École Nationale des Chartes
The École Nationale des Chartes is a French grande école and a constituent college of Université PSL, specialising in the historical sciences. It was founded in 1821, and was located initially at the National Archives, and later at the Palais de la Sorbonne. In October 2014, it moved to 65 rue de Richelieu, opposite the Richelieu-Louvois site of the National Library of France. The school is administered by the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Research. It holds the status of a grand établissement. Its students, recruited through a highly selective examination and hold the status of trainee civil servants, are appointed by decree of the Minister of Higher Education and Research, receive the qualification of archivist-paleographer after completing a thesis. They generally go on to pursue careers as heritage curators in the archive and visual fields, as library curators or as lecturers and researchers in the human and social sciences. In 2005, the school also introduced master's degrees, for which students were recruited based on an application file, and, in 2011, doctorates.
History
The École des Chartes was created by order of Louis XVIII on 22 February 1821, although its roots are in the Revolution and the Napoleonic period. The Revolution, during which property was confiscated, congregations were suppressed and competencies were transferred from the Church to the State, produced radical cultural changes. In 1793 the feudist Antoine Maugard approached the public instruction committee of the Convention with a proposal for a project of historical and diplomatic education. The project was never carried out, and Maugard was largely forgotten. The institution was eventually created by the philologist and anthropologist Joseph Marie de Gérando, baron of the Empire and general secretary to Champagny, the Minister of the Interior. In 1807 he submitted a proposal to Napoleon for the creation of a school to train young scholars of history. Napoleon examined the proposal and declared that he wished to develop a much larger specialist history school. However, Gérando was posted to Italy on an administrative mission, and the project was interrupted. At the end of 1820, Gérando convinced Count Siméon, a philosopher and professor of law who had been state councilor under the Empire and who was at that time Minister of the Interior, of the usefulness of an institution modeled on the grandes écoles, dedicated to the study of "a branch of French literature", the charters. The 1820s were a favorable period for the creation of the École des Chartes. Firstly this was because the atmosphere of nostalgia for the Middle Ages created a desire to train specialists who would, by carrying out a direct study of archives and manuscripts confiscated during the Revolution, be able to renew French historiography. Secondly, the need was also felt to maintain this branch of study, which stemmed from Maurist tradition, since the field was endangered by a lack of knowledgeable collaborators in the "science of charters and manuscripts". And thirdly, during the reign of Louis XVIII, a period which saw the return of the Ultras and during which the constitutional monarchy was called into question, the political context influenced the creation of an institution whose name inevitably made explicit reference to the defense of the Charter.Under the order of 1821, twelve students were nominated by the Minister of the Interior, based on propositions by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and they were paid during the two years of their studies. They principally studied paleography and philology, with a purely practical aim: to be able to read and understand the documents that they would be responsible for curating. The professors and students of the school were placed under the authority of the curator of medieval manuscripts of the Royal Library, rue de Richelieu, and of the general guard of the Archives of the Kingdom.
This first experience was not very successful, mainly because no job openings were reserved for the students. The first course was implemented in two stages by the ministerial decree of 11 May and by the decree of 21 December 1821 and was the only one run. The Académie did put forward a new list of candidates, and the course length was set at two years by the Order of 16 July 1823, but lessons had to be suspended on 19 December 1823 due to a lack of students. However, following a long period of inactivity, the Ministry of the Interior decided to re-open the school. Rives, the director of staff of the ministry, together with Dacier, drew up a report on the reorganization of the School and a draft order, proposed to Charles X by La Bourdonnaye, which resulted in the order of 11 November 1829. The school was now open to anyone who had acquired the Baccalaureate, but six to eight students were selected by competitive examination at the end of the first year. They received a salary and followed two further years of training. On completion of their studies, they received the qualification of archivist-paleographer and were reserved half of the available jobs in libraries and archives. The first valedictorian was Alexandre Teulet.
The "Guizot period" benefited the École des Chartes, which soon became an important institution in the field of historical – particularly medieval – studies. On 24 March 1839 the Société de l’École des Chartes was founded by Louis Douët d'Arcq, among others, and it published the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, one of the oldest French scientific reviews, to disseminate the work carried out in the school. The Order of 31 December 1846 implemented a fundamental reorganization of the school and its study program, which then remained unchanged for more than a century. The students, who were holders of the Baccalaureate, were recruited by examination, and followed a three-year course of studies. Interdisciplinarity, an essential characteristic of the school, was then written into the reform, which required students to study six subjects, some of which were not taught anywhere else. The second innovation, a thesis, was introduced, with the first public defense being held in 1849. A surveillance council was set up, consisting of the guard of the Archives, the director of the Royal Library, the director of the School and five members of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. The school was finally provided with a new statute. It moved to the Kingdom Archives in the hôtel de Soubise, in the oval hall and adjacent rooms of the hôtel de Clisson.
By now, the École des Chartes had become a point of reference in Europe. Its historical research methodology had been greatly modernized, as had its teaching methods, thanks to the copies of ancient documents to which it had access. The students were taught paleography, sigillography, numismatics, philology, filing for archives and libraries, historical geography, currencies, systems of weights and measures, the history of political institutions in France, archeology, civil law, canonic law and feudal law. The teaching had both a scientific and a professional aim.
Thus, by gradually being integrated into the network of royal then national and departmental archive services, the graduates of the school contributed to the strengthening of the network and to the improvement of archival principles. A career-path for the graduates was thus established in the archives, first implemented by the Order of 31 December 1846, then reinforced by a legislative framework providing them with a means to enforce this law. The decree of 4 February 1850 reserved the posts of departmental archivist to those holding the qualification of archivist-paleographer, while all the positions at the National Archives were reserved for them by the decree of 14 May 1887. The same could not be said of libraries. The order of 1839 was never applied, and although the order of 1839 reserved places at the Royal Library for École des Chartes graduates, fewer than 7% of them worked in a library in 1867. It was not until the end of the Second Empire, partly thanks to the work of Léopold Delisle, the general administrator of the national library, that the qualifications of the school's graduates were recognized by libraries. Little by little, decrees and orders facilitated their access to jobs in libraries.
The school moved in 1866 into more suitable premises in the hôtel de Breteuil, rue des Francs-Bourgeois, without this move having much effect on the teaching. In the same year a number of the alumni of the school were involved with the creation of the Revue des questions historiques, the first scholarly history journal in France and although influenced by German techniques it was also influenced by the careful historical techniques of the school. Seven professorships were instituted by the decree of 30 January 1869: paleography; Latin languages; bibliography; filing for libraries and archives; diplomacy; political, administrative and judiciary institutions in France; civil and canonic law of the Middle Ages and archeology of the Middle Ages. Apart from minor modifications, these remained unchanged until 1955. The school moved once again in 1897, to 19 rue de la Sorbonne, into the premises originally intended for the Paris Faculté de théologie catholique. This move brought the school geographically closer to the other research and teaching institutions based at the Sorbonne, such as the Faculté de lettres and the École pratique des hautes études. The school had a classroom, with windows along both sides and special deep desks for paleography practice, as well as a library, in which books were available for immediate access. Although the premises have been refurbished, the school is still located here today. During the 1920s, a number of moves to other premises were proposed, with suggestions including the hôtel de Rohan in 1924, the garden of the Institution for Deaf-Mutes, a plot on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a house on rue de Vaugirard, the former Polytechnic School, and the refectory of the Bernardins. The school will move in 2015 to the Richelieu area, into new premises at 65 rue de Richelieu and 12 rue des Petits-Champs. The school was also a founding member of the Campus Condorcet, and for this reason, some of its research activities were conducted at the Aubervilliers campus.
The image of the École des Chartes, in political and social terms, was firmly anchored, even though it has sometimes been classified as a right-wing institution. The image of the "right-wing chartiste" originated in the figure of the "amateur", the son of a well-off family, passing through the school to kill time elegantly, or to "wait", in the words of Robert Martin du Gard, who graduated from the school in 1905. In fact, throughout the 19th century there was a discontinuity between the high-prestige training offered by the École des Chartes and the lower-prestige, modestly remunerated jobs open to graduates. However, this reputation was at least partly unfounded, as demonstrated by several cases. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, for example, the milieu of the École des Chartes mirrored the divisions in French society: "Nowhere were civic quarrels more completely invested in the job of historian." The few chartistes who were called upon as experts during the Zola trial – Arthur Giry, Auguste Molinier, Paul Meyer, Paul Viollet and Gaston Paris – and those who were involved in the founding of the League of Human Rights were attacked by other archivist-paleographers, including Robert de Lasteyrie, Gabriel Hanotaux and Émile Couard, as well as by their students at the École des Chartes. The variety of engagements at the time of the Dreyfus Affair did not necessarily reflect the political sensitivities of those involved, and their motives were political as well as professional, jeopardizing the very training and methods of the school. Although it was conservative to some extent, the school admitted a female student, Geneviève Acloque, in 1906, long before the other grandes écoles had started admitting women. The École des Chartes may have been perceived as a bastion of the French Action during the interwar period, although several relatively prominent alumni, such as Georges Bataille or Roger Martin du Gard, seem to have been more left-leaning. During the Second World War, there were therefore more École des Chartes students and teachers on the side of the Resistance than on the side of Vichy. Bertrand Joly concludes that the school was largely neutral, in that each "wing" seems to have been equally represented, a neutrality that was also justified by the fact that the school was not big enough for its members to have a significant effect on national politics.
The entrance examination and internal examinations of the École des Chartes were reformed at the beginning of the 1930s. At this time, the school began offering the qualification of diplôme technique de bibliothécaire 34, which was required to obtain a job as a librarian in first-category municipal libraries or university libraries. The school opened its classes on the history of books and bibliography to external students preparing for the qualification. This practice continued until 1950, when the diplôme supérieur de bibliothécaire replaced the DTB as the qualification for librarians.
The mid-20th century was a difficult period for the school as it struggled to modernize. Its student numbers dropped sharply. Its training was considered to be outdated and lacking in the latest approaches to history, notably the historiographic revival of the Annales School. It was not until the 1990s, when the entrance examination and teaching were reformed and a new policy was introduced, that the school really saw a revival. It entered a period of development under the direction of Yves-Marie Bercé and Anita Guerreau-Jalabert. The current development of the school is based on solid training in new technologies and their application to the conservation of cultural heritage, and closer, more structured links with French universities and similar institutions in other European countries. The teaching has also been restructured to be better suited to the current demands of scientific research and evolution in conservation jobs. This approach will be introduced gradually as of the academic year 2014–15.
Since the current director, Jean-Michel Leniaud, took up his post in 2011, the school has once more reformed its entrance examination to focus student recruitment on the specifics of the training, while also expanding the training to a broader field of human and social sciences, adapting it to the European context and recruitment conditions within conservation organizations. The range of subjects taught, which was expanded in the 1990s to include the history of art, now also includes archeology, the history of contemporary law, and history of property law. The course has been extended from three years to three years and nine months, aligning training in fundamental scientific techniques with empowerment in conservation jobs. In no other social and human sciences institution is the study of history, philology and law integrated to this extent into the conservation of archives, books monuments and works of art, be they inventories, historic monuments or museums.
As well as improving the recruitment process and upgrading the training of future archivist-paleographers, the school has introduced specialized Master's programs focusing on digital technologies adapted to the humanities. It has recently introduced a continuing training service that takes into account the validation des acquis de l'expérience . The school's collaboration with the Établissement Public de Coopération Scientific, the ComUE heSam University and the Sorbonne Universities demonstrates the new directions that it has taken in recent years. To this end, it has modernized its administration, implemented ambitious communications programs and established a new campus opposite the National Library on rue de Richelieu. It is thus preparing to fulfill as effectively as possible the public service role assigned to it by the government.