GENERAL DATABASES

Encyclopédie Universalis: I think of it as the French-language, academic Wikipedia. I relied on it for my undergraduate theses but could only access it while I was an intern at the BNU. Sometimes you can gather sufficient information outside of the paywall.

​

Gallica: the platform of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (la BnF). You can find the Mercure de France and the Journal official de la République française [JO] here.

​

Numistral: the digital archive [patrimoine numérisé] for the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire (la BNU, Strasbourg), which is the regional depository for Alsace. I imagine other regional libraries have similar platforms because libraries and special collections increasingly put materials online. A quick search showed me the Jules Verne Collection on the Nantes municipal library website.

​

Yale’s library features materials ranging from modern art to 13th-century paintings as well as texts in several languages. I found this database while looking for André Breton’s speech “Situation du surréalisme entre les deux guerres.”  Yale’s library also has a list of French web resources that serves as a great starting point. 

The Library of Congress has documents pertaining to Franco-U.S. relations. I used it while researching French and American views on the Statue of Liberty.

​

Museums also have great information on their websites. I often use the MoMA online search to confirm dates of paintings or view a certain artist’s work. MoMA gives short biographies too; see the Dalí one for an example.

​