Archives départementales du Var

Created during the French Revolution, the role of the Departmental Archives has always been to collect papers from the Ancien Régime administrations, nationalised ecclesiastical establishments and documents produced within the jurisdiction of the department by the new public administrations.

They are also intended to receive all private archive collections, in whatever form they may take, including oral testimonies, films and photographs, which may shed additional light on the history of the département.

In this way, the Departmental Archives are able to gather together the memory of the Department.

Placed under the authority of the President of the Departmental Council since decentralisation (1st January 1986), the Departmental Archives are responsible for :

• Collecting: ensure that public archives are deposited, i.e. documents resulting from the activities of the State, local authorities, companies and public establishments, as well as notaries. Collect deposits from municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Encourage donations and deposits of private archives from individuals, families, associations or companies.
• Classify: making archives accessible to the public by sorting and classifying them and producing finding aids (inventories, directories, files, databases).
• Preserve: to ensure the physical preservation of archives, a prestigious and irreplaceable heritage, in the best possible conditions. To this end, the Archives have digitisation, photography and restoration workshops and have documents digitised by external service providers.
• Communicating: to make the archival heritage accessible to as many people as possible... to administrative departments that regularly consult their files, to private individuals to justify their rights, to researchers for their historical work, to genealogists and local history enthusiasts who discover their roots there, to young people through the Educational Service, to the general public through conferences, symposia, publications or exhibitions...

The holdings of the departmental archives are organised into series designated by letters of the alphabet according to a filing system.

After initially setting up in Brignoles, the Departmental Archives moved to Draguignan in 1799. Located for a long time within the precincts of the Prefecture, they were transferred in 1972 to the building on avenue Alphonse Daudet in Draguignan. From February 2015, the Departmental Archives became part of the Pôle culturel Chabran, a shared space with the agglomeration media library and the Conservatoire de la Dracénie.

The Var departmental archives hold almost 20 linear kilometres of documents.

The oldest, on parchment, dates from 1136. It is a papal bull promulgated by Pope Innocent II (1130-1143) relating to a right granted to the collegiate church of Pignans for the use of a chapel.

The holdings of the Archives départementales du Var are particularly rich in notarial and municipal archives. The oldest notary's register dates from Cabasse in 1280. 80 of the 153 communes have deposited part of their archives, some of which date back to the Middle Ages. The oldest item, from the Barjols archives, dates from 1214.

Judicial collections have been important since the 16th century, and even the 14th century. However, the ecclesiastical archives (bishoprics, parishes, abbeys and priories) are relatively poor. When the Alpes-Maritimes département was created in 1860, the Archives départementales du Var transferred part of its holdings from the arrondissement of Grasse to the département.