Conference Agenda

Les Archives nationales sont régulièrement sollicitées dans le contexte de la forte demande sociale portant sur les archives de l’exil espagnol en France. Ces quatre dernières années, des travaux approfondis et un projet innovant ont été menés afin de permettre d’identifier les réfugiés espagnols mentionnés dans les documents conservés aux Archives nationales. Cet exposé présentera les résultats de ces travaux qui permettent de faciliter la recherche et la reconstitution de parcours de réfugiés.

Le 80ème anniversaire de la Retirada en 2019 et les lois espagnoles de 2007 et de 2022 permettant à des descendants d’exilés d’obtenir la nationalité espagnole ont suscité de nombreuses demandes portant sur les fonds des Archives nationales de France. Les Archives nationales conservent en effet, au sein des fonds du ministère de l’Intérieur, des documents permettant d’identifier nominativement plusieurs dizaines de milliers d’Espagnols réfugiés sur tout le territoire français à partir de 1936.

Cependant, ces documents ont longtemps été difficiles à identifier et plus encore à interroger en raison de leur histoire singulière et de leur dispersion au sein des fonds des Archives nationales. De fait, les archives relatives aux réfugiés espagnols produites par le ministère de l’Intérieur ont connu un sort particulier : elles relèvent pour partie des archives spoliées par les autorités d’occupation allemandes en 1940, envoyées dans les territoires du Reich puis récupérées par l’Armée rouge en 1945. Elles ont ensuite été conservées, classées et inventoriées par des archivistes soviétiques avant d’être restituées à la France en 1994 par la Russie. Ces archives restituées, parfois appelées « fonds de Moscou », ont alors intégré les fonds des Archives nationales. Elles y ont rejoint des archives relatives aux réfugiés espagnols qui, n’ayant pas été spoliées, sont conservées et classées selon une logique différente. Depuis 2021, les Archives nationales se sont employées à résoudre ces difficultés, tout d’abord en réalisant des inventaires visant à réconcilier les archives de l’exil espagnol dispersées dans les fonds. Une vaste opération de numérisation de documents nominatifs a également été accomplie, donnant lieu à la mise en ligne de plus de 30 000 images d’archives numérisées et indexées sur la plateforme collaborative GIROPHARES.

Cet exposé permettra de présenter ces différents travaux et de revenir en particulier sur ce projet d’indexation collaborative en restituant les étapes et les défis liés à sa conception et sa réalisation : mise au point d’un formulaire de description bilingue franco-espagnol, animation d’une communauté d’indexeurs bénévoles, travail de relecture fine, vigilance particulière à des questions linguistiques… Ce projet d’indexation, toujours en cours en octobre 2025, a pour finalité la mise en ligne d’inventaires nominatifs détaillés, la mise à disposition en open data des données relevées et leur valorisation par une cartographie en ligne.

Presenting findings from participatory action research of documentary burdens faced by refugees, this paper presents archival services as a critical but unmet need for refugees. Necessary archival interventions include the development of information hubs and preservation training resources for personal collections. Critically, a field-wide commitment is necessary to develop empirical evidence that can be used by policy makers and advocates in addressing documentary burdens in displacement.

Refugees establishing new lives during resettlement are often forced to do so without clear understanding of which identity records will be needed from step to step. These challenges are part of the refugee “documentary burden,” which Jimenez (2019) explains archivists “have a role to play in addressing” (p. 82). Presenting emerging findings from a participatory action research study of the documentary burdens faced by refugees in the United States, this paper explores documentary obstacles affecting refugees and feasible archival interventions that can be enacted. Findings from focus groups and interviews with refugees and refugee service workers show that the already traumatizing experiences of refugee resettlement are worsened through emotional and information burdens placed on refugees because of issues regarding documentation. Grounded theory analysis suggests that major burdens include unclear guidelines and inconsistent implementation of policy regarding official documents across different sectors—leading to unnecessary crisis situations which can result in losses of employment, educational services, and housing. Additionally, workloads for refugee service workers are consumed by and dedicated to helping their clients manage constant documentation crisis situations—leaving little room for information sharing or creation of best practices. Beyond identity documents, findings show that personal records, including photographs and videos taken by refugees as they chronicle their new lives in resettlement, are vital for their identities and their connections to others—making the management, control, and long-term preservation of personal records a critical need to be addressed. Though refugees actively combat documentary burdens through their personal archiving practices, they are rarely afforded any guidance from the archival sector. While documentary burdens of refugees require systematic changes, immediate interventions that archivists and archival scholars can contribute to include co-design of user-centered information hubs with refugees and refugee service workers, as well as the development of culturally competent preservation training and resources for long term digital preservation of personal collections. Critically, a wider field-wide commitment to a displaced archives research agenda (Lowry, 2022) is necessary to develop empirical evidence that can be used by policy makers and advocates in addressing documentary burdens in displacement.

The Historical Archive of National Bank of Greece preserves archival documents concerning the population exchange pursuant to the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) that provided for the relocation of 1,500,000 Greek Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and, vice versa, 700,000 Muslims. In a parallel manner, it has developed searching tools that enable access to the available information, with the aim of accommodating both researchers and descendants of refugees.

The Treaty of Lausanne, signed on 24 July 1923, addressed the major issue of the territorial partition of the former Ottoman Empire and its replacement by new nation-states. The agreed upon terms provided, inter alia, for the relocation of 1,500,000 Greek Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and, vice versa, 700,000 Muslims.Greece was required to allocate compensation to the incoming refugees for their property in Turkey. To this end, the Greek state and the National Bank of Greece signed a mutual agreement in May 1925. Under the agreement, the Bank assumed the management of the exchanged property and the subsequent compensation of the urban refugees who obtained Greek citizenship.To monitor the procedure, the Bank established the “Special Real Estate Exchange Division” that was entrusted with the responsibility to acquire archival material from public authorities and refugee associations as well as create primarily accounting records and special registers of the exchanged property. Among others, the National Bank of Greece obtained from the Ministry of Agriculture, indices of rural refugees and registers of the urban refugees who were eligible for compensation. For receiving financial compensation, the beneficiaries were obliged to submit a certificate of identity with attached photograph that was issued from a recognised refugee association.Under the Emergency Law no. 1909/1939, the National Bank of Greece lost jurisdiction over the provisions of the 1925 mutual agreement and, consequently, the creation of the forementioned archival material covers the period 1925 – 1939. To date, the Bank has paid great attention to the handling of the archival material being discussed with the aim of its preservation as well as its provision for research purposes. It is safekept in the National Bank’s Historical Archive that was established in 1938 and has been classified into three series. In addition, a special digital collection has been created that encompasses certificates and photographs.Furthermore, in the attempt to provide an excellent service to the academic community as well as the descendants of the refugees, the National Bank’s Historical Archive has created searching tools that include a digital database of certificates along with photographs, an index of rural refugees, an index of registers of urban refugees and an index of the exchanged property.

The paper analyses the impact of 25 years of investment and development of an accessible humanitarian archive, and the research trends that have emerged as a result of that accessibility. Furthermore, the challenges and obstacles that keepers of humanitarian archives face in realising an accessibility agenda are addressed.

Refugees’ lives are to a considerable extent affected by decisions taken by others, in so faras they rely on the support of host communities and governments, NGOs, international organisations, private sector sponsors and others to find protection, assistance, shelter and improved livelihoods. These decision-making bodies make choices every day. Such choices include policy direction, investment and funding decisions, resource allocation, adoption and interpretation of legal positions and the targeting of advocacy and communication pieces. The debates around those choices, and the decisions that are reached, form part of the historical record.

Reflecting on reliable evidence of experience, impact and outcomes of previous

refugee situations to inform decisions can make future measures, operations and

interventions more effective. This can also foster public dialogue based upon recorded experience and source-driven knowledge, as opposed to hindsight, assumption and potentially misleading or biased information sources.

Encouraging refugees, the displaced and stateless persons to access source

material to help them tell their own stories is a way of empowering those communities

to contribute to the public discourse.

Many organisations are custodians of institutional knowledge which is often under-exploited and inaccessible to those who would be well placed to analyse the information contained therein. In this paper, the ways in which the archives have been managed and made accessible for research by UNHCR are examined, and the impact of that

accessibility is assessed.

Committing to archival accessibility requires overcoming obstacles and barriers, including policy gaps, archival obscurity due to lack of knowledge, metadata or finding aids to assist with the identification, location and navigation of collections, lack of resources or tools to run an archives service and the lack of political will to commit internally-produced content to public scrutiny. Agencies with resources, expertise and leverage should use means at their disposal to encourage adoption of basic pillars of accessibility to archives.