiguous evidence of the past waiting to be discovered by historians.This is not a new insight, but it has gained increased attention in the last two decades, as evidenced by an expanding body of work that attempts to theorize archival practice.3 Long gone are the assumptions, inherited from nineteenth-century positivist history, that the archives are mere repositories for documents that will reveal historical truth to scholars. As Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg put it in Processing the Past, scholars “must also incorporate an understanding about the processes by which sources were assembled, appraised, and described if they hope to reach conclusions other than those the documents may have been retained to provide.”4 In other words, they question the notion that archives are either neutral or comprehensive in ways that past historians may have assumed. Blouin and Rosenberg's previous collection of essays, Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory, as well as Antoinette Burton's Archive Stories, provide vibrant case studies of historians' encounters with archives around the world. The subtitle of the Burton volume, Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, emphasizes the constructed nature not only of historical narrative but also of the archives themselves. “Archive Stories,” Burton writes,is motivated, in other words, by our conviction that history is not merely a project of fact-retrieval . . . but also a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention—processes set in motion by, among other things, one's personal encounter with the archive, the history of the archive itself, and the pressure of the contemporary moment on one's reading of what is to be found there.5We now accept that history is not merely what actually happened, to paraphrase Leopold von Ranke, but what is shaped by our own narrative and research choices; increasingly, historians understand that that process begins long before they access the sources.Historians of France should be well placed to explore this new understanding of archives and archival practice. The desire to create a new conception of the nation at the time of the Revolution resulted in the founding of the Archives Nationales in 1789, earlier than national archives in other major European states.6 Departmental archives followed in 1796. The famed Ecole des Chartes, established in 1820, has trained a highly professional cadre of French archivists who organize them.7 For a long time, historians of France were able to plumb the substantial holdings of state-sponsored archives to create detailed political, social, and economic histories of France. The methods pioneered by the Annales school encouraged in-depth analysis of local records, resulting in specialized monographs produced by generations of French thesis writers, as well as their overseas counterparts. Only in the 1980s did the cultural turn in history seem to threaten to make archives less relevant by focusing on the production and representation of texts. At the same time, more profoundly, postmodernism upended fundamental notions of historical truth and our notions of archival authority.Postmodern theory has provided tools for a rediscovery of the archives and new ways to think about the relationship between archives and history. It is probably no coincidence that the publication of Derrida's Archive Fever in 1996 jump-started a new interest in archival practice.8 In it, he reminded us that archives from their very origins in ancient Greece have been sites of power that have shaped history rather than reflected it. More than twenty-five years earlier, Michel Foucault's concept of the “archaeology of knowledge” already argued that the archive is a discursive system rather than a mere repository of documents. These insights have allowed historians to see that archives are constructed like any other “text” and that understanding how they are put together, what is included, and what is not included can complicate, but also enhance, the very history we are trying to write.Unsurprisingly, historians of colonialism and postcolonialism have been in the forefront of interrogating the archive itself as a subject of historical analysis to uncover the power dynamics that lie beneath its surface. The categories of analysis fashioned by colonial administrators and the materials they archived and did not archive all contributed to the larger project of empire; only by deconstructing them can we understand the deeper assumptions that lay behind colonial exploitation. As Ann Laura Stoler puts it in Along the Archival Grain (a work cited by other contributors to this issue), “Colonial archival documents serve less as stories for a colonial history than as active, generative substances with histories, as documents with itineraries of their own.”9 Yet she warns against assuming that the archives are stable or monolithic, that they can be read so easily “against the grain” rather than paying attention to the “scripts” themselves, for their “discrepant accounts, dissenting voices, and extraneous detail.”10Whether “along” or “against” the grain, many of these techniques have now spread well beyond colonial history; indeed, only one of the six articles in this issue specifically concerns the relationship between metropole and colonies. But they all interrogate the context in which archives were formed and how that context shapes the material that is now available to historians. They remind us that archives are not usually designed with historians in mind but serve other purposes that are often in tension with historical work. On the surface, this may appear to be an obvious point. The work of historians has always been to tease meaning out of documents written for other purposes or, in some cases, to discount claims made for posterity. Farge's marvelously evocative book about working in the archives, Le goût de l'archive, first published in French in 1989, treats the Paris judicial archives in which she has spent a career in just this way, taking readers through the process of reading Old Regime police records for the “fragmented world” of eighteenth-century Parisians, while resisting “traps and temptations.”11 Yet Farge is primarily concerned with how to interpret the documents, which she conflates with archives, choosing not to question the very constitution of the archive itself.The articles in this issue go farther by questioning the nature, origin, or history of the archive itself to examine its dynamic relationship to the history we write, rather than treating the archive as static and inert. Rather than a problem to be solved (“How can I find what I need in the archives?”), the authors in this issue approach the archives as the historical subject itself, asking what the structure or context of the archive tells us about the history it represents. Probably no essay in this issue demonstrates the potential of this approach more persuasively than that of Andrew Israel Ross. He rejects the idea that the conflation of male homosexuality and female prostitution in the nineteenth-century police archives necessitates searching through the more numerous prostitution records to uncover traces of male homosexual identity. Instead, he argues that taking seriously the categories the police used in tracking sexual behavior provides a completely new way of thinking about sexuality in the past that is obscured if we merely look for confirmation of twenty-first-century sexual categories.In addition to Ross's problematizing of sexual categories in the police archives, these articles take on unopened French Huguenot letters now lying in a trunk in a Dutch museum, the formation of War Ministry archives under the absolute monarchy, the wariness toward outsiders by nun-archivists, the destruction (and salvaging) of potentially compromising documents during the Second World War, and the promise and perils of interviewing 1960s activists in France and its former colonies. This issue reveals not only the breadth of archives now used to write French history but also the depth of thinking about the relationship between archives and history and between archives and historians. We will not summarize the many riches found in individual articles here, leaving readers to discover them for themselves. But we do wish to highlight a few important questions they collectively pose that might inform the reading of this issue and resonate with the archive stories we carry in our heads.First, what constitutes an archive? Rebekah Ahrendt and David Van der Linden call the postal trunk full of opened and unopened letters by eighteenth-century Huguenots that is the subject of their article an “accidental archive” whose peripatetic history shows that only recently has the trunk or its contents been considered a historical resource at all. Instead, they interpret it as an “assemblage,” using the techniques of museum history to make sense of its value. If theirs is an accidental archive, Robert Fulton finds in the Dépôt de la Guerre of the same period what we might call an “improvised” archive as early modern officials suggested a divide between the public and the private in asserting that documents belonged to the state, rather than to its ministers. Burleigh Hendrickson, in his article on the global 1960s, argues that the archive should be defined in a broad enough fashion to include personal narratives and oral histories that are not controlled by postcolonial, single-party states eager to promote an official version of events. In these articles the authors argue for an expansion of the notion of archive, as well as the techniques to access it.Second, what is the role of the state in archival collection? In this era of WikiLeaks and increased concern about cybersecurity, few questions are as timely as how states manage information, what they keep, what they discard, and what, eventually, they allow researchers to access, as any historian of France who has applied for a dérogation to consult sensitive material knows. Fulton traces the development of the War Ministry archives, the Dépôt de la Guerre, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as early modern administrators began to define a state interest in the preservation of military documents separate from the private ownership of ministers, who often kept important papers in the family or even sold them off. The purpose of the archive was to collect and save information necessary to win wars, but over time they became a historical repository in ways that we would now understand as archival. Here, at a remove of two hundred years, Fulton's analysis overlaps with Alexandra Steinlight's conception of the “future-historical,” the realization among archivists after the Second World War that their role was not merely to preserve documents from the historical past, in the tradition of the Ecole des Chartes, but to decide which contemporary documents would be saved for posterity. As they did so, those archivists created the distinctly new “contemporary” series, thereby implying that World War II was the most important historical caesura since the French Revolution. Bound up in the experience of Occupation and Liberation, this process was loaded with legal and moral questions. Both articles demonstrate the fragility and the instability of the state archive that its claim to neutrality and comprehensiveness often hides.Third, what is no longer in the archive? It is easier to take stock of what is available in the archive than what is missing. We are perhaps not surprised that eighteenth-century military documents or Huguenot letters are no longer available to us, in ways that Fulton or Ahrendt and Van der Linden describe. But Steinlight's article confronts this problem most directly, showing the uneven process by which documents were both destroyed and saved as the Germans invaded France in 1940 and then the politically charged process of restoration at war's end. Most stunning, perhaps, was the decision in 1946 to erase all traces of state discrimination against Jews in the name of republican symbolism, a decision that nonetheless fell well short of its objective. Archives, even in recent times, are histories of erasures, of lost or deliberately destroyed documents, as much as they are histories of preservation.12 Historians increasingly use the term elision to describe realities not acknowledged in the past or present, and it seems obvious that elision sometimes results quite concretely from what is no longer in the archives.Fourth, who controls access to the archive? Ahrendt and Van der Linden's unopened letters present perhaps the most concrete example of an inaccessible archive, but impediments to consulting archives are described in other articles as well. Women's religious orders, as Curtis shows, have been attentive to their history but reluctant to allow outsiders to consult their archives.13 She begins her analysis with the question of why they limit access but concludes that the archives, to them, serve a fundamentally different purpose than they do for professional historians. Wary of state power, women religious used their archives mainly to bolster their own sense of identity that might be undermined by fuller access. To understand activism in 1960s Tunisia and Senegal, Hendrickson goes to the “street” to avoid the one-sided nature of state documents. Yet his article uncovers another fascinating locus of control, institutional review boards put in place by universities in the United States that regulate research on human subjects, in this case oral history interviews. By setting rules as to where interviews could take place and whether interviewees could be identified, his university's institutional review board unwittingly reproduced categories of colonial control that his research seeks to overcome.Fifth, what do we owe our sources? Hendrickson's article also raises ethical questions about our responsibility to our sources, particularly those who share oral testimony that might put them in political danger. But surprisingly similar issues are raised by Ahrendt and Van der Linden in working with a postal trunk that includes six hundred unopened letters dating from the eighteenth century. How many of us would have the self-restraint not to open those letters if given the chance? Yet Ahrendt and Van der Linden argue for the patience to wait for technologies that might be able to preserve the letters in their current state and, simultaneously, reveal their contents. The research team they have assembled includes both conservators and historians, which, they argue, has expanded the scope of their historical inquiry to include the form of the letters as well as their content. The usual bifurcation of archivists as conservators and historians as users can obscure historians' own concern about historical preservation, one that may become even more pronounced as we study the origins, organization, and cultural categories of the archives themselves.A sixth question might be the one we expected but did not get. Because the call for articles specifically invited reflections on the impact of digitization on archival use, we were surprised not to have received a single submission on that topic. While we might all take for granted the omnipresence of the keyword search, the digitization of catalogs and resources, and the use of digital photography to preserve records, these research transformations nevertheless raise obvious questions about how we as historians use archives. What is the impact of computerized catalogs, which have essentially replaced the printed finding aids in public archives? Encouraged to use a practice now intuitive when we use Google, electronic finding aids invite us to use keywords. For those of us who came of age in the analog era, the results can be astonishing, as such searches turn up documents in unexpected places if researchers can manage to imagine just how many ways records might have been labeled. When Steve recently tried to track down the quotidian reality of North Africans as documented in the departmental archives of Alpes-Maritimes, he searched algérien, marocain, tunisien, nord africain, immigré, travailleur, ouvrier, and of course the feminine forms, as well as maghrébin, main d'oeuvre, bidonville, habitat insalubre, logement social, habitation à loyer modéré, meublé, taudis, garni, not to mention the names of relevant institutions, individuals, and major employers of North African workers. Results were surprising: the bidonville bulldozed to build the Musée National Marc Chagall would have been easy to miss in the analog era. In public archives in the old days, series and subseries usually organized our research. Now keyword searches can reveal the array of series in which we should look, re-creating the assumptions of bureaucrats and archivists figuring out how to handle the original versement, while also seeing past their categorizations. But would it work as well if we are one day no longer thinking simultaneously in both analog and digital contexts, using the keyword search as a mere point de départ? That is, will the existence of the electronic search one day induce historians to stop the search when all of the documents containing the keywords are ordered?How might digital photography be changing our research methods? The Bibliothèque Nationale has recently loosened restrictions on photographing publications, merely warning about copyright limits rather than requiring authorization of each photograph or set of photographs. Likewise, with a few exceptions, the Archives Nationales now allows unrestricted photography of documents by researchers. In smaller archives and private holdings, conservators now often expect a researcher to arrive with a digital camera, moving quickly and then getting out of the way. And many archives and libraries have digitized documents themselves, making them available to any researcher with an Internet connection. Lara Putnam has recently worried about the impact of researchers making short research trips in which documents are quickly photographed for later analysis.14 The concern seems legitimate, as such trips could potentially short-circuit chance meetings with French and foreign scholars, the development of deep knowledge of cultural contexts, and the serendipitous, daily connections we all make between past reality and contemporary relevance—particularly in a country as historically aware as France. At the same time, as we are analyzing and writing, digital photographs make it possible to go back and check the document and any handwritten marginalia. Moreover, digital photography is facilitating iconographical analysis of a wide array of images nearly impossible in the analog era. For Sarah's new work on nineteenth-century childhood, photographs of illustrations of toys make it possible to pull together visual evidence from multiple sources mostly ignored thus far. Putnam is certainly correct that the digitization of some publications can lead to their relative overuse compared to those not digitized (much as scholars overused the newspaper Le temps because it had such a handy index), but digital photography on the part of an individual historian can also redress the imbalance by allowing for a sort of personal archive of more breadth.Certainly, access to archives for Americans and other foreign scholars is easier than before. Preliminary searches of holdings and often the actual reading of documents can be done from the relative comfort of one's office or study. The organization of research trips no longer takes a weeks-long correspondence with archivists to rule out annual and exceptional closings. With e-mail correspondence, it is easier to follow the trail quickly to individuals and associations controlling nonstate archives. Thanks to the H-France housing digest, Airbnb, and the Internet generally, setting up lodging is not nearly the headache it once was. Increasingly, a smartphone and a car are flexible research tools for those on short trips in the provinces, so they can move immediately to the next archives. Could the homogeneity of lodgings (if you've stayed in one apart'hôtel, you've stayed in them all) and road trips alter our deeper understanding of la France profonde? If archival research is our fieldwork, how much of the field are we seeing?Today the subjects of our archive stories often include the quirks of archives' computerized cataloging and ordering systems, archival policies regarding digital photography, and description of individual archivists' nervousness or nonchalance as scholars photograph hundreds of documents a day, racing as if they were bringing in the harvest before a storm. Is the patrimoine threatened, as French librarians and conservators initially worried, when reproductions of whole cartons of documents exist outside the archives? Digitization in the specific context of French historical study could use more of the deep, explicit reflection about archives found in the pages below. Stoler's distinction between reading colonial documents “along the grain” as opposed to “against the grain” implicitly assumes that documents are like the paper from which they were made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—physical objects housed in state archives.15 But now our finding aids, working copies of documents, and increasingly the documents themselves consist of electrons that can be combined and recombined very quickly. As we write, we now constantly search place-names, maps, and proper names, making connections whenever possible. Do we need a new metaphor that better elucidates how historians research, read, and write in the digital era?Despite these new questions, our contention is that historians of France, like historians in many other fields today, use a wider array of archives, and we use them more broadly, more deeply, and more self-consciously than ever before. One special issue cannot fully capture that depth or that breadth, but the essays here offer a taste of the richness that characterizes current work on France while also providing thoughtful understandings of the structure and context of archives. We hope they encourage you to reflect—critically or not—on your own archive stories.The authors would like to thank contributors for their interesting articles, as well as for their patience during several rounds of revisions. They are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers, as well as to French Historical Studies editors Kathryn A. Edwards and Carol E. Harrison, for their timeliness and professionalism.