ABSTRACT
Democracy, human rights and archives have a shared history. The civil registration system created in 1792 was to have an even greater effect than the National Archives in consolidating the rights laid out in the 1791 French Constitution through the inclusion in its preamble of the principles outlined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Civil registration, as a secular system linked to the public authorities, may rightfully be considered the ancestor of public archives. The horror of the extremely violent attacks on individuals in the troubled years of the first half of the 20th century, among them the extermination of civilian populations, genocide, deportation and war crimes, including the Holocaust and other unspeakable crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, culminated in the aftermath of World War II in the decision to create new international legislation based on the Nuremberg Principles to form the legal reference framework for prosecuting the war criminals of the Axis powers.
