Guizot the letter writer: correspondence 1806-1874

Letters take up a lot of space in life. But it's not a wasted space. We do a lot of things by letter, and many people don't trust a letter as much as a conversation.. (F. Guizot to D. de Lieven, 13 September 1850)

Letters exchanged between François Guizot and Dorothée de Lieven

The Guizot collection, and in particular the 47,000 folios of correspondence, poses an archival and historiographical challenge. It is one of the largest collections of private archives in France. The digital tools and methods available are ideally suited to meeting this challenge. In May 2024, over 15,000 autograph folios of François Guizot's correspondence from 1806 to 1874 will already be accessible.

In order to give wide access to a collection that is remarkable for its volume and thematic wealth on 19th-century Europe, the project aims to inventory and analytically index the academic, political and diplomatic correspondence of 19th-century actor François Guizot. L’objective of this edition is to encourage people to read in a network, but also to search and delve into a body of correspondence.

The project began with the digital publication of 11,000 folios of correspondence between the historian and statesman François Guizot (1787-1874) and a female figure from the European diplomatic world of the first half of the 19th century, Dorothée van Benckendorff, Princess of Lieven (1785-1857), between 1836 and 1856. Over 2,900 letters are now accessible, part of the private archives of a committed political and intellectual figure in the public domain.

The first objective is to make available to the public the entire corpus of correspondence compiled and preserved by François Guizot: to provide an overview, facilitate navigation between the different parts of the collection and stimulate thematic exploration.

To meet the needs of both amateurs and experts, this edition is designed as a digital library structured into thematic and biographical collections. Cross-disciplinary thematic browsing is made possible by indexing using 325 keywords.

The project is funded by the’Association François Guizot, benefits from the platform's technical facilities EMAN, and the support of Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, and the DRAC Normandie. It is produced by Marie Dupond.

The project began with the digital edition of 11,000 folios of correspondence between the historian and statesman François Guizot (1787-1874) and a female figure from the European diplomatic world of the first half of the 19th century, Dorothée van Benckendorff, Princess of Lieven (1785-1857), between 1836 and 1856. Over 2,900 letters have now been transcribed, indexed and structured.

There are various ways of searching and browsing the site, starting from the home page and the notices:

Using a full-text search and any field
By collections
By keywords

within each leaflet

By networking
Active links at the bottom of the page to the next or previous content

Le back to home page is possible at any time by clicking on the portrait of François Guizot.

The corpus is structured around two main collections:

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Conference proceedings

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The Guizot awards

Guizot the letter writer: correspondence 1806-1874

Cross-correspondence between François Guizot and Dorothée de Lieven: 1836-1856

The correspondence of François Guizot: 1806-1874