Getting it together in burgundy, 1675-1975

TLDR: The municipal archives of Dijon occupy several cluttered rooms in the grand old palace of the Dukes of Burgundy as mentioned in this paper, and the main door looks out onto the elegant semicircle of the Place de la Liberation, built in the late seventeenth century as the Place Royale.

Abstract: The municipal archives of Dijon occupy several cluttered rooms in the grand old palace of the Dukes of Burgundy. The archives' main door looks out onto the elegant semicircle of the Place de la Liberation, built in the late seventeenth century as the Place Royale. Readers in the high-ceilinged salle de travail have no trouble tallying arrivals and departures. A strident bell sounds in the room so long as the outside door is open. The interruption usually lasts five to ten seconds, as the newcomer closes the street door, crosses the anteroom, fumbles with the inner door, and enters. In bad weather arrivals are more disruptive; after the long bell stops sounding, visitors stomp their feet unseen, remove their boots and hang up their raincoats before presenting themselves for inspection. Exists are equally distracting, for they mirror the entries precisely: thud, shuffle, stomp, ring. Distractions, however, are few. Not many people come to the archives: a few city employees, an antiquarian or two, an occasional student from the university, now and then an itinerant historian. Those few have riches before them. They have the surviving papers of the capital of Burgundy, both as an independent power and as a major French province. The archives are especially full up to the point at which the centralization of the Revolution shifted the balance of power, and paperwork, toward the state's own bureaucracy. Among the thousands of bundles in the pre-revolutionary collection, 167 fall into series I. Series I includes Police, in the broad old-regime meaning of defense against all manner of public ills. Its topics are sanitation, public health, fire protection, asylums, pursuit of beggars, vagrants and criminals,