Abstract

From 1672 to 1693, a vast quest to compile archives was carried out in the Kingdom of France. The aim was to gather titles and deeds to be used to justify the union of all the ancient leprosaria to the royal Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem. This explained the creation of an unprecedented collection of records, now preserved in the National Archives of Paris. The original documents had been withdrawn, copied or even falsified, in order to impose a modified interpretation of the history of welfare before the reign of the Sun King. The archivist and the historian thus have the difficult task of avoiding the falsification of history, made so easy nowadays with global online access to such documents that must not be taken for granted. The present study of how this record collection has been artificially created may therefore help the public to take a take a closer look at these images inherited from the past rather than taking them at face value.