Welcome to the Site

Goals |  Visitors Guide  | Context and Documentation
History of the Archive | Funding | Contacts

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.)

A Guide to the Perplexed

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.

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.

The History of the Archive

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.