Archives départementales de la Réunion - Sudel Fuma

Preceding by three years the law of 5 brumaire an V (26 October 1796) which created departmental archives in metropolitan France, a decree of the Colonial Assembly of Bourbon Island dated 17 August 1793 established the "colonial archives" and appointed a first archivist.

Before the Revolution, the archives of the Compagnie des Indes and the royal administration were kept in the offices of the company, the clerk's office of the Conseil Supérieur and the Hôtel du Gouvernement. Despite an attempt in 1793 to bring them together in a single repository, the colony's archives went through many vicissitudes before being placed under the responsibility of the colonial controller by the organic order of 21 August 1825. The archives were then transferred for more than a century to a building of the colonial control, rue de l'intendance (today rue Amiral Lacaze).

On 5 September 1861, the General Council re-established the post of colonial archivist, entrusted to a retired assistant commissioner of the navy, Marcel Voïart. Filing and sorting were carried out until the post was abolished in 1906, leaving the archives abandoned. In 1919, the curator of the Léon Dierx museum, Adrien Merlo, was appointed curator-archivist. After his death, the functions of "archivist-curator of the Léon Dierx museum, colonial librarian" were combined in the person of Eugène Massinot.

To cope with the clutter of the premises, Governor Truitard decided to build a new building, at the corner of Rue Jean Châtel and Rue Roland Garros, to house the colonial archives and library. The transfer of the archives took place in 1939 in a state of great confusion.

With the departmentalization, the metropolitan legislation on departmental and communal archives was extended to the overseas departments by decree of 28 June 1948. The first departmental archivist, Yves Pérotin, took up his post in 1952. The saturation of the premises led to the multiplication of annexes, before a new building was delivered in 1971, on rue Hippolyte Foucque in Le Chaudron.

The Departmental Archives are now housed in Champ-Fleuri (4 rue Marcel Pagnol - Sainte-Clotilde) in a building designed by architects Pierre Noailly and Alain Bocquée, which was inaugurated in 2001. Since the decentralisation laws of 1986, the Departmental Archives have been under the supervision of the General Council, now the Departmental Council.

Housed on the Victoire site, the General Council's intermediate archives service was attached to them in 2009; since then they have extended their competences to the Department's intermediate archives.

On 13 July 2015, the Departmental Archives of Reunion Island took the name of Sudel Fuma, in memory of the politician, academic and historian who died the previous year.

The Departmental Archives carry out the legal missions defined by the Heritage Code concerning archives, considered as "all documents, regardless of their date, form and medium, produced or received by any natural or legal person and by any public or private service or organisation in the course of their activity".

These missions are divided into five actions: control, collection, classification, conservation and communication of archives.

The classification framework of the Archives de La Réunion is presented in series and sub-series in accordance with national regulations, but the number and title of these series as well as their periodisation take into account the particular administrative organisation of the island.

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