A “written monument”
At some point, an archivist applied a stamp to indicate the section of the archives to which it belongs. We see here SECT.Hist – and then Archives du Royaume, indicating the French national archives. Today the document can still be found in the Archives nationales as part of the Museum collections with the classification AEII 763. This shows it belongs to the section ‘AEII: Museum of French documents’. The Museum collections were curated by Léon de Laborde for display in the Archives Museum which opened to the public in 1867. The exhibition included thousands of significant documents produced by French institutions and leaders and was described by Laborde as “written monuments of the motherland”. The Archives Museum can still be visited at the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris.