This year, the AVG-Carhif is 30 years old. On this occasion, we offer you the favourites of the team (and more…) throughout the year 2025. Today, archivist Amandine presents hers: the archive entitled ‘Conversations’…
Amandine has been an archivist at AVG-Carhif for just over a year and a half. She is mainly responsible for the French-language archives (inventory, etc.) but also manages the travelling exhibitions and projects of AVG-Carhif.
English translation of the video
AVG-Carhif: What is your favourite item in the AVG-Carhif collections?
Amandine: My favourite item in the AVG-Carhif collections is an archive we called ‘Conversations’.
AVG-Carhif: Tell us about your favourite item.
Amandine: So why did we call this collection Conversations? It’s because it contains notebooks in which two friends wrote to each other every day. They would exchange these notebooks during class or even in the evening. There are even special holiday notebooks in which they recounted what happened during the summer. The notebooks were written between 1958 and 1962. They started exchanging them when they were in their fifth year of ‘lycée’, which is the second year of secondary school in our time. And they ended their correspondence in their final year.
AVG-Carhif: Why is this one of your favourites?
Amandine: I think it’s one of my favourites because it’s an archive that I find very entertaining, with quite spontaneous writing that reflects adolescence in the 1960s. As a little anecdote: at the end of their conversation, the two friends divided the notebooks between them. So today, we only have part of these notebooks in our collection. Nineteen in total. And why did they end up at AVG-Carhif? The producer didn’t want to throw away her notebooks, so she turned to AVG-Carhif to have them preserved. And we found them to be a rather rare testimony to adolescence at that time. That’s why they are now in our collection. Out of respect for the privacy of the two authors, these notebooks are not yet available for consultation. They will only be available in 2032. Nevertheless, I think they are a rather unique source and deserve to be presented in these short videos.