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 mémoire—legitimized by a respect des fonds—took shape in nineteenth-century France.