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As part of our summer internship scheme in 2018, Quill partnered with the Maison française d’Oxford to host three French interns, Lucie Saëz and Laurine Le Rolland-Raumer from the University of Rennes 2, and Gauthier Boucly from Paris I. The aim of the partnership was to carry out some preliminary work on the records of the French Constituent Assembly during the French Revolution in order to explore the practicability of a larger scale project. Using tools created for the 1787 project and digitizations of the Parliamentary archives created by Stanford University, the interns traced and modelled the workings of the Ecclesiastical Committee from 12 August 1789 to 1 October 1791. Even in the limited time available to them, they were able to illuminate both the possibilities and challenges that a full-scale project, similar to that on the 1787 Convention in the US, would open up. Of immediate interest was the possibility for comparative work on France and America within the platform.
We would like to thank Lucie, Laurine, and Gauthier for their hard work, and also Professor Frederic Thibault-Starzyk, Director of the Maison française d’Oxford, for enabling the collaboration. It now falls to Quill and the Maison to seek partners and funding to allow a full exploitation of the materials relating the Constituent Assembly. We hope that Lucie, Laurine, and Gauthier might be part of that future venture!