the world of private banking

36
THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
the acquisition and stocking of the estate and mansion at Ferrières and of many
other French houses, and papers relating, to take an example, to the will of Victor
Hugo, an account holder with the Bank, there are many useful and interesting files
demonstrating the distinctive approach of the Paris house – distinctive, that is,
from the London bank – with its considerable involvement, through the family, in
a wide range of industrial companies, including Le Nickel, Rio Tinto, the Chemin
de Fer du Nord and the oil fields of Baku and Batum. There are also one or two
surprises, like the files of letters sent regularly to the Bank by an unidentified
informer, giving reflections on and details of contemporary political issues, both
internal and external, from the heart of French government and society in the
1880s and 1890s.
Supplementing these are the body of papers of the French family, formerly,
like the Austrian papers I mentioned earlier, in the Special State Trophies Archive
in Moscow and released by the Russian Government in 1994. These contain a
random collection of papers relating to the activities of the French family in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the drafts of a number of
plays by Henri de Rothschild, political correspondence of Maurice de Rothschild,
Député for the Hautes Alpes in the 1920s and 1930s, and the correspondence with
artists and art dealers of Baron Edmond at the turn of the century.
The complex of subjects within the Archive – indeed, within individual
documents – places particular demands on the archivist, demands which can only
ultimately be met by the completion of detailed item-by-item cataloguing. In an
archive the strength of which is based upon correspondence, and in correspondence
which regularly touches upon a range of subjects, nothing less than this detailed
treatment can ensure that the researcher is directed to all relevant letters on a
particular theme and has explored every avenue before he can be sure his search
is complete. We are light-years away from achieving this. The archive contains
millions of letters, and the cataloguing is complicated by the fact that they are
written in a range of half a dozen or more languages. The availability of a spectrum
of language skills among our staff is vital.
Nevertheless, we have determined not to be daunted by the size of the task and
have embarked on the first stage of a multi-level plan to open up the archive. The
initial stage is to produce a guide to the contents of the Archive which will indicate
the broad content and significance of every individual group of letters, volumes
or other documents. That challenge, spearheaded by Melanie Aspey, has come to
fruition with the publication of the Guide in 2000. The Guide serves to indicate
to us, within the Archive, the relative importance of individual groups of papers,
so that a structured programme of cataloguing down to the next level – which in
many cases will be the level of the individual document – can be undertaken. In
this, we shall make full use of database and text-retrieval software to ensure the
most rapid access to individual subjects and persons.
M. Aspey, The Rothschild Archive: a Guide to the Collection (London, 2000).