LibGuides: French Studies: Primary and Archival Sources

Primary and archival sources for French studies

In addition to the extensive resources available through ANU, there are a number of other organisations that provide free access to primary and archival sources, which you can view below

Gallica
Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and the national aggregator for collections held in French cultural heritage institutions. The available collections consist of printed materials (books, journals, newspapers, printed music, and other documents), graphic materials (engravings, maps, photographs, and others), and sound recordings. Gallica enables you to find sources that are rare, unusual, out-of-print, or difficult to access.
Gallica Manuscrits
Europeana
Funded by the European Union, Europeana displays digital cultural heritage from over 2000 different European providing institutions using a network of aggregators which collects their items and its related data, checks it thoroughly, and enriches it with information like geo-location, or links it to other material or datasets through associated people, places, or topics.
Portail européen des Archives
Archives Portal Europe provides you with a single access to find, browse and discover information on archives about Europe held by thousands of cultural heritage institutions from more than 30 countries.
Bibliothèque et Archives Canada = Library and Archives Canada
Library and Archives Canada helps Canadians gain a better understanding of who they are. It serves as the continuing memory of the federal government and its institutions and as the guardian of Canada’s distant past and recent history
France Archives
FranceArchives provides references to French historical and administrative archives. FranceArchives does not provide direct access to digitized images of archival documents, but only links to the websites of the archive services that hold them. If the archives described are not digitized, it is possible to consult the documents physically in the reading room or, in some cases, to request a copy of the document from the archive.
FranceGenWeb-Archives
French genealogical info from department archives of digitized church & civil, censuses and military records.
INA
The Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA) is a French public institution whose main mission is to archive audiovisual productions and to publish audiovisual and multimedia content.
Ciné-Ressources
Ciné-Ressources is a collective catalog of French film libraries and archives, created in 2007 and administered by the Cinémathèque française. Created by the Bibliothèque du Film in collaboration with the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, it provides access to over 200,000 resources via a search engine.
ARTFL Project
Founded in 1982 as a result of a collaboration between the French government and the University of Chicago, the ARTFL Project is a consortium-based service that provides its members with access to North America's largest collection of digitized French resources. ARTFL also supports many Public Access databases including the Dictionnaires d'autrefois, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, and the Bibliothèque Bleue de Troyes. Update December 2022: first-ever PhiloLogic build of the Très Grande Bibliothèque (TGB), a corpus of 112,907 texts from the Gallica digital library at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Les Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes
“Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes” gives free access to patrimonial documents and carries out research combining skills in the humanities and computer science. It brings together several types of digital documents:
-A selection of facsimiles of Renaissance works digitized in the Région Centre and partner institutions.
-The Epistemon text database, offering digital editions in XML-TEI.
-Digital editions of literary manuscripts and archival documents from the 16th century.

Electronic Enlightenment
A network of interconnected letters, documents and correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

French Revolution Digital Archive = Archives numériques de la Révolution française
A multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the international scholarly community. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires [1787 to 1794 only] and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the "Images de la Revolution française".

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contains: Parliamentary archives = archives parlementaires ; Images of the French Revolution = images de la Révolution française ; French Revolutionary Data

Gale Primary Sources
An integrated research experience, Gale Primary Sources unifies extensive digital archives and enables researchers to make never-before-possible research connections. The Gale Primary Sources program combines dozens of historical archives covering hundreds of years of history. In this exhaustive resource you will find monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, and photographs. Gale continues to make additional primary source collections available through the Gale Primary Sources cross-search experience. Collections availability limited to licensing agreement.
Journaux de la Révolution de 1848
The revolution of 1848 caused the final collapse of monarchy in France, and in the power vacuum that followed a range of competing voices sought to control the future direction of the country. The social and political upheavals of this period are richly detailed in this unique collection of newspapers and periodicals — an essential resource for understanding modern European history. This series captures the British Library's holdings of all newspaper and periodical titles published in France during the revolution of 1848. Coverage is continued through the coup d'état in 1851 to the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852.
European Colonialism in the Early 20th Century French Colonialism in Africa: From Algeria to Madagascar, 1910-1930
This collection comprises correspondence, studies and reports, cables, maps, and other kinds of documents related to U.S. consular activities. U.S. Consulates were listening posts reporting on the activities of the French colonial government and the activities of the native peoples. Highlights include the beginning of an anti-colonial movement and problems along the Moroccan-Algerian border.
Product Category
Gale Primary Sources

Series
Archives Unbound

La France pendant la guerre 1939-1945 : résistance et journaux de Vichy = Voices from wartime France 1939-1945 : clandestine resistance and Vichy
Call Number: electronic book

"Voix françaises sous l'Occupation (1939-45): Résistance et journaux de Vichy" réunit la somme des journaux français qui réussirent à parvenir au Royaume Uni durant l'Occupation entre 1940 et 1944: un parfait compte-rendu de ce que l'Outre-Manche connaissait des événements en France durant l'ère la plus dramatique des relations franco-anglaises. Cette collection unique offre la somme complète des documents français de la Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume Uni, provenant de différentes sources (clandestines, secrètes ou neutres) et propose ainsi une vue aussi exhaustive que possible de la vie durant la guerre.
Providing perspectives from both the Vichy government and the resistance movement, this unique collection constitutes the sum of the French press that actually reached Britain during the Occupation of 1940-44. It is the record of what was known by the British about the hearts and minds of the French people at the most dramatic period of their shared history.

RetroNews
RetroNews is a platform that provides private access to public press archives from the BNF's (Bibliothèque nationale de France) collections. It enables users to explore and share press pages published between 1631 and 1966.