The Depot in Aix and Archival Sources for France Outre-Mer

In October 1966 the Depot des Archives d'Outre-Mer was inaugurated at Aix-en-Provence. The rapid disintegration of the French colonial empire between 1958 and 1961 created this depository, when nearly a thousand tons of official papers were quickly repatriated from French governor-generalships in Africa and Asia. Far from being a simple reflection of the materials already held by the central colonial ministry in Paris, they were the essential complement of that collection. Their presence under one roof in France has been a windfall for scholars. While these overseas records are, of course, valuable to historians concerned with, for instance, Senegal or India, they are even more a part of the history of France. The importance of this distinction is confirmed by the French government's adoption of a policy of dividing local colonial with the successor states when they achieved independence. The French left behind a quantity of documents as great or greater than that which they took to Europe. What the French removed and have now made available at Aix, subject to the fifty-year rule, are the archives of sovereignty. This choice has ensured that these documents would be, by and large, the products of men from France itself, who went out, often temporarily, as administrators, soldiers, or judges to participate in their nation's share of European colonial expansion during the century and a quarter after 1830. Until 1918 at least, which is the present open-date, the indigene figures in these records chiefly as the anonymous object of colonial administration; and the locally born French citizen of European descent, even when he was numerous as in Algeria, plays a secondary role, since in no French colony was he being groomed for an eventual assumption of full political power. In general, the French retained for themselves official files that

Archaeology · Depot · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History

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