Find the archive. Investigate France’s role in Rwanda

Since 1994, journalists, activists and researchers have been collecting documentary traces of the Tutsi genocide. This article attempts to write the history of this quest for “archives” to document the role played by France in Rwanda. In a French context where state public archives have long remained inaccessible, the text questions the peculiarities of the working conditions of historians specializing in genocide faced with competing expertise, a large profusion of documents as well as the claim of the political authorities to frame the methods of writing this particularly sensitive history.