This is a remarkable book that offers the reader not only pleasure and instruction, but also opportunities for thought. Although it is plainly intended for an academic audience, it is an unusual academic work, combining a vivid, funny and touching description of the experience of working in an archive with an account of archival materials (especially those in the judicial archives of Paris), some advice on reading, organising, interpreting and writing about historical documents, and some reflections on history as a discipline. These different aspects of the book are interwoven, so that the book itself becomes the kind of document that interests the author: personal, sensory, complex and yet written in plain language.
The Allure of the Archives is a reflection on the practices that allow a researcher to produce historical scholarship. It is so uncommon to read a description of academic work as it is conducted that it is hard not to be surprised by the familiarity of what is described and the strangeness of finding it described. The researcher we meet in this book feels the cold of the room, touches papers that are covered in ‘stiff dust’, is surrounded by others who irritate (by sniffing, or playing with their rings, or making repeated trips across the room in high heels), experiences the thrill that comes from feeling she is somehow in direct contact with the past (while knowing that is an illusion) and is surveyed by an archivist who ‘reigns, gives advice that bears a strong resemblance to orders, speaks very loudly, and does not understand what she does not wish to understand’ (p. 119). For anyone who has worked in an archive or a rare books room, it will come as a relief to discover that others share the ignoble sentiments, the excitement that is also a trap, the bureaucratic frustrations, the feeling that one is still a slave to the discomforts of the body.
The archives that Farge describes here include a range of eighteenth-century papers: records of ‘criminal complaints, trials, interrogations, case summaries and sentencing’ (p. 3). These were not documents intended for publication, and their value lies in the kind of immediacy they transmit, especially insofar as they capture the speech of the poorer inhabitants of Paris. Farge argues that these archives allow the women of eighteenth-century Paris to speak, and that their speech suggests that they were not simply captives of circumstance but also agents, as they arrive in the city from the provinces, wait at the port to send their children off to wet nurses, lodge complaints, protect their men from the police and circulate information in their neighbourhoods. Her claim is not that these women wielded real power, or enjoyed freedom, but that they were assuming economic and political responsibilities, as evidenced by their activities and their words. Farge does not claim that the words recorded in the archive are necessarily true. But she argues that they reveal important truths about authority, and about norms, because how a person set out to convince her interrogator tells us something about what she thought would be believable and persuasive.
As a guide to historical research, this book sets out to explain how it is done, and why. Archival work begins of course with reading, selecting and, often, with the transcription of texts. Farge acknowledges that these are banal tasks, fraught with practical difficulties – making out what is written through dirt and damage, deciphering the writing, identifying the words despite eccentric and illiterate spelling – but also insists that they create a new object, a new archive. And she describes the process of combing through the archives with that object in mind, collecting all the materials that might be relevant and then dividing what has been collected into coherent categories. Farge is especially good on the pitfalls of archival research. She identifies the process of accumulating detail as one of the ‘traps and temptations’ which haunt the archive, but also insists that such detail is ‘the soil in which historical thinking takes root’ (p. 70). In a similar vein, she allows that identifying with the characters in the archive is both necessary and dangerous for the historian. She cautions us that extracting facts from the archives is not enough, that the archive cannot by itself provide proof for anything and, more generally, that the archive will not provide a ready-made interpretation. What the documents in the archive mean must be determined by the historian whose work, done well, ‘should retain the hint of the unfinished’ (p. 123).
The Allure of the Archives is the English translation of Le Goût de l’Archive. As a translation it is elegant and readable, but the full meaning of the original title has been lost; it refers both to a taste of the archive, and a taste for the archive: this book captures both the experience of and the desire for what the archives hold and how they operate.
McGill University
© 2014, Arlette Farge
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.963826