Datasets issued from the project “Le Bureau des longitudes (1795-1932): de la Révolution française à la Troisième République”

These datasets are issued from the ANR project “Le Bureau des longitudes (1795-1932): de la Révolution française à la Troisième République” (2016 to 2022). 

The Bureau des longitudes was established on 25 June 1795 and  still exists today. Since its foundation, and until 1854, the Observatoire de Paris was placed under its authority. Its missions, which have evolved considerably since that time, were initially aimed at improving the determination of longitudes at sea and to constitute an advisory board of scientific and technological expertise for the French State.

As part of this project, all the minutes of the Bureau des longitudes’ sessions between 1795 and 1932 were digitized (22 000 files, 2.7 million words), transcribed and published online.

During this project, four databases have been developed.

Two databases are dedicated to the instruments which are mentioned in the minutes for the period 1795-1895. The first focuses on references to scientific instruments in these archival sources. The second, which is based on the previous one, attempts to provide a traceability, through these citations of the trajectory of some instruments.

There are two additional prosopographical databases: the list of members of the Bureau des longitudes from its creation to 1970, and a list of all individuals whose names appear in the corpus between 1795 and 1932 (except for the members).

These tools were built from the corpus online, except for the database of the members, which mainly uses the Inventaire des archives du Bureau des longitudes produced by Michelle Chapron-Touzé in 1998. These datasets are provided in CSV and ODS formats and are each accompanied by a user guide (readme.txt).