Sources and archives

The life and work of René Cassin are so rich that it is impossible to construct a list of all the sources pertinent to his sixty years of public work in France and in the world at large. We will limit this bibliographical survey to a short guide to the primary sources we used by theme.

The starting point must be the Cassin papers in the National Archives in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. This collection, 382AP, was formed in two stages. During Cassin’s lifetime, 169 boxes were deposited. Ten years later, Mme Ghislaine Cassin deposited sixty-one boxes in a supplementary donation, including numerous photographs. The backbone of this biography was built out of this extraordinary collection.

On Cassin’s early years, he himself penned a text in 1972 entitled ‘A note on the Cassin family’. This may be found among other important documents in 382AP198 and 167. Family letters are found in 382AP158, and other important sources on the family may be found in 382AP171, 189, 186 and 203. A fine collection of photographs is located in 382AP229–35. For a history of the family in the Second World War, the essential records are in AJ38, the archive of the Commissariat pour les Questions Juives, in particular in files on Aryanization 4235, dossiers 3550–7, 4237, 3640–3, and those on the provisional administrators, 5457 and 5458.