In celebration of its twentieth birthday, the Napoleonica® Les Archives project, launched in 2000, now has a brand-new website design, created with the company, Logilab.

The website napoleonica.org makes available original First and Second Empire archival material as part of partnership agreements between the Fondation Napoléon (in the role of distributer) and the holders of the archives and documents, whether institutions or individuals. With its bilingual French-English interface, it is aimed both at researchers and the general public. Consultation of the site, printing and downloading of documents is entirely free of charge.

The full original texts/documents are published in distinct corpuses. Each corpus includes a presentation and a brief contextualisation of the documents. The integrated search engine allows full-text searches, both within each corpus and across all sections of the website.

For the moment, there are five corpuses (including a totally new one* put online for this occasion), namely:

– 3,255 printed working documents of the Conseil d’État (First Empire);
– 3,996 letters by Vivant Denon, Director of Museums (Consulate and Empire);
– 227 drawings by Houdetot, Conseiller d’État [state counsellor] (First Empire);
– 26 letters from the Architrésorier Lebrun to Napoleon I* (First Empire);
– 47 documents relating to the proclamation of the Empire (1802-1804).

The site will be regularly enriched with new corpuses and should, by the end of 2021, include the first volume of the much-awaited digital version of the Correspondance générale de Napoléon Bonaparte (The General Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte), published in 15 volumes between 2004-2018 by Fayard and the Fondation Napoléon.

► Contact for the napoleonica.org website: François Houdecek, Manager in charge of Special Projects at the Fondation Napoléon (tel. : +33 (0)1 56 43 46 08 – e-mail).

The Fondation Napoléon has been present on the internet since the end of the 1990s. It launched its institutional website (fondationnapoleon.org) in 2015, the 4th version of its general history website (napoleon.org) in 2016, a new database of its art collection (napoleon.arteia.com) in 2017, and its Libraries portal in 2018 (bibliotheque-martial-lapeyre.napoleon.org).

December 2020