arlette farge the allure of the archives

Even though eighteenth-century government did not allow public participation, popular opinion was vital to the monarchy, which used the police to both know it and control it. Archives allowed Farge to recapture how the city of Paris functioned below the surface of elite culture and to expose the myriad ways that women operated at the forefront of neighborhood networks. Archival materials also reveal much that was unintended by those interrogated by the police or incidental to what they said to defend themselves.

Archival material, she notes, is categorically different from printed sources, which are intended to convey the authors’ views and convince the reader. Other chapters focus on what Farge found in the archives and how she was able to interpret it. These short chapters give the neophyte humorous and evocative introductions to the physical and emotional experience of archival research. Researchers are transported immediately to very real archival experiences, particularly the discomfort of initially confronting arcane and largely unspecified rules and practices. Brief vignettes richly evoke the experience of being in the archives - from the quest for the ideal seat to the quirky mannerisms of fellow researchers. This book is a memoir of Farge’s life in the archives in two ways.

Farge, a specialist in eighteenth-century France, has consistently read archival material against the grain, finding in them an entrée into the social world of otherwise unknown men and women. In The Allure of the Archives, Farge, director of research in modern history at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, gives her readers such a vibrant sense of her research experiences that they might begin to feel the drafty reading rooms and fragile paper. Anyone who has tried to navigate an archive or convey to others the excitement of discovery or of a way of reading texts will surely enjoy these books. Both books are compelling and could introduce history majors or graduate students to the delights and challenges of research. Both books make vivid for scholars, students, and general readers how these two prominent historians of early modern France found their subjects and questions and pursued their research. English translations of these books, published earlier in France, are most welcome. A Passion for History is a series of conversations between Natalie Zemon Davis and fellow historian of sixteenth-century France, Denis Crouzet, about her work and her life. In The Allure of the Archives, Arlette Farge describes her work in the judicial and police archives of Paris.

Arlette farge the allure of the archives