Being an Archivist in Provincial Enlightened France: The Case of Pierre Camille Le Moine (1723–1800)

In: European history quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 3, p. 568-589

Abstract

This article focuses on Pierre Camille Le Moine (1723–1800), an archivist and the author of the first printed French monograph entirely devoted to archives and archival management and description, the influential Diplomatique pratique (1765). The article investigates the strategies that archivists such as Le Moine used to acquire employment. A labour market for archival expertise came into being in mid-eighteenth-century France, and several episodes from Le Moine's professional life illustrate the mechanisms used both by potential employers and employees to attract interest. Next, the article investigates Le Moine's understanding of himself as an archivist and his assumptions about the status of archival work, both in relation to his family life and in relation to the wider cultural changes at the time. While able to use enlightened rhetoric and showing at least some superficial acquaintance with the new sociability of the philosophes, Le Moine in many ways remained anchored in a culture more akin to the world of the traditional antiquarian. Clearly, his constant concern for archives gave him a preservationist bias. What made the author most famous was the publication of Le Diplomatique pratique, a serious attempt to combine erudite diplomatics in the Maurist style with a manual for the practicalities of everyday archival life. The last section of the article studies the nature of daily archival experiences in eighteenth-century France, including daily routines regarding the production, content, structure and function of inventories.