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

France’s Noble and Seigneurial Archives in the Eighteenth Century

To situate Le Moine’s career within the archival history of eighteenth-century France, three aspects of the country’s archival landscape need to be highlighted in advance. First, it is important to note that much of French archival history is still written with a particular focus on archives and archival projects related in one way or another to the king and his ministers, or else to the great public institutions. Most scholarly attention is thus drawn to such famous repositories as the Trésor des Chartes, the archives of the Parlement de Paris, of Colbert and his family, or of the secretaries of state. ² This is understandable given the visionary planning realized by these figures, the spectacular results some of their initiatives yielded in practice, and the overall importance of these institutions for the history of Europe. Yet it is important to stress that many other archives existed besides these flagship institutions, and that they too had great significance for Europe’s archival history. Le Moine’s career took place almost entirely beyond the sphere of public administration, yet contributed significantly to French archival history – as demonstrated by the Diplomatique pratique’s prominent place in the history of French archival thought. ³ His life and work can help to bring these archives, their challenges and opportunities, out of the shadow of these better known institutions, which still dominate archival history.

The second aspect worth noting is that local seigneurial and ecclesiastical archives were dynamic institutions during the eighteenth century. Seigneural archives attracted more and more attention from their owners for a number of different reasons. The nobility, for instance, was under increasing pressure to prove their noble status by producing solid genealogical evidence in the form of archival documentation. The rise of archive-based genealogy was a crucial factor in the long process of embedding archives into the daily lives of early modern men and women. ⁴ Furthermore, relations between lords and tenants were generally conducted on the basis of written evidence, thus also increasing the appeal of archives for holders of seigneurial lands. French historiography has conducted a long debate on the development of seigneurial relations in the eighteenth century. ⁵ The key question for social historians is whether or not a so-called ‘seigneurial reaction’ took place in the decades before the revolution, involving a more forceful and systematic exploitation of seigneurial rights. Of particular relevance in the context of archival history is the fact that seigneurs became increasingly inclined towards, and capable of, deploying their archives when dealing with their tenants. They began creating and using vast amounts of archive-based evidence, combining it with the more traditional activities of seigneurial administration such as surveying. ⁶ When disputes over contractual rights and duties broke out, seigneurial lords could now easily rely upon archival knowledge in order to advance their cause. Even in rural France, archives thus became a fact of social life with which people across the social scale were forced to contend.

Finally, the growing archival interest of hundreds, probably even thousands, of noble and other ‘private’ owners of record collections created new social opportunities, as a variety of people were needed to help manage these newly appreciated local archives. A new caste of experts capable of organizing and handling these repositories subsequently emerged, amongst them Le Moine. Contemporaries frequently labelled these new experts feudistes or, more rarely, archivistes. They worked as freelance specialists, offering their skills to whoever needed them. Although our knowledge about this group is only sketchy, the feudistes and archivistes were likely to have been very many in number. ⁷ From the perspective of a social history of archives, the emergence of such a group of experts specializing in minor archives is highly significant, and their activities were crucial in facilitating archival development in provincial France. Individuals such as Pierre-Camille Le Moine were instrumental in integrating archives more thoroughly into the social and cultural fabric of seigneurial daily life. Let us now turn to our protagonist in greater detail.

Le Moine’s Life and Career

Le Moine was born on 21 December 1723 in Paris and died in 1800 in Reims. His biography is known only in fragments. His father was a merchant, but not much more is known about his family or social and cultural background. More detailed information becomes available only for the late 1740s, when Le Moine’s archival career was already underway. Around 1750, he was under the tuition of Dom Guillaume Gérou in the abbey of Marmoutier. Gérou was a typical Maurist with wide-ranging interests in the historia litteraria as well as in regional history. ⁸ What precisely Le Moine was doing in his years with the erudite Benedictine monks, or how he got to Marmoutier is unknown, but the Maurists left a lasting impression upon his life. A few years later he considered himself the ‘disciple’ of yet another ‘master’: Guillaume Roussel, archivist of the cathedral chapter of Saint-Martin in Tours. ⁹ Gérou and Roussel exemplify two major forms of interest in archives and archival documents in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe – two traditions that also shaped Le Moine’s perception and treatment of archives. Gérou, for his part, personified the erudite interest in medieval documents and in archives and libraries as their repositories. Roussel, instead, belongs to an administrative or economic sphere closely connected to the society of estates. Gérou was interested in archives as a means of reconstructing French history in its broadest sense, whilst Roussel was organizing and mining them for the benefit of seigneurial lords. Despite their differences, however, the two contexts were by no means entirely separated. ¹⁰ The life and career of Le Moine himself highlights the close connection between these two worlds.

After this extensive period of working under and with experienced men of the archive, Le Moine started his own activities, while working for the cathedral chapter in Tours. Le Moine was responsible for organizing and inventorying several smaller archives and archival fonds of ecclesiastical entities linked to Tours cathedral. His inventories for the prevotés of Varenne and Notre-Dame d’Oé still exist. ¹¹ With these two inventories, the most important type of Le Moine’s future employment was established: he would become well-known in France for quickly and effectively organizing and inventorying archives. Time and again over the next half century, he would be hired mostly by ecclesiastical institutions for a limited amount of time (usually several years) to physically and epistemically rearrange their records so that they might be used more effectively. Over the following decades, Le Moine criss-crossed much of France taking up such employment opportunities wherever they arose. The mobility of his career must be highlighted. After Tours, he was next employed by the chapter of Toul from 1756 until 1765. ¹² In Toul, Le Moine began a family. ¹³ Around this time, he established contacts with some of the regional academies of France, mostly with institutions relatively close to his current home. In due course, he would become affiliated with the academies of Metz, Rouen and Lyon.

After the momentous time in Lorraine, Le Moine’s next employer was the chapter of Lyon cathedral (from 1765 until 1770). ¹⁴ This was also the period when Le Moine started to publish. During the move from Toul to Lyon, the Diplomatique pratique first appeared, and at the end of his stay in Lyon he published a complete reworking of the Jesuit Father Claude-François Ménestrier’s work on heraldry. ¹⁵ From Lyon, he moved north and east again and had employments in Meaux (1770–1771) ¹⁶ and the abbeys of Chambrefontaine and Faremoutiers. There followed employments in Saint-Quentin (1771–1774) and Amiens (1775–1776), with Le Moine inventorying and organizing yet again a host of different archives. ¹⁷ His time in Amiens was followed by four volumes of inventories for the abbey of Corbie, produced in 1779–1781. ¹⁸ In the years leading up to 1787 he took care of many more archives, including several city and church archives in Reims, Saint-Thierry, Longueau and Saint-Basle. ¹⁹ In Reims, Le Moine developed a particularly fruitful and wide-ranging archival life. ²⁰ Traces of his hand were left in many documents of the municipal archives of which he also produced a substantial inventory. ²¹ He also contributed several articles to the Affiches de Reims. ²² Le Moine was also in Reims when the revolution started. ²³ Although he embodied the society of the ancien régime, he did not become persona non grata. Just like very many other archival professionals of the ancien régime, Le Moine found (albeit moderate) opportunities within the new order, and continued to live and work in Reims until his death in 1800. ²⁴

Le Moine’s life seems to have been a fairly successful one. There were economic anxieties at times, but he could support a growing family with his highly specific archival skills. ²⁵ There was not too much upward social mobility in an archival career such as Le Moine’s, but this line of work nevertheless brought respectability and a wide range of social contacts. He married the cousin of a member of Toul’s cathedral chapter, and the local bishop agreed to serve as one of the bride’s witnesses. ²⁶ Le Moine was a printed author and had at least some connections to the system of provincial academies. His life shows in exemplary ways the social opportunities provided by the landscape of rural French archives during the eighteenth century for enterprising specialists in the field of record-keeping.

Archival Labour Market: Finding an Archivist and Finding Employment

Le Moine’s life also illustrates the challenges of founding a career upon archival work. The major difficulty was finding employment. Hired predominantly for limited periods of time, feudistes and archivistes had to be constantly on the look-out for the next job, the next employment, the next archive in bad shape and in need of expert care. Many owners of smaller or medium-sized archives, in turn, faced a similar problem. They usually had but little connection to the world of archivists. Once they decided that their archives needed an expert to care for them, they faced an obvious problem: how to find the right person? In order to match both sides, a rudimentary form of archival labour market emerged in eighteenth-century France. Le Moine’s career provides plenty of instances that help us understand in detail how potential employers and employees could meet.

The most abundant sources for this market come from Le Moine’s successful employment in Toul, and from his unsuccessful application to the abbey of Saint-Germain-de-Près in 1770. ²⁷ Once the chapter of Toul had decided to hire a professional, they dispatched one of their officers, a certain M. Talon, to Paris in late 1755 on a scouting trip. Talon, in turn, contacted other persons in the capital who were familiar with the milieu. An important role was played by M. Dardenne, archivist of the duke of Orléans, who suggested a capable subject, an unnamed archivist. This candidate, however, had requested too great a salary. A few weeks later, in January 1756, Talon tried again. This time, he began searching via printed job offers in journals or broadsheets (‘mettre sur les petites affiches’). Four applications indeed reached the chapter, including Le Moine’s. Talon and Dardenne arranged themselves as an ad-hoc committee for evaluating the candidates. Once shortlisted, the chapter’s secretary wrote to Tours, where Le Moine was still working, to inquire in more detail about his abilities. Convinced of his qualities, the chapter offered him the job on May 28, 1756. If the chapter’s procedure was typical at all, then extensive scouting and networking, public searches and individual applications were all habitually part of the process of finding a suitable archivist.

Archivists like Le Moine, on the other hand, were always looking for new employment opportunities. They actively tried to promote their services, not least by (sometimes unsolicited) applications. Thus, in 1770, Le Moine wrote to Saint-Germain-des-Près in Paris asking for employment. ²⁸ To promote his services, Le Moine relied on a series of well-honed arguments. As a first step, he made sure that the recipients of his letters understood the enormous importance of archives. Archives were the backbone of law and justice, as feudistes like Le Moine would argue over and over again. The seigneurial rights of the abbey ‘cannot be defended without documents, and those are hard to find in the archive if it is not properly ordered’. Currently, however – or so Le Moine suggested in a typical second step of his argument – Saint-Germain’s archives were in no shape to perform their important function. ‘Dysfunctional arrangements’ prevented an effective exploitation of the documents, he claimed. In a third and final step, Le Moine presented himself as a capable archivist with all the necessary skills. He made this point particularly by highlighting the great advancements of archival expertise over the last decades – advancements that he impersonated. Thus, Le Moine made a well-articulated rhetorical argument to promote his quest for employment in three steps – archives were important, the archive in question was in a disorderly state, he was a professional capable of amending the situation.

Besides actively offering his services, Le Moine sought jobs also through careful networking. A telling set of side-employments while working in Lyon can illustrate this. In 1768, Le Moine produced in Valence a neat inventory of papers and documents of the Order of Saint Ruf, a medieval monastic community originally established in 1039 in Avignon. ²⁹ Where his connection to Saint Ruf originated from is unknown, but once established it created additional opportunities. In 1769, at the very end of his time in Lyon, Le Moine inventoried the archive of the priory of Saint-Jacques et Saint-Philippe de Tranchin in the small town of Annonay, about 75 kilometres south of Lyon. ³⁰ Here, he worked under the close supervision (‘sous les yeux’) of the priory’s then administrator, one M. Collongeon. This administrator, in turn, was also a member of the Catholic order of Saint Ruf, and thus it seems reasonable to assume that Le Moine got the job in Annonay following on from his work for Saint Ruf.

The three episodes from Toul, Saint-Germain-des-Près and the Order of Saint Ruf demonstrate in different ways that a job market for archival expertise was fast emerging in mid-eighteenth-century France. Job-seeking archivists like Le Moine had not only to be mobile but also highly active in opening up new avenues for employment. Almost unregulated by written norms, the archivists presented themselves forcefully and with unabashed self-promotion. As well as the chapter of Toul, archivists and feudistes like Le Moine also used journals and newspapers to announce their services. ³¹ In addition to actively soliciting employment, they relied upon wide-ranging social networks in order to acquire jobs. Archive owners, thus, when searching for an archivist, had to navigate a complex professional milieu in which almost no fixed standards existed. Reputation was important, but self-promotion made it hard to determine who possessed which qualities. Multiple strategies of informal networking and public searches were therefore combined to find the right person. Agents and middle-men like Talon and Dardenne were important in managing and discerning the many offers.

Asceticism, Enlightenment and a Preservationist Bias: The Mindset of an Eighteenth-Century Archivist

For Le Moine and most of his colleagues, an archival career ended up being much more than just a means to survive. Archives became a part of their very selves, their minds, habits and mentalities being shaped by what they considered to be the necessary requirements for success in the repositories. Their archival work influenced how they viewed the rest of life, just as their perception of archives was influenced by surrounding private and public, cultural and political developments. Although Le Moine was never very explicit about his thoughts, ideas, or emotions, a few glimpses into his mindset can still be gathered.

Le Moine’s perception of his archival activities influenced his evaluation of his own family life. A strong statement comes from a letter written by Le Moine to the erudite Benedictine Dom Augustin Calmet (1672–1757). It is all the more astonishing as it was written shortly after his marriage in 1756. ³² In a rhetorical gesture common to early modern intellectuals, Le Moine contrasted the new reality of his busy and chaotic family life with the imagined quietness of a life purely dedicated to archival work and research: ‘I am snared by the trappings and difficulties of a household […]; I fight against a thousand things not related to philosophy’. The archivist constructed his professional credibility by using the well-established trope of family life as an unwelcome distraction from more serious and worthy activities. ³³ Perhaps he had simply wanted to impress Calmet on this occasion, for this was the first letter addressed to the famous man. But Le Moine continued to use such a language of quasi-monastic austerity to describe his perception of archival work. A few years later he depicted historical research in general, including work in the archive more specifically, as a heroic affair that required ‘expatriating oneself from the middle of society; breathing unhealthy air amidst a mass of books [that are] ruins of the Gothic empire; encountering in the archive (cabinet) all the ferocity of barbarian centuries’. ³⁴ Working in the archive as a form of suffering and withdrawal from the world was to become a popular topos of self-promotion for future archive users, and it fitted nicely with Le Moine’s rhetorical longing for monastic life. None of this, moreover, was necessarily meant to be a pleasing experience. On the contrary, proper archival work was not characterized by being easy. As Le Moine once wrote sarcastically to a rival: ‘Seigneurs who trust their archivists do not dispense them from pain’. ³⁵ Again, Le Moine seemed to make a point of pride out of the fact that archival work was supposedly at odds with more regular and joyful expectations of everyday life.

When writing to Calmet, Le Moine spoke of ‘philosophy’ as being the real goal of his life. In the enlightened eighteenth century, la philosophie was no simple concept, as it came to stand for much of the content and style of enlightenment itself. The question thus arises as to how Le Moine positioned archives in general, and his career as an archivist in particular, vis-à-vis the broader cultural trends of his time. Several papers which he wrote for the academies of Lyon and Metz demonstrate a rather uneasy relationship between Le Moine’s ideas and such broader cultural trends.

On 10 June 1766, only a few months after his arrival in Lyon, he presented a ‘dissertation’ to the local academy that was read to the assembly about a month later, on 8 July. ³⁶ Le Moine’s treatise discussed ‘The Study of Antiquitiy’. ³⁷ It shows the cultural context in which Le Moine viewed the institutions to which he dedicated his life. The Discours sur l’Etude de l’Antiquité rehearsed a well-established narrative of cultural decline and rebirth: the fall of the Roman Empire under assault from northern tribes inaugurated dark centuries in which the valuable learning of ancient Greece and Rome was not cultivated. It was only the ‘revolution (revolution)’ of fourteenth-century humanism that resurrected this ancient wisdom. Le Moine saw positive effects of this renaissance in almost all sciences and disciplines, including historiography, medicine, physics, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, law, and much else. Studying antiquity gave joy, procured practical information for genealogy, and contributed to literature, society and even the state, as it helped to ‘chase the torrent of frivolity from the nation’. Unfortunately, though, enthusiasm for antiquity had acquired some unpleasant and unhelpful dimensions. Le Moine railed in a typically enlightened fashion against antiquarianism, whose practitioners wrote boring books and compiled huge amounts of information nobody really wanted or needed to know. ³⁸ To this, Le Moine liberally applied the category of ‘useless’ knowledge, calling instead for at least some measure of ‘elegance’ in style and ways of presenting. In sum, his idea of learning claimed to be ‘philosophique’ and supposedly stemmed from ‘literature’, rather than from antiquarianism.

On other occasions, however, Le Moine sounded much more like the antiquary that he had criticized in Lyon. He typically pursued antiquarian interests in regional or local history, including an obsession with detailed studies of historical geography and toponyms. ³⁹ He was typically interested in institutional details of church organizations, especially of those for which he was working. ⁴⁰ At one point, in an essay for the academy of Metz, he stated: ‘The best of all histories will certainly be the one founded entirely on some monument. This is why the curious (les curieux) gather with so much care all the inscriptions, coins, medals, seals, gravestones, charters and documents. They do this to make these pieces useful for historiography’. ⁴¹ Le Moine himself cultivated a strong interest in coins and other material remains of the past, supplementing his archival concerns. ⁴² Together with many of his contemporaries, Le Moine considered it self-evident that work in the archive should lead to historical and genealogical fact-gathering. This was an ‘indispensable obligation’, as his ideas were summarized by Dupré de Geneste, secretary of the Academy of Metz. ⁴³ Generally, Le Moine was asking for ‘more zeal in conserving monuments’. ⁴⁴ He advocated a broader and more thorough culture of preserving the past, coming close in fact to calling for a museum or collection of ancient monuments. ⁴⁵ He even imagined a central deposit for copies of all historically relevant archival papers. To safeguard the historical heritage of humankind, Le Moine ultimately suggested nothing less than a declaration of neutrality by international law:

Today, when people consider themselves to be less barbarian than the Goths and Vandals, shouldn’t there be between the sovereigns a convention of international law stipulating that public archives and monuments should never be violated, burned, plundered or destroyed? They should have the same status as the sacred bodies of ambassadors. ⁴⁶

Archives between Experience and Erudition: The Diplomatique pratique (1765) and Le Moine’s Relationship to Maurist Scholarship

Le Moine’s best-known claim to fame is his book La Diplomatique pratique which was published in 1765. This was in many ways the essence of Le Moine’s practical experiences in a vast variety of local (church) archives distilled into a manual. It was also a manifesto concerning the place that should be given to practical archival knowledge, gathered by people like Le Moine after years of work, within the broader epistemic framework of early modern archival thought.

The book started with sections on the archivist, his training and necessary character traits. The entire second chapter, consisting of several pages, was dedicated to measures ensuring that the archivist’s health was maintained while working in the repositories. Next followed an extensive discussion of Le Moine’s preferred method of archival work – the core of practical diplomatics. His protocol was divided into six steps. First, a rough separation of the documents and the containers housing them was to be made. The second step consisted of forming thematically coherent bundles of documents. Step three was the opening and unfolding of ancient parchments and the dating of the undated pieces. The next, more extensive step was concerned with analysing and evaluating the opened documents. Careful examination and close study of the charters was most important and distinguished a proper archivist from mere ‘dechiffreurs’. ⁴⁹ Making sense of ancient documents was ‘hard work depending upon knowledge of bureaucratic procedure and language’. ⁵⁰ Accordingly, Le Moine spent many pages detailing how to proceed. The fifth step of producing order in the archive consisted of making proper extracts of the documents and assigning them shelf-numbers. The last part of an archivist’s organizing work was to establish a general inventory and write it out neatly. Chapter XVI contained a miscellaneous set of practical suggestions, ranging from technologies to enhance faded ink, to exemplary contracts for archivists, general observations on archives and a brief set of rules for establishing a genealogy. Large sections of the book are best described as reference work or pattern-book, containing for example ideal schemes of archival order for different types of archives and inventories (City Hall, Abbey…), a vast set of formules des actes, and a dictionary of ancient French (‘Gothique’) words. There was also a very long typology of different forms of French legal documents. Most helpfully, Le Moine included 12 fold-out tables of different types of handwriting and of abbreviations that frequently occurred and were hard to decipher for the uninitiated.

La diplomatique pratique distilled Le Moine’s practical experiences into a manual. Accordingly, the book is full of advice about what to do and not to do while undertaking archival work. Writing on original documents was not allowed, though underlining key words was. ⁵¹ Extant copies could and should be used to help establish the content of those originals that were more difficult to read. A clear passage also encouraged the archivist to discard ‘useless’ papers and documents. ⁵² Le Moine frequently digested his experiences into helpful maxims such as ‘the longest documents do not necessary require a long analysis’, referring to the often formulaic and repetitive character of official charters. He alerted the reader to the common practice of integrating verbatim copies of older documents into younger ones, thus renewing previous legal relationships. ⁵³ Le Moine also attempted to provide guidance in morally conflicting situations. What was the archivist to do if he detected documents that contained errors concerning seigneurial rights, errors that were advantageous for his employer? He proposed that the archivist should stick to the archival evidence, making at the very least a note about the true, if less advantageous original situation. ⁵⁴ Such practical observations might indeed have helped an inexperienced novice in finding his way through piles of papers and parchments.

At the centre of Le Moine’s art lay the analysis of individual documents. Throughout his life he insisted that he never simply organized documents but also ‘analysed’ them while working in an archive – he knew what the documents meant, he could judge their legal importance and could evaluate their nature and origin according to internal and external criteria of critical assessment. ⁵⁵ Le Moine considered his self-declared ability to ‘analyse’ documents as one of the major selling-points of his services. ⁵⁶ To guide the process of analysis, the Diplomatique pratique indeed presented an immense amount of diplomatic observations. And it was here, at the heart of the whole project, that Le Moine’s book turned into a battle-cry. In fact, the Diplomatique pratique can be seen as a new and distinctive voice in the broader contemporary discourse about records, archives and the culture of writing at large.

The peculiar contribution that Le Moine attempted to make to the established modes of thinking about records and documents can best be appreciated by looking at his carefully crafted attitude towards the Maurists. The tradition of St Maur goes back to the seventeenth century. The most important erudite emerging from that monastic congregation, Jean Mabillon, is considered the founder of modern diplomatics thanks to his 1681 De re diplomatica. Closer to Le Moine’s lifetime, two younger Benedictines, Dom René-Prosper Tassin and Dom Charles-François Toustin had updated the tradition in 1750 with their multi-volume Nouveau traité diplomatique. In terms of diplomatics, this had become the new point of reference by the time Le Moine was planning his own treatise.

Le Moine had a very ambivalent position towards the Maurists and probably towards erudite diplomatics in general. While he did on several occasions acknowledge the wealth of information provided in the Nouveau Traité, he still wanted to maintain his independence from erudite discourse. He claimed throughout his book that he was discussing these issues ‘from the standpoint of our experiences and not according to the ways the Benedictines analysed them’. ⁵⁷ Even at an early point in his career, in 1757, he noted: ‘The treatises on diplomatics are all too erudite. They touch upon eras much older than that with which we are habitually concerned. They are not concerned with ordering documents in the archive’. ⁵⁸ Indeed, neither Mabillon nor Toustin and Tassin had been particularly interested in the archive as such and had little to say about practical work carried out within. Their books were thus of limited use for archivists looking for help in their daily activities. This was what Le Moine’s Diplomatique pratique set out to remedy. In a way, the Diplomatique pratique was thus a statement about, and against, the invisibility or outright neglect of archives in dominant cultural discourses. In – moderately – criticizing the Maurist tradition, Le Moine thus opposed a development recently highlighted by Randolph Head, namely that French authors in the field tended to focus more on documents than on archives. ⁵⁹ Le Moine’s book shows that there was a line of thought in France that strove to keep the archive – and not just documents and their study – at centre stage. There was more to French archival thought than the obsession with Maurist diplomatics.

Le Moine did what he could to launch his book. In 1763, he had a preliminary Extrait du Prospectus d’une diplomatique-pratique ou traité de l’arrangement des archives printed in Toul. ⁶⁰ To promote the Prospectus (and, thus, the main book itself), Le Moine contacted Barthélemy Mercier de Saint-Léger, the famous bibliographer and librarian of the abbey of Saint-Geneviève, and asked him to review his short sketch. Mercier de Saint-Léger obliged and published a positive essay on the Prospectus in the Journal de Trévoux of 1764. ⁶¹ Other dignitaries, too, seem to have supported the book, for instance Dupré de Geneste, the secretary of the Academy in Metz. Such publicity notwithstanding, financing the Diplomatique pratique proved more complicated than anticipated. ‘Only half the necessary subscriptions’ had been signed. In June 1764, Le Moine personally had to advance considerable sums to cover the costs, and Dupré de Geneste lent him an additional 500 livres. In order to increase sales, he asked Saint-Léger to review the main work as well. The famous bibliograph obliged again and, in December 1765, the Journal de Trévoux ran his lengthy positive summary. ⁶²

Though behind expectations, the list of subscriptions printed at the beginning of the Diplomatique pratique is still substantial. ⁶³ It helps to establish at least in part which milieus might have found such a new approach to archives and the study of records particularly helpful. Notice of the forthcoming book seems to have spread widely throughout France. Individual copies were pre-ordered from a disparate set of locations all over the country, though by far the greatest number of subscriptions came from cities and regions where Le Moine had worked – Toul, Metz, Nancy and also, more recently, Lyon. In other words, it was to a large degree his personal reputation that helped to establish the book. Only comparatively few booksellers pre-ordered the book, and mostly then only in single copies. Several of Le Moine’s archival colleagues bought the book, too, among them for instance ‘Dardenne, Archiviste de M. le Duc de Rohan’, ‘Roussel, Conseiller du Roi, Garde des Archives de S. M. de Languedoc’, or a certain ‘Merjeti, Secretaire des États de la Province de Luxembourg’. Other buyers, too, could have been expected to have a certain interest in such a book, including for instance Dom Delrue, Father General of the Congregation of Saint Maur or ‘L’Ordre des Avocats de Metz’. By far the greatest number of advance orders, however, were placed by ecclesiastical institutions and individual churchmen. Several cathedral chapters and their officials (e.g. Toulon, Nevers) and abbeys and their priors or abbots (e.g. Chartreuse de Lyon) pre-ordered Le Moine’s work. Predominant in this was Antwerp, from where no less than 15 copies were ordered by different members of the city’s cathedral chapter and several copies more were bought by other individuals. The church, therefore, was particularly relevant not only to Le Moine’s professional life, but also to his book.

Buyers and critics in general seem to have had a positive view of Le Moine’s book. It was consulted by other archivists of the time when organizing local archives, even if they did not always follow Le Moine’s advice. ⁶⁴ Saint-Léger, in his (albeit solicited) reviews, applauded the author. Even a German version appeared in 1776 in Nuremberg, despite the fact that ‘some material in the book applies only to France’. ⁶⁵ Nevertheless, both editor and translator obviously thought the Diplomatique pratique worthy of their attention. And yet, there were also critical voices, emanating from Le Moine’s colleagues as well as from members of the academic establishment.

Among the professional group of archivists and feudistes, others too had felt the need for a practical handbook, and Le Moine’s Diplomatique pratique was thwarting their own plans for publication. One of these disappointed competitors was Joseph Batteney – a serious contender as his life and career resembled Le Moine’s in many regards. Both would draw on roughly similar bodies of experience, both would have been familiar with roughly the same kind of literature. And yet, while the two men had many common interests and shared ideas and experiences, their opinions differed in nuanced ways. Batteney’s understanding of an archivist’s role was rather close to what Le Moine had disregarded as mere ‘dechiffreur’, as Batteney considered the act of deciphering the real basis of an archivist’s work while Le Moine, as we have seen, considered the analysis of documents to be its most significant part. ⁶⁶ If Le Moine wanted to highlight the full range of archival activities and position this approach against diplomatics’ focus on single documents, Batteney had not immediately seen the need for such a programmatic statement. In essence, though, they agreed on most aspects. When Batteney learned about Le Moine’s Diplomatique, he halted his own project and communicated his additions and alternative views to Le Moine. Eventually, they published together a Supplement to the Diplomatique pratique in 1772, containing additions, alternative passages, and further alphabets and exemplary charters for the archivist to learn about diplomatics. ⁶⁷ When Batteney finally did publish his own manual on archival work in 1775, this turned out to be only a very short text. ⁶⁸

Far more critical was another of Le Moine’s colleagues, Jean-Guillaume Chevrières, who criticized the Diplomatique pratique strongly in his 1775 Le nouvel archiviste. Chevrières thought that Le Moine, who had devoted substantial efforts towards a more practical approach, was still creating ‘too many difficulties’. ⁶⁹ This may in fact have been the first polemical exchange in France on archival matters to appear in print, and thus might indicate that both parties considered such matters to be of wider, ‘public’ interest. Yet Chevrières’ role should not be overestimated. While not being entirely overlooked by contemporaries, ⁷⁰ Chevrières’ short work could hardly rival the relevance of Le Moine’s, even though Chevrières did enjoy a (moderate) archival career after 1789. ⁷¹

While some of the critical remarks made by Chevrières or Batteney might be seen as turf war among newly self-conscious archival practitioners, it was an entirely different matter for Le Moine to have been critically read by prominent scholars spearheading the discipline of diplomatics. At least one of them, the eminent German professor Johann Christoph Gatterer of the University of Göttingen, wrote a rather ambivalent review of Le Moine’s book. ⁷² He applauded the book as a practical guide for archivists, but was much more critical regarding Le Moine’s self-positioning vis-à-vis the academics and the Maurists. Gatterer did not deny that men like Le Moine acquired considerable knowledge about documents, hand-writing, and other important diplomatic details. Yet, the practitioner’s knowledge remained inferior to the scholar’s. The most important difference, according to Gatterer, was that scholars of diplomatics like him would systematically gather a wide range of documents in order to draw their philological and diplomatic conclusions, while practitioners such as Le Moine, though knowing many pieces, would rely on random encounters and thus on an incomplete and ill-defined corpus of texts. In Gatterer’s eyes, what Le Moine considered the greatest advantage of his own profession’s knowledge base – i.e. the focus on practical matters – was the greatest weakness of all.

The Diplomatique pratique itself and the (moderate) debates surrounding it illustrate that the place of archives and archival work in early modern discourse was far from stable and undisputed. In fact, Le Moine’s attempt to create a new voice of archival theory and the mixed results that he achieved show just how contested and undefined the social and conceptual location of archives was in late eighteenth-century France. Academics and practitioners, as well as the practitioners themselves, were at odds about the nature of archival work and its proper relationship to practical experience and academic research. Yet all these debates notwithstanding, Le Moine’s decidedly practical outlook remained appealing to practitioners well into the nineteenth century, when his text continued to be used in French archival education. ⁷³ In early nineteenth-century Milan, too, Le Moine served as a point of reference in the ongoing debates about archival reform, even though, once again, his limits and shortcomings were not overlooked. ⁷⁴ As late as 1842, Le Moine was included in a list of reference authors who should guide Milanese archival instruction in the newly founded Scuola di paleografia e diplomatica. ⁷⁵

The Fight for Order and Against Chaos: Archives as Daily Workspace

Archivists had to work hard to achieve their goals. In the nearly ten years he stayed in Toul, Le Moine seems to have had only two periods of vacation. In 1762, he was granted eight days off ‘to be taken in such a manner that the chapter’s affairs do not suffer’. ⁷⁶ In keeping with his austere work ethic and extending it to his co-workers, he promised employers ‘that my apprentices or helpers (commis ou élèves) are used to never lose a second while working under my supervision’. ⁷⁷ Archival work was also physically demanding or even dangerous. It was a frequent complaint of early modern archivists that the damp, dusty and dark storage rooms ruined clothes, skin and health: ‘I thought I would die’, Le Moine once wrote. Archives, he furthermore suggested, were a transformative workspace: ‘[my] blood is altered by the archives and my work there’, he exclaimed in 1756 when he was sick and unable to travel. ⁷⁸

Indeed, many archives Le Moine visited were in less than exemplary condition. By the mid-1750s, for instance, Toul’s archives had fallen into ‘chaos’ and were hardly usable. ‘Several packets of papers were half-destroyed by the humidity’ and had to be taken temporarily to the ancient chapter hall ‘to make them get some air, save them and examine them’. ⁷⁹ On other occasions, work was hindered by unhappy traces of animal life: ‘Parchment half erased and eaten by rats; of the date we can only read ‘the tenth of the month of… of the year… 2’. I believe this is 1422’. ⁸⁰ Such asides allow us glimpses into the difficulties faced by early modern archivists when dealing with underprotected documents. Putting things in better shape was one of the tasks men like Le Moine were hired for. This was meant quite literally, as archivists were indeed responsible for the material dimensions of record-keeping. Putting an archive in order, thus meant, even for Le Moine, physically handling, carrying, and placing the parchments and papers. No wonder, then, that he had mentioned the ‘unfolding of papers’ as a distinctive step of his work routine.

Ordering and organizing archives involved epistemic work as well. Archivists devised orders of knowledge that they then implemented physically, for instance by arranging documents in bundles or putting them in boxes or folders, as reflected in the inventories. ⁸¹ Le Moine combined chronological and geographical with subject-based criteria in structuring the records. ⁸² In Toul, for instance, he sorted the documents according to social, functional and geographical categories. Only within each category, did chronological order prevail. The first of the six volumes of the inventory contained all the documents of popes, kings and princes. The second volume, on the foundations and donations given to the chapter and on the different structural aspects of the ecclesiastic organization (such as chapels), was more ‘internal’ in nature. Volumes three and four referenced holdings and properties and the related documentation, while the last two volumes outlined the documents pertaining to the important prévôte de Void. The inventory proper was supplemented with hundreds of pages of extracts from the chapter’s registers of deliberations. The excerpts were ordered topically into two additional volumes so that they could serve as an encyclopedia of important earlier decisions and deliberations. ⁸³ Inventories like Le Moine’s not only indicated documents, but presented more or less extensive summaries, and thus became condensed ‘surrogates’ for the originals. ⁸⁴ If well done, the inventory could be a substitute for reading the originals.

Generally, Le Moine’s subject-based approach to archival orders of knowledge was typical of eighteenth-century trends. In one way or another, most archives of early modern Europe relied on topical categories to structure their records. ⁸⁵ There were critics, however. Chevrières in his Le nouvel archiviste argued against Le Moine’s Diplomatique pratique and insisted instead on a purely chronological order. ⁸⁶ Le Moine defended his own ideas in a fierce letter to his opponent. ⁸⁷ This ‘controversy’ has resonated in scholarship throughout the twentieth century, and is occasionally presented as the clash of ‘two great schools’ of archival thought. ⁸⁸ The debate, if it can be called that, needs to be put into perspective, however. There were only a few chronologically ordered archives, and those that existed had nothing to do with Chevrières. ⁸⁹ There was no battle of ‘schools’. The reason why this exchange has nevertheless attracted considerable attention from scholars (albeit all too often without much historical analysis) is highly revealing for the state of historiographical interest in archives. The exchange is considered important because Le Moine’s position, as compared to Chevrières’, is often deemed to be ‘closely related to the so-called principle of pertinence’, the backbone of modern archival thought ever since its first consistent implementation in late nineteenth-century Prussia. ⁹⁰ In essence, then, the fascination with the Le Moine–Chevrières ‘debate’ arises from the fact that a great deal of scholarship on archival history was (and still is) narrowly tied to modernizing narratives while also being focused mostly on institutions and inventories. ⁹¹

This paper, however, has argued for a different perspective, here labelled a ‘social history of archives’. ⁹² By taking the career of Pierre-Camille Le Moine as a starting point, it has attempted to demonstrate that our picture of archival history can become much more complex by looking at neglected areas of early modern Europe’s archival landscape. In the French case, a highly dynamic world of smaller archives came to light, complete with its own labour market, publicity campaigns and pioneering publications. The close investigation of Le Moine has also led us to appreciate the difficulties and ambivalences that came with all attempts to meaningfully situate archives and archival work in different conceptual and social spaces – in the French case, it was for instance necessary to carefully balance enlightened and antiquarian discourse. Social roles, too, had to be reconfigured and negotiated once archives and archivists of a new kind emerged and became socially visible – witness Le Moine’s difficult self-positioning vis-à-vis the erudite and academic world. Le Moine allows us, too, at least impressionistic glimpses into the mental states and personal hopes of a newly emerging social class of archivists – his fear of economic difficulties, his flirting with monastic seclusion while still benefitting from the social advantages of marriage, and his ambitions for intellectual upward mobility through contacts with local intellectuals and academies. All of this illustrates the many ways in which French society by Le Moine’s lifetime was deeply engaged with and affected by archives on a vast scale. Studying carefully the social and professional developments as well as the concepts through which people accommodated archives into their daily lives and, indeed, started to build new careers and lives around archives, makes an important contribution to our understanding of how archives could and did become an ever more omnipresent aspect of European history.