The following piece appeared in the journal Cold War Studies in  October 2001.  We are reprinting it here as the first in what we hope will be a  series of short articles on Cold War archives around the world. 

No Longer a Closed Shop

Post-1945 Research in the French Archives

N. Piers Ludlow

It has become a commonplace amongst post-1945 historians, whether at postgraduate level or more senior, that constructive archival research on French foreign policy is a difficult, if not impossible enterprise. Those working on the 1960s in particular, are told repeatedly that the situation with regard to archival access in France is dire - so bad indeed that there is little point in attempting to cover the French dimension at all. And yet this has arguably never been true, and is certainly no longer the case.

The longevity of the myth is remarkable. Oliver Bange's, The EEC Crisis of 1963 is just the latest academic monograph to justify its failure to use French archival sources with a throw away line about the impossibility of access. (Olivier Bange, The EEC Crisis of 1963, (London: Macmillan, 1999) And even a historian as distinguished and as well placed as Alan Milward observes in a recent edition of The Journal of Cold War Studies that the key French papers for the 1960s remain inaccessible. Little wonder therefore that graduate students and supervisors alike have tended to accept this received wisdom uncritically and direct their research efforts elsewhere. But in so doing they have in fact been neglecting a wide array of research possibilities in France which, with a little patience and know-how can bear rich rewards.

The key to understanding the French archival system is to realise that, compared with the British or even German systems, it is highly decentralised. Although there is a central archive, the Archives Nationales which ostensibly plays a role akin to the Public Record Office or the Bundesarchiv in Germany, multiple ministries retain their own papers and individual Presidents, not to mention ministers, have chosen to devise their own arrangements for historical researchers. Those wishing to work in France will therefore have to divide their time between several different locations, rather than being able to work solely at the well equipped Centre d'accueil et de recherche des Archives nationales (CARAN) reading-room in central Paris. But while dispersed, the majority of French papers up to and including the 1960s are now open to researchers, both foreign and French.

For those working on French foreign policy, the first step is almost certainly to consult the Documents Diplomatiques Françaises which in marked contrast to their British equivalent are now emerging for most of the first half of the 1960s, and the second is to visit the Quai d'Orsay. The files relating to the 1961-6 period have been open since the early 1990s; those from the next five year stretch, 1967-72, are now available, although as yet do not figure on the index available in the Salle de Lecture. Within them the historian will find a fairly comprehensive array of incoming and outgoing telegrams - vital for assessing how the French viewed the evolution of British or German politics for instance - an idiosyncratic mix of think pieces and analyses, the records of most bilateral or multilateral meetings held by the French (although not necessarily the Presidential level meetings), and a variety of interdepartmental documents which give some indication of the internal pressures being brought to bear on French diplomats. The files on French European policy from the mid-1960s yielded for instance both a valuable copy of a Cabinet meeting record in which de Gaulle was clearly deterred by his Ministers from vetoing British EEC membership prematurely, and a selection of correspondence from the French Finance Ministry to the Quai which underlined the financial imperatives driving at least some aspects of French policy-making. It is certainly not enough in itself to allow an historian to chart the development of French foreign policy-making, but it is already considerably better than nothing. The official Quai papers can, moreover, be complemented by the private files of Maurice Couve de Murville, the French foreign minister from 1958-1968, which can now be consulted at the Quai itself.

The next step may be to visit the more specialist ministries involved in different aspects of French policy-making. For those interested in Colonial Affairs this is likely to involve a journey to Aix-en-Provence, a hardship which is likely to win you little sympathy from most of your colleagues and fellow-researchers. Those working on military affairs, by contrast, should direct their attention to Vincennes, just outside of Paris, and Nantes in Brittany for naval matters. And for specialists interested in economic policy, but also in the economic determinants of foreign policy more broadly defined, a trip to the Ministry of Finance archive at Savigny, about an hour from Paris, may well prove rewarding. But before plunging into these highly detailed collections, it is almost certainly worth exploring the Prime Minister's files, largely held by the Archives Nationales in their 20th century section out at Fontainebleau.

In 5th Republic France, the President may well have hogged the lime-light in terms of foreign policy and made the key strategic decisions, but a lot of the day to day policy implementation was run out of the Matignon, the Prime Minister's office. As a result, the Prime Ministers' files are likely to contain a great deal of interest to a foreign policy specialist. Nowhere is this more true than in my own field, namely French European policy, since the key institution for devising the French stance in Brussels from 1958 onwards was the Service Général de Coopération Interministérielle (SGCI), a committee which was directly answerable to the Prime Minister. Reading the SGCI files is thus about as close as one can get in France to working through the British PREM files, since one finds the same varied range of papers submitted by all of the various departments concerned, as well as numerous synthesising analyses put together by the SGCI officials themselves. Most of these were prepared for the Prime Minister, a minority went direct to de Gaulle, but all serve to summarise the French view of most European issues extremely well and to shed much light on the various factors lying behind the often controversial stances adopted by French representatives in Brussels. Episodes as diverse as the two French vetoes of British membership, the empty chair crisis of 1965-6, the Hague Council of 1969 or the French struggle to create an effective Common Agricultural Policy are all well-covered by the extensive SGCI holdings. No serious research into the evolution of European integration during the 1960s is thus likely to be complete without a fairly lengthy interlude spent going through these papers at Fontainebleau.

All of this means that the hole left by the inaccessibility of the de Gaulle papers matters much less than might at first appear. For those accustomed to the PRO where long memos penned by Macmillan or Wilson can be read, or the American Presidential libraries, it is admittedly frustrating to have to stop short of the very top of the policy-making process in France. This is all the more true given the fascination which General de Gaulle's personality continues to hold for many historians. But not even the General made policy within a vacuum, and the fact that it is now possible to trace virtually all the ministerial and official advice which was sent to the Elysée, as well as to identify the policy instructions which issued forth from the Presidential palace, means that the General's workings should no longer be surrounded with total mystery. Instead, patient research through the records of the rest of the French government machine, combined with a detailed scrutiny of the massive outpourings of the de Gaulle publishing industry, should allow most researchers to come up with a reasonably complete picture of how and why the V Republic's first President operated as he did. A blanket reference to the closure of the de Gaulle archives should no longer constitute a valid excuse.

Furthermore, as the focus of historical research moves forward into the later 1960s and early 1970s the de Gaulle aberration ceases to matter as much, since the papers of his successor, Georges Pompidou are much more accessible. (At the Archives Nationales.) Officially, the Pompidou collection, like all Presidential papers in France, is subject to a sixty rather than thirty year rule. Exceptions (dérogations) can be applied for, however, and in my experience are fairly liberally granted. Indeed one of the perverse effects of the sixty year rule is that access to papers from the early 1970s is actually easier in France than it is in Britain, since a dérogation would appear to be as likely to be granted for a file relating to 1973 as it is to one dating from 1969. The French record of the crucial May 1971 summit meeting between Heath and Pompidou, for instance, was made available to me over the summer of 2000, while I will have to wait until 2002 to see the British equivalent. Those planning to work on the final and successful British application to the EEC might therefore do well to plan a trip to France before rather than after the bulk of their work in the PRO.

All of the archives described above have their idiosyncrasies. (Notably, and bizarrely given France's general reputation, the almost complete impossibility of buying appetising food without leaving the premises.) Their scattered nature, moreover, causes inevitable frustration. And an effective research trip making the most of their various holdings needs to be meticulously prepared in advance, and almost certainly preceded not merely by numerous telephone calls and letters, but also by a preliminary reconnaissance trip far enough in advance for dérogations to be applied for where necessary. But the contents of the archives is sufficient to mean that any well-prepared expedition is likely to reap rewards comparable with those to be found in virtually any other continental country, or indeed in the United States. Those with the linguistic ability to tackle the French archives should really have no excuse for failing to do so.

Piers Ludlow

LSE, 26.4.2001

Useful addresses:

CARAN : Centre d'accueil et de recherche des Archives nationales: 60, rue des Francs-Bourgeois, 75141 Paris cedex 03 telephone: 00 33 1 40 27 64 19 or 64 20 fax: 00 33 1 40 27 66 28 website: http://www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/chan/index.html

Le Centre des archives contemporaines (CAC), rue des archives, 77300 Fontainebleau Tel. 00 33.(0)1 64 31 73 00 Fax: 00 33.(0)1 64 31 73 03 Website: http://www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/cac/fr/index.html

Le Centre des archives d'outre-mer 29 chemin du Moulin-Detesta, 13090 Aix-en-Provence tel.: 00 33 04 42 93 38 50 fax: 00 33 04 42 93 38 89 Website: http://www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/caom/fr/index.html

Ministère des Affaires étrangères. Direction des archives et de la documentation. Centre parisien, 37 quai d'Orsay, 75007 Paris. Tel.: 00 33 01 43 17 42 42 (salle de lecture) or 00 33 01 43 17 42 46 (secrétariat) fax: 00 33 01 43 17 52 84 Website: http://www.france.diplomatie.fr/archives/index.html

Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN). 17 rue du Casterneau, 44000 Nantes. Tel.: 00 33 02 51 77 25 25 Fax: 00 33 02 51 77 24 60

Centre des archives économiques et financières 9 rue de l'Aluminium, 77176 Savigny-Le-Temple. Tel.: 00 33 01 64 87 79 24 or 25 or 26 Fax: 00 33 01 64 87 80 16

Service historique de l'Armée de terre. Pavillon des Armes, Vieux-Fort, château de Vincennes. Tel.: 00 33 01 41 93 34 33 or 32 94 Fax: 00 33 01 41 93 39 82

Further information about the above, and indeed most other French archives, can be found on the Net at: http://www.archivesdefrance.culture.gouv.fr/fr/annuaire/index.html.

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