Agreement between Stanford University and Bibliothèque nationale de France

The cultural partnership between Standford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), begun a few years ago, led to the creation of a digital archive that brings together both the resources of the archive known as  Images de la Revolution française and the Archives parlementaires. The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) nowadays includes thousands of resourcs regarding the French Revolution, making them available to the international scholarly community and enabling digital research.

The first archive includes thousands of high-resolution digital images regarding the French Revolution:  about 14,000 visual objects like prints, illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects, showing aspects of the Revolution. These materials have been selected, mainly from the collections of the département des Estampes et de la photographie, but also from other departments of BNF. It is possible to do a search by artist, subject, genre, and place.

The Archives parlementaires is a chronologically ordered collection concerning the sources of the French Revolution: it includes parliamentary deliberations, letters, reports, speeches and other first-hand accounts from a wide variety of published and archival sources. It was conceived in the mid-nineteenth century. FRDA contains AP volumes referring to the years 1787-1794. It's possible to easily find places, dates and terms in the published index. Users can see either scanned images of AP pages or text only.

As we can read in the presentation of the project “the FRDA was first conceived in 2006 by Stanford French professor Dan Edelstein, with input from other scholars and librarians, and was launched in spring 2013. It has been supported by grants and collaboration from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the ARTFL project, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford University's Division of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures, Stanford University Department of History, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France”.

Students also have an interactive Timeline of the Revolution on which they can read events year by year.

The use of the contents for non-commercial purposes is free of charge, while the one for commercial purposes is covered by a license.

Discover the FRDA: https://frda.stanford.edu/en