Memories of la Comédie-Française

With archives going back 300 years and thousands of costumes and accessories, la Comédie-Française has a remarkable patrimony that has to be digitalized to ensure its survival. The institution has acquired software to catalog and archive its records and reappraise its history. The key aim is to make access easier for everyone.

Three major projects are planned:

• migration to new software of the La Grange database, the daily-updated catalog going back to the foundation of la Comédie-Française in 1680;
• scanning all the 19th and 20th century registers of the Library and Museum so as to safeguard the archives and make them available to researchers and also the general public;
• purchase of software to catalog and create a digital index of the collection of thousands of costumes.

The Michelin Corporate Foundation has given its backing to this extensive program enabling it to be totally funded over three years.

In this way, redesign has started of the La Grange document base which contains around 70,000 playbills and around 15,000 images. The aim is to make consultation easier, more intuitive and accessible to a wider public.

The work to scan documents and create the digital library has started. Over the next two years, about 500,000 pages of archives will have been scanned and made available, revealing the program of la Comédie-Française day by day since its foundation in 1680.

It must be emphasized that the forecast timeline and project launch have had to be replanned because of the health crisis.