Archives de Paris

In changing political institutions and administrative districts, the French Revolution was concerned with the preservation of its archives and those of the abolished institutions. Sorting officers were charged with sorting out useful state documents, preserving historical archives and destroying all monarchical and feudal vestiges. They often confused the function of Paris, the capital of France, with that of chief town of the Seine department, by directing to the National Archives (created in 1790) documents that would naturally have belonged in the Archives of the Seine, created by the law of 5 Brumaire An V (26 October 1796).

From 1803, the Archives de la Seine were housed in the Hôtel de Ville, then in 1860, in an annex on Avenue Victoria. The fires that ravaged Paris at the end of the Commune in May 1871 had disastrous consequences for the Parisian archives: in addition to parish records, civil status registers, documents resulting from the activities of Parisian guilds, religious communities, and parish factories, as well as the documents that existed in the courthouse, which was also burned down, were all reduced to ashes. From 1878 onwards, the archives of the Seine moved to Quai Henri IV. Following the law of 10 July 1964 on the reorganisation of the Paris region, the Seine department was abolished. There followed a new distribution (devolution) of the archives from the former prefecture of the Seine to the newly created Archives départementales de la petite couronne. In order to be able to continue the statutory collection of the archives of the administrations located on the territory of Paris, several annexes to the one on the Quai Henri IV coexisted in the Paris region. A first annex was inaugurated in Villemoisson-sur-Orge in 1985 and the current Archives de Paris building, designed by the architects Henri and Bruno Gaudin, located at the Porte des Lilas, was inaugurated in 1990. A second annex in Seine-Saint-Denis, opened in 2018, further increases storage capacity.

Until 1975, the status of Paris was largely inspired by the law of 28 Pluviôse Year VIII (17 February 1800), which established a prefect for administration and a prefect for the police. It is only since 1975 that the prefect no longer has any municipal functions. Because of this dual status (city and department), the Archives of the Seine and then of Paris are both municipal and departmental archives, which can be considered the leading French territorial archive service: they conserve nearly 76 linear kilometres of documents, welcome more than 7,000 researchers in 15,000 working sessions and communicate approximately 45,000 documents each year.

The missions of the Archives: to collect, classify, conserve and communicate

For more than 200 years, the Archives de Paris have been collecting, classifying, inventorying, conserving, communicating and promoting documents of historical interest concerning Paris or the former department of the Seine, whether they come from the services of the municipality, the department of Paris, the decentralised services of the State or private law organisations with a mission or a delegation of public service, established on the Parisian territory (prefectures, courts, the Paris council, schools, etc.).

• Collecting: collecting public archives produced in the administrative area (the department of Paris), on the one hand, and private archives (archives of individuals, companies, associations or unions) of historical interest, on the other hand, by donation, deposit, purchase or bequest. The Archives de Paris is a key contact for archiving. To find out more about transferring (or depositing) public archives and to get advice on how to rationalise the management of your files, consult the "Public archives" section.

• Classify: organise the archives collected in this way by sorting and eliminating them, if necessary, and then draw up a finding aid describing the content of each identified unit (call number) so that everyone can find out about them.

• Preserve: preserve these documents, firstly as a preventive measure, by ensuring that they are well preserved in suitable packaging and stored in healthy and controlled premises; by making consultation copies (microfilmed or digital), to remove fragile documents from consultation; and as a last resort, curatively, by restoring or binding them.

• Communicate: allow access to the information contained in the documents held by the library to all publics, directly in the reading room or remotely (digitised resources accessible online) or through a mediation action (exhibitions, workshops, visits, publications).

The Archives de Paris hold almost all unpublished, often handwritten documents. Most of them come from the administrations of the Seine, then of Paris, and, to a lesser extent, from private individuals or legal entities. In addition to the archival sources, a specialised library is also available to researchers. It consists of 37,000 volumes and a thousand serial publications. In order to identify the references (call numbers) likely to document a search, one must first consult the finding aids: inventories, archive directories and files. They can be consulted in the reading room.

Digitized archives, Finding aids & Inventories.