Editing Man in the Iron Mask (section)

===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}}