École nationale des chartes

The École nationale des chartes is a French grande école which specializes in historical sciences. It was founded in 1821 and was located first at the National Archives, then at the Palais de la Sorbonne (5th arrondissement). In October 2014, it moved to 65 rue de Richelieu (University of Paris II), opposite to 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 grand établissement. Its students, who are recruited by competitive examination and hold the status of trainee civil servant, receive the qualification of archivist-paleographer after completing a thesis. They generally go on to follow a career 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.

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 finally 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. This was firstly 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.

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