The article examines the epistemic possibility of archives of social suffering within public archives and from an archivist's perspective. Public archives are understood in their political reality, with their construction and preservation linked to the materiality of power and governance. Among the shelves of state records, the article focuses on the archives of the first French psychiatric hospital, which archives are taken as a whole system of production of meaning and not isolated sources. The approach is part of an epistemology of archives, often called archival turn, taking the archives for what they are: administrative matters, and the process of archival as a social fact. Articulating institutional and personal, seeking to understand the factual reconciliation of fragments of one's self in administrative documents and not opposing one to the other, this article questions the place of intimate and suffering discourse in the public sphere. From the asylum, the article returns to critical reflection on public archives policies and archives as logistical tools for government knowledge: informed by archival ethics, it asserts that the responsibility for collecting and preserving the private lives of citizens should not be left to the State. The social suffering encountered in public archives would then be equivalent to that of State production, and these archives, restored to their revolutionary definition (1789), would serve as evidence, for better or worse, of its governance.
Agathe Meridjen (2026) studied this question.