TY  - JOUR
A1  - Combe, Sonia
T1  - Confiscated Histories. Access to ‘Sensitive’ Government Records and Archives in France
T2  - Zeithistorische Forschungen – Studies in Contemporary History
N2  - In France, the culture of secrecy continues to dominate access policies. The acceptance of or resistance to this culture by various social actors, including government officials, civil servants such as archivists, historians, independent scholars, and journalists, partly explains the historical tension between advocates of a more restrictive or liberal policy of access to government records deemed ‘sensitive’. Unlike the American case with its long-established right to access, in France, access to information is just starting to be considered a citizen’s right. Initial reactions to the first version of my book (1994) sparked a rather violent debate. In the controversy, most of the archivists and some influential historians either denied or justified the difficulty of accessing so-called ‘sensitive archives’. Indeed, thanks to the ‘invisibility’ of this question until then, a book dedicated to the ‘Vichy Syndrome’, which had been published some years before, did not even mention this problem as evidence of France’s difficulties in facing the past.
Y1  - 2013
UR  - https://zeitgeschichte-digital.de/doks/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1554
UR  - https://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/1-2013/4435
VL  - 10
IS  - 1
SP  - 123
EP  - 130
PB  - ZZF – Centre for Contemporary History: Zeithistorische Forschungen
CY  - Potsdam
ER  -