n.the principle maintaining records according to their origin and in the units in which they were originally accumulatedPosner 1940a, 166–167The principle of respect pour les fonds, rising from the conviction that archives bodies correspond to a former or existing administrative unit and should be preserved accordingly, was proclaimed in Belgium and France about 1840 AND its way during the following decades.Duchein 1983, 67On the theoretical level, the reasons which justify the principle of respect des fonds are numerous and indisputable. Archives by their very definition are “the whole of the documents of any nature that every administrative body, every physical or corporate body, automatically and organically collects by reason of its function or of its activity,” and let us add, “and which are kept for reference.” The archival document, contrary to the object for collection or the file for documentation made up of heterogeneous pieces of diverse origins, has therefore a raison d’etre only to the extent that it belongs to a whole.Horsman, Ketelaar, and Thomassen 2003, 260The Manual does not provide a definition of respect des fonds. The definition of the Dutch interpretation, the herkomstbeginsel (principle of provenance), only dates from 1908, as we saw earlier. The Dutch did not conceive the idea of respect des fonds. There is, of course, a link to the École des Chartes where Muller was lectured to on the respect des fonds. The Manual in any case goes a step further: not only may archives not be mixed with each other, but the internal structure ought to be respected, too.Jimerson 2009, 72Instead of organizing archival records according to pre-determined classification schemes based on subject matter or content, French archivists developed the central concept of respect des fonds, in which all records originating from an administrative authority, corporation, or family would be brought together in a fonds based on their origins and function. First articulated by Natalis de Wailly in 1841, in a French archives circular, this principle became the basis for the Prussian concept of provenienzprinzip and still stands as a founding concept for modern archival arrangement. The emergence of archival theory—distinct from bureaucratic, historical, or library approaches to documents—marked the beginning of a nascent new profession of archivists.Robyns 2014, 3Similarly, in response to the development of the registry system, Prussian archivists seized upon and refined the French notion of respect de[s] fonds into what we know today as provenance.Duranti and Franks 2015, 51The organic nature of the fonds has since been articulated in all the glossaries of archival terminology and archival manuals, and the principle of respect des fonds has become the main principle of archives administration.
Notes
Respect pour les fonds and respect pour l’ordre primitif are synonyms used early in archival theory.
