The Ministry of Culture coordinates and chairs the Memory of the World Committee in the support and support of French and transnational applications in connection with the French National Commission for UNESCO. On 18 May 2023, UNESCO’s Executive Board approved the inscription of the seven French nominations, which were submitted in November 2021 by France alone or in association with other countries, on UNESCO’s International Memory of the World Register.

The Memory of the World Programme, created by UNESCO in 1992, aims to protect and disseminate documentary heritage in all its diversity in order to “to avoid collective amnesia and to promote the preservation of archival and library collections around the world.” Up to now, it has had more than 430 documents and documentary collections from five continents in various formats: print, graphic, audiovisual, digital. For this new session, sixty-four applications had been accepted from the ninety-nine proposals from the Member States.

These new inscriptions highlight the active investment of France and its institutions in the promotion of documentary heritage, notably through valuable national and international partnerships and collaborations.

The International Memory of the World Register is now welcoming seven new assets for France:

Two national properties :

  • Montaigne’s “Essays”, copy of Bordeaux, 1588, presented by the city of Bordeaux.
  • The curtain of the Apocalypse of Angers, submitted by the city of Angers.

Five transnational assets :

  • The archives of the ATD-Fourth World International Movement, 1957-1992 kept at the Centre de mémoire et recherche Joseph Wresinski in France and at the Cour aux 100 métiers in Burkina Faso,
  • “Shoah”, film by Claude Lanzmann, 9:10, original negative, restored and digital masters, presented by Ms Lanzmann and the Jewish Museum of Berlin (with the German National Commission).
  • The corpus of records identifying persons in slavery in former colonies, presented by the Departmental Archives of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Réunion, the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery and the Archives of Haiti, (with the National Commission of Haiti).
  • Archives of the International Physics and Chemistry Councils Solvay (1910-1962), presented by the International Solvay Institutes with the support of the Department of Libraries and Scientific Information of the Free University of Brussels (DBIS ULB), the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industriels (ESPCI Paris-PSL) and the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) (with the Belgian French and German-speaking Commission).
  • Illuminated manuscripts of the Charlemagne Court School proposal submitted by Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Romania, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the libraries of Trier, Bucharest, London, Vienna, Abbeville and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (with the German, Austrian, Romanian and English National Commissions).

These new elements of documentary heritage thus join the 14 French elements already inscribed on the International Register «Memory of the World», namely the Declaration of Human Rights and the Citizen of 1789, the archives of Louis Pasteur, the corpus of the Lumière brothers, the archives of Father Castor, the Beatus Rhenanus humanist library in Sélestat and the Appeal of 18 June 1940.