The code and data available in our GitHub repo is derived from work done under the auspices of Stanford’s French Revolution Digital Archive. The FRDA project scanned, OCRed, and encoded the first 82 (of 102) volumes of the Archives parlementaires (AP), the record of speeches and deliberations from French Revolutionary constitutional and legislative assemblies. These volumes only cover the first five years of the French Revolution, from the Cahiers des États Généraux of 1789 until 4 January 1794. FRDA, a collaboration between faculty and students in the humanities at Stanford University, Stanford Libraries, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), presented the AP through a user interface permitting basic keyword and chronological searching.

FRDA received praise from the community of scholars working on the Revolution, but developments in digital humanities methods, researcher requests, and newly available data motivate the original researchers to expand from the FRDA foundation.

The data available on this site is the product of data cleaning performed by ARTFL (The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) at the University of Chicago. As a result, these XML files contain fewer OCR errors and more consistent markup than the materials currently searchable through the FRDA interface.

Further Development

Work is currently underway to disambiguate names with the XML corpus, linking each name to an individual. Many of these individuals (the parliamentarian deputies) are associated with biographical metadata in a database developed by the Service de la Bibliothèque et des Archives de l’Assemblée nationale. We anticipate building an interface to allow scholars to query the AP data using the biographical parameters in that database, but the database itself will not be included in the downloads available here.