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Goals
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Guide | Context
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Documentation
History
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The Esternay Project archive is based upon resources provided
by Catherine Hennequin-Libert
(Resource
Associate) and research conducted by Carl Weiner. It is directed by
Professors
Carl Weiner and Scott Carpenter (Carleton College) and Professor Daniel Ringrose
(Minot State University), and programmed by Bruce Duffy and Aaron Miller.
The site is available for
students, teachers and
researchers. This archive currently contains 879 transcribed
letters
(accompanied by 350 scanned originals and
185 letters translated into English),
all revolving around
the Poirrier family in
the rural town of Esternay, France
(about 100 km from Paris).
The core
of the collection is the familial, business, political and patronage
correspondence of three
generations of
notaries and landowners Jean
FrançoisPoirrier,
Louis François
Poirrier and
Louis Alfred Poirrier who
consecutively held office at the municipal,
cantonal, departmental and national level from the time of
the French
Revolution down to 1895 when Alfred Poirrier,
while
sitting in the Senate of the National Assembly, died. Apart from the
letters of their wives and
daughters (Louise
Eulalie Poirrier,
Sophie Guillemain Poirrier
and Denise Poirrier)
and Alfred's two brothers (Charles
and Paul Poirrier) and assorted friends and
kin, the archive contains a selection from a much larger mass of notarial documents including the
correspondence of
various clients of the notarial
office of Alfred, his
father and his grand-father . We have also included a small
sample of
items from the
documentary remains of Alfred's
political and administrative career which provide insights into the
everyday
workings of electoral politics in the first three decades of the III
Republic.
Aside from the personal correspondence of the family, our site now
offers only
a sample of what could be included in a much expanded version of the Esternay Project but even so we
believe the site can serve
as a window
into the lives of French men and
women as they lived through what was certainly one of the most
tumultuous
periods in their nation's history.
The
goals
behind the project are multiple:
- to make available to students and researchers a
unique
archive of personal and professional letters spanning nearly the entire
nineteenth century.
- to test the concept of a virtual archive, in which
databases and hyperlinks are harnessed to create a vast and potentially
infinitely cross-referenced resource.
- to provide insights into private and professional
life
in provincial France, as well as oblique looks at so-called "big event"
history, as viewed by minor players and spectators -- for example, in
series of letters dealing with the revolutions of 1830 and 1848,
or war, invasion and flight in 1814 as the first Bonaparte's empire
crumbles or in 1870-71 as these catastrophes recur, this time with the
siege of Paris, when the empire of Napoleon III suffers the
same fate.
- to attempt to create a unique cooperative of students
and researchers. Many of the letters in the archive have been
transcribed and/or translated by undergraduates at Carleton College. It
is our hope that other students and researchers will not just use
the archive, but that they will want to participate
in
improving and expanding it. Hundreds of letters remain to be entered,
and many translations require editing and annotation. (If you would
like to request editorial access to the archive, please contact us.)
We hope this guide will facilitate a visitor's initial exploration
of the site. With the above highlighted names of Poirrier family
members in hand, you may now begin your efforts by clicking on one
of two buttons, "Documents"
or "People",
on our Home page.
The "People"
button is perhaps the easiest
initial path to follow.
First, click on "Search
Biographies"; then, under the Select a Name
pull-down menu,
click on one of the Poirriers.
Lastly, click the Find
Biographies button. Clicking on their names will yield a
brief
summary of indispensable biographical information. Most importantly, a
column
list of Relevant
Documents,
both authored and received by your
subject will appear.
Like the spreading
branches of a
tree, clicking on
the names of people who either authored or received letters from your
subject will yield their biographies and their "Relevant Documents".
All in all, this procedure will provide you a birds-eye view of a great
deal of what is currently on site. By either noting down the accession
number of any particular letter, or a subject's ID number,
you may
return to the Home page and use the "Search" - Full Test Search
- mechanism to access a letter or all the letters of a particular
subject.
However, as
encompassing as a
bird's-eye view may be, it probably will
not provide an adequate direction to your continued explorations.
Biographical information situates our subjects in time, place,
occupation, and affiliation, but what is invaluable about so many of
these letters is what they tell us about what our subjects experienced
and how they experienced it. They tell us what they thought or felt
about what
happened to them as agents acting and being acted upon; Finally, they
tell us
about those events, structures and institutions which influenced them
in their daily lives.
In short, how do you
discover a
"reason"
for reading any one or many of these letters? Here is where the
"Search" mechanism of our site is absolutely indispensable. Clicking on
the "DocumentsP"
button on our Home page will
yield two paths: Full
Text
Search and Search
Options. We have already explained the way Full Text
Search can
be put to use.
Once you have
decided on a
direction to your explorations, you can call up a range of
letters by name or date. But how do you arrive at a question to ask
about the individuals who are on this site, how do you deepen your
exploration? To do that you will need to take full advantage of
at least one of the Search
Options offered to you once you click the
"Search" button.
The two options most
valuable in
this effort are those
to be checked off in the "Subject" and/or the "Document Type"
boxes. Checking the "Subject" box and then clicking on the Modify Search Option
button
will yield a pull-down menu which somewhat
resembles the index of a book. It comprises over one hundred and
ten entries referencing persons, aspects, things, events or
institutions described or discussed in any particular letter.
The
content of this subject list, indeed of all the pull-down lists under
"Search Options" are continuously enlarged as more letters are
transcribed but the Subject and Document Type lists are also
constantly modified to more accurately reflect what is in each letter.
Furthermore, by using the "Match all" or "Match Any" options for
combining searches under more than one of these lists, you can isolate
a number of relationships, constants and regularities reflected in the
correspondence of our subjects.
Similarly, the
Document Type list
can organize your search by providing you with a baker's dozen of
inclusive categories that supplement or generalize what is to be found
under the more specific Subject list. Other "Search Options" provide a
variety of services, from telling you how many and which of the letters
have been scanned or translated, to organizing a search by a
date(s) or location(s) sent or received.
Probably the two you
will likely most use once you have fixed the direction(s) of your
research, are the Person
and the Series
boxes.
Under the
Person option, type in a name; specifying "Author", "Recipient"
or "Cited". This will yield a list of the relevant letters. The Series
option does something similar for the Person option as the
Document Type option did for the Subject option - it organizes any
individual subject's letters on site into Author or Recipient folders
and, in some cases, isolates a particular content category.
To start your use of the Search mechanism, here is your
launch
check-off list. From the home page: click on Documents
>From the Home page:
<>Click
on <>
<>Choose <Full
Text
Search> or <Add
Search Options>
<>If
you choose Full
Text Search, type in Name(s) or Subject(s) or Document ID#
<>Click on
<Find Documents>
<>See
display of "Relevant Documents Found"
<>If
you choose Add
Search Options, click
on
one or more "option" boxes
<>Click
on <Modify Search Options>
<>Hit
<Continue>
<>This
yields pull-down menus of "search by" items or a box to type in a range
of dates
<> Click on
your selections
<>Click
on "Match All" or "Match Any"
<>Click
on <Find Documents>
<>Hit
<Continue> again
<>See
display of "Relevant
Documents Found"
In
either a "Full
Text" or "Add Search Options" display, when you click on any one
letter, it will appear on a
"Document View" screen complete with a "Document Information" template
listing: Author, Recipient, Subject(s), Date, Document Type, Location,
Series and
Series number.
If your French is up to it and you have a modicum of patience, we would
strongly suggest that sometime in the initial stages of your
exploration of our site you visit this section.
Though eventually,
we
hope to make available a variety of historical and contextual sources
on our subjects and on Esternay and its environs, what is now on
site is a large excerpt from Alexandre-Clément
Boitel's Histoire
d'Esternay
published
in
1850.
Boitel, who became
the
curé of the Esternay parish in
1844, was something of a local erudit,
publishing a number of works on the history of the Champagne area and
its towns before his death in 1881. He most likely had access to
documents and registers in the possession of the Esternay church.
Perhaps more importantly, he seems to have heard and collected a
number of accounts (personal testimonies, things remembered or heard at
first or second hand) of those among his older parishioners who had
lived through the events of the Revolution, Empire and Restoration in
Esternay.
Hardly dispassionate
in his
sentiments, he had
a marked distaste for the Revolution and all its works and his
preference for the elder branch of the Bourbons and sympathy for the
sufferings of the old nobility is manifest. Nonetheless he admired
Napoleon as a military hero and leader and his concluding chapters
indicate that he had come to terms, at least at the local level, with
the Phillipist monarchy and even the subsequent February
revolution in 1848.
Though the writer of
Boitel's
entry in Dictionnaire
de Biographie
Française
wryly notes that Boitel's books were of a "valeur inégale",
you will
find his history of Esternay quite a useful adjunct to your researches
as background for the lives of the first two generations of Poirriers
and their friends, enemies, patrons and clients in
Esternay. One can get from Boitel a sense that, from
the great Revolution down through the nineteenth-century, the
town had a distinct political coloration. All that had transpired
since 1789 left cleavages and divisions in Esternay and the surrounding
region that had certainly not been resolved by 1850.
And if you
go on to study the political career of the last of the male Poirriers,
Alfred, you will realize how large a role these divisions still played
at the local and regional level at the end of the century.
It is well over two decades since I first began work on
what I called the "Poirrier collection". It all began rather
serendipitously when I was on sabbatical in Paris and a close friend
who was a sister-in-law of Catherine
Hennequin Libert told me that Catherine had some old family letters she
thought a historian might like to look at.
Shortly afterwards I
took my wife and two boys out for a week-end with the Liberts in an old
farm house in Esternay which belonged to Catherine and her Hennequin
relations. True enough, Catherine produced a number of shoe boxes full
of letters spanning a good two-thirds of the nineteenth-century
and while my wife and Catherine did something mysterious in the kitchen
and my two boys rough-housed in the farm's dilapidated
out-buildings, I immersed myself in what appeared to be a more
than modest horde of letters from the Poirrier family whose last
survivor had been Denise
Poirrier,
Catherine's grand-mother.
Indeed, the
farm-house had been
the Poirrier's ancestral home. But
there was more to come. That same day Catherine took me up to the attic
of the house and there, beneath a somewhat porous roof, lay a large
mound, almost archaeological in proportion, of papers, cartons and
ledgers with more of the same lying on shelving along the attic's
walls. What I saw was the remains of the Poirrier's notarial office,
once stored neatly on the attic's shelves but roughly used when a
Wehrmacht headquarters company had occupied the house during the last
war.
The subsequent
development of the
archive was the product of the
collective efforts of many people but above all of Catherine Libert
herself. Not only did Catherine allow me to take the Poirrier family's
correspondence back to Carleton, but she worked closely with me
transcribing a number of letters, copying relevant newspaper clippings,
marriage contracts and other materials. She even put me in touch with
the one surviving member of Denise Poirrier's generation. She and her
husband Alain were generous with their hospitality as I shared
sabbatical and vacation time between excavating the mound in the
Esternay attic (Catherine organized the shipment of many of these
materials back to me) and work in the Archive Départementale
of
the Marne and the National Archives in Paris contextualizing,
clarifying and amplifying much of what I found in Esternay.
In the
early and mid-eighties I wrote and delivered two papers based on the
Esternay materials and began to explore the idea of publishing a
documentary reader on what had been found, but I met with little
in the
way of a positive response. Even with the diminished prospect of such a
publication becoming a reality and despite my attentions being drawn to
more pressing demands on my time, my interest in the Poirrier materials
did not diminish.
With the help of
successive
generations of Carleton students, the process of transcribing,
digitizing and
sometimes
translating the letters continued until almost all of the family
correspondence was done. But aside from my use of a selection of these
letters in various classes, there seemed no hope of the mass of these
materials ever seeing the light of day.
It was not until
Lewis Weinberg
of Carleton's ITS suggested the possibility of constructing a web site
to house the archive that I could see a viable solution to the problem.
And this last year with the help of various members of ITS,
particularly Paula Lackie, and with the invaluable work of Aaron Miller
and my colleague Prof. Scott Carpenter, the Esternay Project site has
been realized.
Funding
This project has been funded by the generous support of Carleton
College, and it has been made possible by the
blood, sweat, and tears of scores of undergraduate helpers over the
past two decades.
Not just a "proof of
concept,"
the Esternay Project is already a
usable, useful electronic archive.
But the current contents represent perhaps one tenth of the total
collection of letters, and funding is
needed to move the project forward. If you have ideas about how to
secure funding (or if you would like to make
a mammoth donation!), please contact us
Contact Info
The Esternay Project is available for use by students, teachers and
researchers. We would be very glad to hear of the uses to which it is
put, as well as suggestions for improvement.
It is also possible
to participate
in the project, helping
to transcribe future letters, or correcting and/or annotating letters
that are currently in the archive.
For any requests or
comments,
please contact Professor
Carl
Weiner.
WELCOME TO PROJECT ESTERNAY
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