| Sumario: | Twenty years ago French historians have turned themselves with an irresistible appetite to the so-called private sources. Until then, personal papers attracted rather literature or art historians who professionally sanctified the laundry lists of great men. Today, the development of cultural history has turned private documents, from exceptional ones, capable of adding some salt to a plain story or to provide (at last!) the key of creation misteries, into ordinary ones, which we try to preserve in the same way as administrative or statistic records. This evolution reveals a major change in historiographical sensibility which some will interpret as a sign of a present "crisis "and others, maybe more clevearly, will see as a change in the relation to history as a scientific discipline, in the relation to time and, more widely, to the observed phenomena.
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