Documentary Resources

Bibliographic Database

Access directly to the Bibliographic Database (in French).

In view of the widespread dispersal of articles and works about Versailles and life at court from the 17th to the 19th century, the need for a tool giving researchers quick access to these extremely important sources became evident, and therefore, systematic indexing began in 2006.

As a first step, we sifted through all the academic journals available on the Gallica website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France to extract relevant articles, some of which had been forgotten or left out of bibliographies in spite of having appeared in less specialised periodicals such as La Revue des Deux Mondes and La Revue de Paris and having been written by eminent historians and art historians.

Secondly, data was systematically retrieved from the bibliographies of seminal works, and a web index drawn up of periodicals whose tables had been published, either in hard copy or online.

Finally, having had the tools for fast digitisation available since autumn 2006, the Research Centre launched a campaign of digitisation.

Since 2019, the database has been enriched with new types of content: books, exhibition catalogues, symposium and study day proceedings, which are gradually added to the articles already listed. Consequently, the field “type of text” has been added and the input charter revised, involving a reworking of the existing notices which is currently underway.

Regarding the enrichment of the corpus, systematic documentary tracking has been set up. In parallel, a bibliography has been prepared, as exhaustive and up to date as possible, listing the monographs and collective works on Versailles and the French court. The references in it are integrated into the database as it progresses, while the complete list, organised by themes and with comments, will be available in an attached file.

Since May 2010, all references can be consulted, and all royalty-free articles downloaded, via the Centre’s resources portal. To date, it lists over 5,300 references, including 2,328 accessible directly online, relating to Versailles or the subjects addressed by the programmes of the Research centre (statistics for 26/05/2023).

For any further questions on this database or suggestions for bibliographical references, please email us.

Index of articles on our database (in French)
Website produced with the support of:
Château de Versailles
Conseil général des Yvelines
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