ABSTRACT

France, and of course any nation with a history and a culture of interest, is a living archive whose records are turning up in attics, in auction houses, and at old book and manuscript dealers. The curators, for instance, were limiting readers to ten file cartons a day, which the clerks reduced on their own initiative to five. One might surmise that at the archives, as at other venerable institutions such as the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Historical Library of the City of Paris, the clerks behind the counters make the rules while curators keep their distance, first because they lack power, second because interference might provoke labour agitation with which they are equally powerless to deal. As Patrice and Anne Higonnet observed in the Times Literary Supplement, the whole French university system resembles the catalogues of the National Library: “unwieldy, incomprehensible and beyond repair.”.