Mr President of the Council, dear Jean-Louis Debré,
Mr Marc Guillaume, Secretary General of the Government,
Representatives of the Assembly of the Regions of France, the departments of France and the Mayors of France,
Mr Jean-Michel Leniaud, Director of the National School of Charters,
Dear Philippe Barbat, Director of the National Heritage Institute,
Dear Vincent Berjot, Director General of Heritage,
Director, in charge of Archives, dear Hervé,
Dear friends,
“Why re-elaborate today a concept of the archive in a single configuration, both technical and political, ethical and legal?” asked Jacques Derrida in his book Archive sickness, twenty years ago.
This issue remains more current than ever.
Today it is a matter of facing the digital, political and scientific upheaval of this continent of memory, the nation’s archives.
So, as we meet on the occasion of the installation of the new Higher Council of Archives, I would like, if I may, to outline with you some aspects of our reflection that animates me on the archives, and, beyond that, on the issue of citizen memory.
Before outlining these perspectives, I would first like to acknowledge those who contributed to this reflection on archives.
I want to thank the outgoing chair of the board, historian Georgette Elgey, for her work during her tenure.
She is for me a reference, a friend, who made me know a little of her own history and that of the Republic, which merge.
Without her and her role in the association «a city for archives», with René Rémond, Annette Wieviorka, Antoine Prost and Michel Balard among others, we would never have obtained the creation of the Pierrefitte-sur-Seine centre.
I will come back to this success.
I also want to wish Speaker Jean-Louis Debré, who succeeds him, the very best for the work he will lead in this body.
I thank him for accepting this position.
As a former president of the Constitutional Council, I have no doubt that he will be able to conduct this council with wisdom and determination.
This council also welcomes for the first time representatives of other major heritage institutions: I want to thank for their presence, the new president of the BNF, Laurence Engel and the Deputy Director of Collections of the INA, Agnès Magnien, who ran the National Archives, as you know.
Foundations and associations whose action contributes to the knowledge of our history are also represented or invited, such as the Shoah Memorial: I thank Jacques Fredj for his presence among us; or the Institute of Memory of Contemporary Edition: I would like to thank Nathalie Léger, Executive Director of IMEC, for joining us this morning.
Finally, this council is open to privileged interlocutors of the archives, the CADA, the CNIL, whose presidents are with us this morning: thanks therefore to Marc Dandelot and Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin; and as always, to representatives of the users of the archives, including professional and amateur genealogists, who, with our historian or researcher friends, are the ones who know them best.
This new composition of the Superior Council will allow a global reflection on memory and archives.
I would now like, as the new Superior Council is being set up, to share with you some of the challenges of a policy serving a new impetus in favour of the Nation’s archives, on which your opinion will be invaluable.
As you know, in recent decades man has collected and preserved more archives than in a millennium.
How then can we speak today of a «communication of the archives» without first dealing with the question of the archive of the means of communication?
In other words, our entire archival policy is reviewed in the light of digital technology.
400 million documents are already online and 2.5 billion pages were read in 2015.
First: Archive the digital
A national plan for digital preservation is therefore necessary.
The archives services are involved in the dematerialisation of the administrative procedures expected by our citizens who wish to have access to the new public service online remotely, at any time and in complete safety.
We need to build the digital tools and platforms that will allow us to take into account public archives that are already digital, such as: the cadastral matrix, notarial minutes, civil status data, or even court archives.
Two programmes are dedicated to these new issues, they must be successful:
. the VITAM programme – creation of a software solution to enable the transfer of digital data on the platforms of the National Archives and the archives services of the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Affairs;
. and the AD-ESSOR programme for departmental, municipal and regional archives.
Second: Broadcasting digital
Creation of the portal «FranceArchives.fr» carried out by the Ministry of Culture and Communication with the assistance of the Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs will make it possible to find all the historical data and the sources of our individual and collective history using the search engines most common.
The online distribution of documents such as: civil status, deliberations of the communes, censuses of the population, cadastre, mortgages, photographs, maps and plans - offers an unprecedented opportunity to satisfy the thirst for knowledge of our fellow citizens, their need for history, or their taste for genealogy.
This movement should be amplified.
The third challenge of digital technology is to ensure the “peace of memory” and better respond to the desire for memory.
I think that is the major dimension of the issue before us today.
This memory is not only that of illustrious, powerful or rich characters. It has to do with those whom Michel Foucault called «the infamous men», who are not the unworthy men but those who have left no traces of their lives other than those of a conviction or a death certificate in the archives: the excluded from history.
I am thinking here of all the work done by the Public Archives Network over the past decade on the history and memory of the slave trade and slavery and, first of all, the publication of a research guide that is now a landmark and has made possible new scientific work.
I am also thinking of the collection of testimonies undertaken to learn the history of the families rescued by ATD Fourth World, the sources documenting the history of Emmaus International, those of the first fights against AIDS led by the Aides movement or, more recently the collection of objects and stories after the November 2015 attacks in Paris.
Beyond administrative production, it is therefore important not to neglect the sources that document the lives of all those who could not say anything, those who remain invisible.
Three areas are open to our reflection on these subjects.
First project: the peace of memories
The Archives of France must be at the service of what the President of the Republic has called the «peace of memories».
We have shared a common history with many countries. It is important to promote knowledge of this history and to share the sources that testify to it.
Here, of course, the French Overseas National Archives in Aix-en-Provence are the main players.
Digital is the tool for sharing memories.
Research guides are being drafted with Algeria, Vietnam, Senegal, Mauritania, Congo-Brazzaville, etc.
It’s about exploring these fields of shared memory with former colonies: Indochina, Madagascar, … ; and with other countries.
Two examples come to mind.
I was with the President of the Republic in Senegal on 30 November 2014 at the cemetery of Thiaroye when he handed over the digitized archives relating the massacre of the Senegalese tirailleurs of 1er December 1944 as evidenced today by the white and anonymous tombs of these places. Seventy years after the events, François Hollande sent to the Senegalese President a copy of the French archives, which would at least shed light on the work of memory and research by Senegalese.
As another example, last week, during the visit of the Governor General of Australia to France, I was able to give His Excellency Sir Peter Cosgrove the digitized version of the first maps of his country, made by the French expeditions, like that of Nicolas Baudin, during the first contacts with this land from 1772.
It is necessary to develop these tools, to multiply these initiatives and to transmit the digital archives so that the researchers of all these countries seize them, that the men and women of these countries appropriate them, and this without history and distance preventing them. We can share memory without depriving ourselves of it.
Second project: large collections or the need to respond to the desire for memory of our fellow citizens.
After the success of the «Grande Collecte» of the French archives relating to the First World War, I want this operation to become a regular meeting of our fellow citizens with their history, their archives, their memory. On the occasion of his speech on March 19, the President of the Republic wanted the Grande Collecte to be dedicated in 2016 to «France overseas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries». The Overseas National Archives in Aix-en-Provence will play a major role in this operation.
I imagine then launching a vast memorial project of another Great Collection around the place of women; I wish to associate with it the Higher Council of Archives.
It is a question of better understanding the place of women in our society: the place of women in the world of work, in domestic and political life, the place of women in the collective memory.
The archives of women’s rights associations, feminist movements and even women’s publications; family planning archives, and many other sources will have to be collected.
I will quickly name a great person who could head the committee dedicated to this issue. It will be up to him to better define the problem and the period chosen for this collection.
This committee will have the mission of federating and mobilizing all the actors who will be involved in this project. In addition to the network of archives services such as the National Archives, the National Archives of the World of Work, the National Archives of the Overseas Departments, the Departmental Archives and the Municipal Archives; but also the major memorial institutions such as the INA, the BNF, and the IMEC, or even foreign archives.
Finally, it will be necessary to encourage as many people as possible to mobilize on this issue and to promote the circulation of private archives of these movements, women and lives, around great figures but also of singular life paths.
Third project: the archives of justice.
Almost 30 years after the recording of the Barbie trial – first trial filmed in 1987 followed by the Touvier (1994), Papon (1997-1998), AZF (2009 and 2012) or Pinochet (2010) trials – it would be a matter of giving full meaning to Robert Badinter’s project by launching an ambitious collection of trial recordings (civil and criminal justice) to leave witness to justice in everyday life and to contribute to transmit a vision of contemporary French society.
The Higher Council of Archives could be involved in the design of the project both from the methodological point of view and from the point of view of its feasibility.
For greater efficiency, the Superior Council could be surrounded by a scientific council, thus replacing the removal of the Advisory Committee on the Audiovisual Archives of Justice in 2013.
Finally, this council should bring together, in addition to the main ministries concerned, specialists in the subject: historians of memory, law, animated image and also sociologists to guarantee the best approach to French society.
Dear friends,
My first message this morning, to give this new impetus to the Archives, is that digitization must be at the service of this peace of memory.
It must give full meaning to the right to memory, giving access to the memory of justice.
At a time when in the world this memory, or the archive that keeps the trace of it, is sometimes hidden, destroyed, forbidden, hijacked or repressed, we bear this responsibility towards our fellow citizens, the archive and memory.
It stems from our reflection on archives today.
I mean of course the sites of Fontainebleau, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Paris, but also the network of departmental archives services.
On the real estate establishment, the administration will express itself before other bodies made for this.
About Fontainebleau first.
I am aware that the National Archives has been experiencing a major disaster on this site since 28 March 2014: two of the units that threatened to collapse are now under protection.
The 41 officers still working at this site are housed in temporary premises.
This situation cannot continue.
We have to allow these people to project themselves into the future.
I have asked the Secretary-General and the Director-General of Heritage to work quickly with the staff representatives to put in place the consultation and the arrangements for taking a decision in the coming weeks.
Pierrefitte-sur-Seine next.
I would first like to remind you that this huge project would not have been successful without the work of all the staff of the Archives and in particular those of the Fontainebleau site.
The project was conducted through intense internal engagement, supported by the establishment of design and validation working groups, for all sites and stages.
They are the ones who allowed the archives to be installed in good conditions in Pierrefitte thanks to the know-how they have been able to develop in the management of large-scale archives, large-scale computerization, or electronic archiving.
We had to recognize that and I want to pay tribute to them this morning.
In operational terms, the site benefits from accessibility by public transport that will be strengthened in the near future, proximity to many producer services (ministries), a dense scientific environment. It faces the University of Paris 8, not far from the University of Paris 13, and the installation of the Condorcet campus in Aubervilliers will create a center of excellence in the humanities and social sciences north of Paris.
In terms of territorial integration: Pierrefitte is one of the major axes of Greater Paris, which this project anticipated in a way. The creation of a dynamic between the different archive sites, abolishing the boundaries of the peripheral was thus inscribed in the project’s genes.
I would like to recall in this regard the decisive involvement of the local authorities, in the first place the community of agglomeration of Plain commune led by Patrick Braouezec, who was looking for this 4 hectares wasteland, [called Tartars,] a high-level infrastructure, which could lead to the requalification of this territory.
Finally, from a symbolic and social point of view: Pierrefitte makes it possible to re-establish the link between France of yesterday and today by installing the National Archives, memory of France, just a stone’s throw from the Basilica of Saint-EtienneDenis, in the youngest and most mixed of France, was a gesture with strong republican symbolism.
The theme chosen for communication at the time of the opening and which applies to us all todayIn the archives, citizens!
This new implementation was accompanied by a formidable conversion of the institution to digital with the creation of a virtual inventory room with over 22,000 inventories.
Paris finally.
In 2015, the ministry initiated a process to consolidate the services of the headquarters, for a more cross-functional operation and a better valuation of the public buildings entrusted to it.
At the request of France Domaine and the Conseil de l'immobilier de l'État, various options have been developed.
I am pleased to announce, on the occasion of this National Council, that the Council of Government Real Estate has delivered its opinion and issued an opinion in favour of the scenario favoured by the Ministry, that is to say the installation of part of the headquarters services in the quadrilateral of the Archives.
The National Archives will be able to function within the quadrilateral by giving priority to the scientific needs which are theirs; the implementation of administrative services will not be at the expense of archives, on the contrary. And the coherence of everything will be guaranteed.
All the buildings and sites of the quadrilateral will be able to benefit from funding to renovate both the buildings classified as historical monuments but also the conservation areas dedicated to the archives, including the Grands Dépôts built by Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III.
The threat of a possible dismantling of the archives block, or even of a «transfer by apartment», is now definitively removed.
We can all welcome this news here.
Last point: the network of departmental archives services.
The archives are the laboratory of an original decentralization in which the State and the communities collaborate to carry out the same public policy.
The departmental departments, which mainly keep the archives of the decentralized departments of the State (75% of the funds), are funded by the department, but managed by scientific staff made available free of charge by the Ministry of Culture, who exercise the scientific and technical control of the State over all public archives within the department.
This network faces two major challenges:
Saturation of archival buildings on the one hand (more than half of departmental archival buildings have an occupancy rate of more than 80%).
It is therefore still essential to be able to speed up the dematerialisation of procedures and to review the criteria for selecting and sorting certain administrative archives.
Territorial reform on the other hand. This inevitably has consequences for public archives services: we must accompany the rise of intercommunalities, the creation of metropolises, the new mapping of skills between communities and the pooling of their resources, the establishment of new regions.
On all these points, for all these sites, an exemplary collaboration between the State, the Regions and the departments is required to guarantee the continuity of public service and equal treatment of French people with regard to access to public archives and history.
The Higher Council of Archives must accompany the ambition and chart strong scientific and cultural perspectives for the Archives of France as well as the archives in France:
First, the network of public archival services must be, more than ever, a major centre of research in the humanities and social sciences and the law: It is therefore important to systematize scientific partnerships with the major research structures: CNRS, ANR and universities throughout the country.
Then, opening up to new audiences must be a priority, thanks to a renewed and expanded offer: scientists and scholars, Internet users, teachers, students, academics (with an educational offer that integrates mechanisms to fight against illiteracy and school dropout), public associations or social field, prevented public, all must be able to nourish their desire for memory.
Finally, I think it is important to strengthen the link between the Archives public services network and its territories: whether it be Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Roubaix, Montpellier or anywhere in the territory where an archives service can play a social role, cultural, educational.
Dear friends,
As the President of the Republic said on February 11, 2013 in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, “The memory of France belongs to all those who live in our country today and love it.”
The archives make it possible to understand throughout our history, concepts as fundamental as the right to vote, secularity or gender equality.
The new digital tools I mentioned will have to reinforce the role that the network of archives plays in citizenship education.
All French people will be invited to enrich the sources of our history, by entrusting their archives to public institutions and by enriching digital content through collaborative internet uses.
At a time when we are witnessing a war of memories, when tensions arise between the right to be forgotten and the duty to remember, and when the history and values of our democracy are questioned and even challenged, including by terror, I hope that the Superior Council of Archives will help me to put archives at the heart of the great questions of our society and respond to its desire for memory.
Thank you.