Qu’est-ce qu’une affaire ? James Mackintosh au dépôt des archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères en 1814
Abstract
Beyond common sense, an "affair" refers to a legal-political model that has its origin in the Calas affair. Historians and anthropologists have identified the structure and functioning of this model, have traced its history and have then analysed their objects in the light of this model. The approach proposed here questions the possibilities of examining an "affair" at its proper level, when the term is not a tool of analysis but was used in their time by the actors to set up a political coup. Constructed as a case study, this article focuses on the visit of a British MP, James Mackintosh, to the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris to write history in the autumn of 1814. In the midst of the Congress of Vienna and shortly after the Restoration of the Bourbons to the throne of France, this visit was not described by the clerks of the repository as scholarly, or courteous. In two virulent memoirs addressed to acting Minister Jaucourt, the archives’ custodian d'Hauterive highlights the diplomatic stakes of Mackintosh's visit, a true event on the scale of the repository. To hinder the visitor, he argues by qualifying the Britishman's ambitions as “literature”: a writer has nothing to do with the depot. By transforming the event into an affair, d'Hauterive acts as a guarantor of the official historical production, defending the historical identity of the repository’s clerks, and shows himself to be a protector of the interests of France, in two memoirs which are all writings rallying to the new regime.
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