Abstract

Translated from French by Leon Antonio Rocha and Thibaud Harrois

"The idea that History is vowed to the ‘accuracy of the archive’, and philosophy to the ‘architecture of ideas’, seems nonsensical to us. That is not the way that we work. One of us had studied street-life in eighteenth-century Paris, and the other the procedures of administrative confinement from the seventeenth century to the French Revolution. We both had to use the socalled Archives de la Bastille, deposited at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. These archives are in fact predominantly dossiers concerning police affairs, which were gathered at the Bastille, became dispersed during the
Revolution, and were subsequently reunited..."