Historische dienst van de Federale Politie / Service Historique de la Police fédérale

Used to be called Centrum voor Geschiedenis en Tradities van de Rijkswacht / Centre d'Histoire et des Traditions de la Gendarmerie.

The Centre d'Histoire et des Traditions de la Gendarmerie, created in 1976 and directed by Lieutenant-Colonel Guido Denis. Heir to the Gendarmerie museum, the centre's ambition was to be not only a museum but also a place where anyone could come and consult the corps' archives. However, due to a lack of human and financial resources, the centre had to rely mainly on a network of gendarmes who collaborated free of charge and outside their duty hours.

The "History of Units" team, headed by Captain Marchoul, was set up around 1978, and was charged with "retracing the history, as vividly as possible, of all our territorial units".

The focus is on both administrative information and stories or testimonies related to the brigades. A letter is sent to the brigade commanders, asking them to provide a list of commanders, photos of the buildings, the number of procès-verbaux written per decade since 1830, changes in staffing levels, and information on the communes within the brigades' jurisdiction. It was also requested that interesting documents be temporarily entrusted to the brigades for the time needed to ensure their reproduction. This archival dimension gained in importance after the publication by the Ministry of National Defence of the general order of 23 May 1979, defining the attributions of its historical service. The CHTG was inspired by this order and took on the responsibility of acquiring, classifying, inventorying and preserving the units' archives. An annual activity report, with the necessary annexes, is requested from the units, but this project is not followed up by concrete measures and the reports only arrive in dribs and drabs.

The Ministry of National Defence was responsible for the organisation and general administration of the Gendarmerie. However, the Archives Act of 24 June 1955 exempted this ministry from depositing its archives in the Kingdom's General Archives. The Gendarmerie had therefore established its own rules for the careful preservation of correspondence registers and other files within the brigades. But these documents were almost systematically destroyed once their administrative usefulness had expired. In 1991, however, the Gendarmerie was demilitarised and all the competences previously managed by the Ministry of National Defence were fully transferred to the Ministry of the Interior. This demilitarisation meant that the law on archives now applied to Gendarmerie archives.

Before becoming a legal obligation for the Gendarmerie, the very idea of safeguarding historical archives was born late and was never the subject of a coherent policy at the corps level. In fact, there has never been a systematic collection of documents or registers kept by the brigades. The collection described in this inventory is therefore based on the files compiled by the CHTG staff, with the help of the brigades, in the 1970s and 1990s (lists of commanders and staff, press cuttings, postcards and photos of the buildings). It also contains the few items that were sent or recovered by the Centre during the last two decades from the Gendarmerie, such as certain registers or reports dating mainly from the 20th century. Most of the collections were essentially compiled for documentary purposes, and not as a true archive.

The Historical Service enhances the existing collections in the museum.

It manages and carries out the inventory of the heritage (archives, uniforms, material and carriage) of the police.

The collection has works on the history of the police services from the 18th century onwards, the lives of gendarmes and on the functioning of the police services over the years.