Editing Man in the Iron Mask (section)

==Historical documents and archives==
===History of the Bastille archives===
When the Bastille was stormed on 14 July 1789, the mob were surprised to find only seven prisoners,{{efn|name=bastille}}{{sfn|Funck-Brentano|1932|pp=114–115}} as well as a room full of neatly kept boxes containing documents that had been carefully filed since 1659. These archives held records, not only of all the prisoners who had been incarcerated there, but also of all the individuals who had been locked up, banished into exile, or simply tried within the limits of Paris as a result of a ''[[lettre de cachet]]''. Throughout the 18th century, archivists had been working zealously at keeping these records in good order and which, on the eve of the French revolution, had amounted to hundreds of thousands of documents.{{sfn|Funck-Brentano|1932|pp=6–7}}

As the fortress was being ransacked, the pillaging lasted for two days during which documents were burned, torn, thrown from the top of towers into the moats and trailed through the mud.{{sfn|Funck-Brentano|1932|p=7}} Many documents were stolen, or taken away by collectors, writers, lawyers, and even by Pierre Lubrowski, an attaché in the Russian embassy—who sold them to emperor [[Alexander I of Russia|Alexander I]] in 1805, when they were deposited at the [[Hermitage Palace]]—and many ended up dispersed throughout France and the rest of Europe.{{sfn|Funck-Brentano|1932|p=7}}{{sfn|Funck-Brentano|1899|p=52}} A company of soldiers was posted on 15 July to guard the fortress and, in particular, to prevent any more looting of the archives. On 16 July, the Electoral Assembly created a commission assigned to rescue the archives; on arrival at the fortress, they found that many boxes had been emptied or destroyed, leaving an enormous pile of papers in a complete state of disorder. During the session of 24 July, the Electoral Assembly passed a resolution enjoining citizens to return documents to the Hôtel de Ville; restitutions were numerous and the surviving documents eventually stored at the city's library, then located at the convent of Saint-Louis-de-la-Culture.{{sfn|Funck-Brentano|1932|pp=9-10}}{{sfn|Funck-Brentano|1899|pp=53–54}}{{sfn|Tuetey|1894|p=636}}{{efn|name=convent}}

On 22 April 1797, [[Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon]] was appointed chief librarian of the [[Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal]] and obtained a decree that secured the Bastille archive under his care.{{sfn|Funck-Brentano|1932|p=10}} However, the librarians were so daunted by this volume of 600,000 documents that they stored them in a backroom, where they languished for over forty years. In 1840, François Ravaisson found a mass of old papers under the floor in his kitchen at the Arsenal library and realised he had rediscovered the archives of the Bastille, which required a further fifty years of laborious restoration; the documents were numbered, and a catalogue was compiled and published as the 20th century was about to dawn. Eventually, the archives of the Bastille were made available for consultation by any visitor to the Arsenal library, in rooms specially fitted up for them.{{sfn|Funck-Brentano|1932|pp=12–13}}

===Other archives===
In addition to the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, several other archives host historical documents that were consulted by historians researching the enigma of the Man in the Iron Mask: the [[:fr:Archives diplomatiques|Archives of the Foreign Ministry]] (Archives des Affaires étrangères),
the [[Archives Nationales (France)|Archives Nationales]], 
the [[Bibliothèque nationale de France]],
the [[Sainte-Geneviève Library]],
and the [[Defence Historical Service|Service Historique de la Défense]] ({{aka}} Anciennes Archives de la Guerre).{{sfn|Petitfils|2004|p=8}}

===Historians of the Man in the Iron Mask===

In his historical essay published in 1965 and expanded in 1973, Marcel Pagnol praised a number of historians who consulted the archives with the goal of elucidating the enigma of the Man in the Iron Mask: Joseph Delort (1789–1847), Marius Topin (1838–1895), Théodore Iung (1833–1896), Maurice Duvivier (18??–1936), and Georges Mongrédien (1901–1980).{{sfn|Pagnol|1973|pp=14–18}} Along with Pierre Roux-Fazillac (1746–1833), François Ravaisson (1811–1884), Jules Loiseleur (1816–1900), [[Jules Lair]] (1836–1907), and [[Frantz Funck-Brentano]] (1862–1947), these historians uncovered and published the bulk of historical documents that enabled some progress to be made towards that goal.{{sfn|Mongrédien|1961|pp=234–254}}{{sfn|Pagnol|1973|pp=14–18}}

In particular, Mongrédien was the first to publish (1952) a complete reference of historical documents on which previous authors had relied only selectively.{{sfn|Mongrédien|1961|pp=7–8}} He was also one of the few historians who did not champion any particular candidate,{{efn|name=fewhist}} preferring instead to review and analyse objectively the facts revealed by {{em|all}} the documents.{{sfn|Mongrédien|1961|pp=8–9}} Giving full credit to Jules Lair for being the first to propose the candidacy of "Eustache Dauger" in 1890,{{sfn|Mongrédien|1961|p=181}} Mongrédien demonstrated that, among all the state prisoners who were ever in the care of Saint-Mars, only the one arrested under that name in 1669 could have died in the Bastille in 1703, and was therefore the only possible candidate for the man in the mask. Although he also pointed out that no documents had yet been found that revealed either the real identity of this prisoner or the cause of his long incarceration, Mongrédien's work was significant in that it made it possible to eliminate all the candidates whose vital dates, or life circumstances for the period of 1669–1703, were already known to modern historians.{{sfn|Mongrédien|1961|p=18}}{{sfn|Mongrédien|1961|pp=181-201,227–231}}

In October 1965, Mongrédien published a review, in the journal ''La Revue des Deux Mondes'', of the first edition of Pagnol's essay. At the end of this review, Mongrédien mentioned being told that the [[Defence Historical Service|Archives of the Ministry of Defense]] located at the Château de Vincennes still held unsorted and uncatalogued bundles of Louvois's correspondence. He speculated that, if this were the case, then these bundles might contain a letter from July 1669 revealing the reasons for "Eustache Dauger{{" '}}s arrest near Dunkirk.{{sfn|Mongrédien|1965|p=427}}