La Contemporaine is a French cultural and scientific organization that includes a library, an archive center, and a museum. It focuses on the history of the 20th and 21st centuries. Established in 1918, it has been located in a new building on the campus of Paris Nanterre University since 2021.

Collections

The collections of La Contemporaine focus on these areas:

• wars and conflicts, especially the two world wars
• people who left their homes due to war or other reasons
• colonial empires and the process of ending them
• groups working for social change and human rights
• the history of how countries interact with each other

The collections include many different types of materials written in several languages, such as French, English, Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, and others. La Contemporaine has about 3 million written items, including books, newspapers, journals, and written and audiovisual archives. It also has nearly 1.5 million items in its image-based collections, such as posters (about 80,000), photographs (over 1 million), paintings, drawings, objects, postcards, and more. These collections are considered unique because they come from many different places, cover a wide range of topics, and include many different types of documents.

Activities

La Contemporaine works as a place that preserves and studies historical materials. It makes sure its collections are available to researchers, organizes scientific events, training sessions, and workshops for students, and also serves as a cultural center for the public through a permanent display and yearly themed exhibitions. As part of its scientific work, it publishes materials such as exhibition catalogs, resource guides, and the journal Matériaux pour l'histoire de notre temps (Materials for Our Time).

It also works with institutions in France, such as the research libraries' network CollEx-Persée and the CODHOS network of archive centers focused on social history, as well as international groups like the IALHI network of labor history institutions.

In 2014, La Contemporaine started its own digital library called L’Argonnaute, which offers free access to 200,000 digitized documents from its collections.

History

The organization was created in 1918 as the « Bibliothèque-musée de la Guerre » (BMG – Library-Museum of the War) using a private collection gathered by French industrialists Henri and Louise Leblanc during World War I to record the war. In 1934, the BMG became connected to the University of Paris and was renamed « Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine » (BDIC – Library of International Contemporary Documentation). It kept this name even as it moved to different locations and changed roles, until it was called « La Contemporaine » in 2018. Starting in 1970, the organization had two centers: the main one, which held the archives and library, was located on the campus of Paris Nanterre University, which was built on the edges of Paris in 1964. The museum was located inside the Hôtel National des Invalides in the 7th district of Paris. In 2021, both centers moved to a new building designed by architect Bruno Gaudin, near the entrance of the Paris Nanterre University campus.