The Liberation of Paper.

VICHY (France); FRANCE

This article explores narratives of documentary destruction and salvaging during France's Liberation, a moment of uncertain sovereignty over institutions and their material traces. As archival functionaries and government officials sought to uncover and process the paper trail of Vichy and the Occupation, they also confronted urgent questions about administrative continuity as well as legal and moral responsibility. Control over the mass of bureaucratic paper produced between 1940 and 1944, this article suggests, functioned as a critical site of contestation and as a source of legitimacy during the transfer of power. The experience of the war and its aftermath also led France's archivists to discover the practical and symbolic importance of the contemporary administrative document, transforming their pro- fessional practices and institutionalizing a new category of historical time. The relationship between state authority and the archive, often regarded as mutually constitutive, emerges in this account as inherently unstable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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