Partners involved

State Archives

General Objectives

Since access to, and knowledge about the production of historical sources invariably and fundamentally determines the quality of scientific research on the past and its relations to the present, WP1 constituted a cornerstone of this IAP project on the history of justice in Belgium.

The general objectives put forward for WP1 and the input of the responsible partner, the State Archives, were the provision of general archival support and the mobilisation of the State Archives’ specific expertise on judicial archives for the benefit of the entire IAP program and its members. More in particular, WP1 aimed to provide both the necessary foundations and collective tools for carrying out the different IAP sub-projects and develop the program at large: finding aids and collective access to archival sources for the history of Belgian justice, and research instruments to correctly exploit and analyse (interprete and contextualize) them.

Workprogramme

• Identification, localisation, inspection, retrieval and inventorying of relevant archival funds, both public and private, kept at the State Archives and elsewhere. In this first IAP phase, priority was given (yet not exclusively), to two documentary sectors that manifested an urgent need for archival preservation: the penitentiary archives and the archives of the judicial police. This work was carried out by the archivist-researchers Nicolas Bruaux and François Welter, with the help of the State Archives’ team.

• Elaboration of an “institutional research guide”, offering a comprehensive overview of the available sources for the history of Belgian justice as well as information about the competencies, organisation and general activity of the different judicial institutions that have produced archival records during the 19^th-20^th centuries. Nicolas Bruaux was responsible for this part of the workprogramme.

• PhD research: both the history of the Belgian prison system and the history of the judicial police consitute key areas that require targeted research efforts in order to increase and sophisticate existing knowledge. Therefore, the archival efforts in both sectors have been coupled with two PhD research projects (WP1a & WP1b) on these topics:

WP1a: The history of the central prisons in Belgium, 1795-1870

This doctoral research project, initially undertaken by archivist-researcher Luc Nguyen in 2007, has been integrated into the research carried out by Drs. Bert Vanhulle of the UCL team, within the framework of WP3 (Criminal Justice, Criminal policies and penal practices), on the history of the Belgian prison system from 1800 to 1940.

WP1b: The Judicial Police of the Public Prosecutor's Offices (1919-1952)

This doctoral research project, carried out by archivist-researcher Drs. François Welter at the State Archives, was concerned with the activities of the judicial police of the Public Prosecutor's Offices from their creation in 1919 up until the year 1952. It joined up with recent international trends in the field of the historical study of policing, by opting for an approach that moved beyond descriptive and ‘police-centred’ analysis of the internal organizational history of individual police forces, and that avoided an exclusive focus on institutional dynamics. Instead, François Welter examined the genesis and functioning of the Belgian judicial police within the broader context of socio-political change, shifts in crime control and new definitions of order and the function of police that characterized the first half of the 20^th century. Further, examination of the place of the judicial police within the larger police system was combined with case studies of four judicial brigades, their men and their everyday practices. Finally, this research aimed to broaden the view from the Belgian to international developments and, at the same time, stimulated new reflections about the realities of criminal policing, transnational circulation of police knowledge and techniques, and transformations of policing and the policing of conflict in times of crisis. These aspects were tackled through the study of two particular issues: a) the participation of the Belgian judicial police in international networks and activities of criminal policing; b) the judicial police’s attitude and role played during the Second World War and the Liberation.