Representations of administrative geography in the historical and archaeological statistics of the Somme, Pas-de-Calais and Nord departements in the 19th century

Initiated by Francois de Neufchateau, strongly revivified by Guizot in 1834 , who separated it from socio-economical accounting, France's historical an d archaeological statistical accounts provide the historians with a number of relevant data allowing them to stud the modalities through which, in pos t-revolutionary France, the reconstruction of the perception of space is ac hieved. It finds its privileged translation in local monographies whose eme rgence can be spotted as early as the beginning of the XIXth century and to which the July Monarchy will grant a status of full-right historiographic genre. The chronology of their publication and the precision of their distr ibution within the framework of the administrative geography born of the re forms of the Constituante and updated with the Pluviose Year VIII Law-depar tments, arrondissements, cantons and communes-present themselves as a privi leged observation point of the way in which the notabilities have accepted and integrated this remodelling of the shape of the territorial grid of the exercise of power and its integration in the centralizing logic of the Sta te. In this paper, we aim, through the use of a documentary corpus constituted of the departments' directories, the periodical publication of the region's learned societies and of the prefectorial committees in charge of the hist orical and archaeological inventory, at measuring the enthusiasm with which the Somme's, Pas-de-Calais' and Nord's authorities and local scholars have responded to the statistical injunctions of the governments that ruled the country down to the end of the Second Empire. We also aim at showing how, through the various representations of administrative geography thus develo ped, the permanence of the historiographical strategies devised within the framework of the territorial realities of the Ancien Regime can be read. Ou r ambition is also to show how, starting with the July Monarchy, the urban networks instituted by historical writing are mentally perceived, become pu t in charge of keeping memory and thus shape, from one department to the ne xt, various modalities of representation of local realities.