The Moscou Fonds: Perhaps the Unexpected Genealogy Treasure of the Century

A Police Archive That Vanished in 1940

In 1940, German forces occupying Paris seized around 10,000 cartons from the French Ministry of the Interior. Among them was the central file of the Direction de la Sûreté nationale, the national police service responsible for political surveillance, the control of foreigners, and other security matters. The records disappeared from France and would remain inaccessible for more than fifty years.

Today, these records form one of the best-known parts of what is commonly called the Moscou fonds. The central file had been assembled in 1934 from records created since the late nineteenth century and eventually contained more than 2.5 million index cards and 630,000 individual dossiers. It recorded people who had come to the attention of the Sûreté for many different reasons, from foreign residents applying for identity papers to political activists and people subject to judicial or administrative measures.

The contents vary considerably from one person to another. A dossier may contain police reports, questionnaires, correspondence, identity documents, passport material, prefectural orders, press cuttings and, in some cases, photographs, fingerprints or anthropometric descriptions. Foreigners form a particularly important part of the collection, including migrants, refugees and stateless people living in France during the turbulent decades before the Second World War.

The seizure also had an unexpected consequence. Because the records were removed from the French administrative system, they escaped much of the routine archival selection and destruction that would normally have reduced a collection of this size. The Archives nationales describes the surviving ensemble as something of an archival fossil, preserving a cross-section of police documentation that would otherwise have been far less complete.

From Paris to Moscow

The archive's survival followed an extraordinary route. After the German seizure in 1940, French police, military and other records were transported to territories controlled by Nazi Germany. When the Red Army advanced westward in 1945, Soviet forces captured large quantities of German-held material, including archives originally taken from France.

The French records were subsequently transferred to the Soviet Union and placed in the Central State Special Archives in Moscow, an institution created to hold foreign archives acquired during the war. The Sûreté nationale records became "fonds no. 1" within this system. Soviet archivists processed and inventoried the material, but its existence and whereabouts remained largely unknown outside the Soviet archival apparatus.

For French researchers, the practical result was simple: an enormous part of the documentary history of French policing had effectively disappeared. Government authorities regarded many of the missing records as lost or destroyed, while researchers had no way to consult them.

The Archives Return to France

The situation changed as Soviet archives began opening around the end of the Cold War. Researchers identified large quantities of foreign records in Moscow, and negotiations between France and Russia followed. An agreement signed in 1992 paved the way for the return of French state archives, with major transfers taking place during the 1990s and continuing into the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The returned material was distributed according to its original institution. Military archives went primarily to the Service historique de la Défense, while the central file of the Sûreté nationale entered the Archives nationales. Other returned records, including material originating with the Paris police authorities, are preserved separately at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police.

The result is that the term fonds de Moscou does not describe one single archive. It refers to numerous French public and private collections that shared the same wartime journey through German and Soviet hands. For genealogists, however, the Sûreté nationale's central file is usually the most immediately useful part.

Why the Moscou Fonds Matters for Genealogy

A police dossier can preserve a type of biography that ordinary civil records rarely provide. An immigrant may appear in a birth, marriage or death certificate only a handful of times, while a Sûreté file can follow that person through applications, addresses, investigations and interactions with French authorities over several years.

This is especially useful when researching families who moved through France between the late nineteenth century and 1940. The dossiers include large numbers of foreigners, including people from Spain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe, as well as political exiles and refugees. The records can help establish where someone lived, when they entered French administrative systems and why the authorities became interested in them.

The surviving documents can also make an ancestor unusually tangible. Photographs sometimes appear alongside handwritten correspondence, fingerprints, physical descriptions or reports recording addresses and occupations. A person who is difficult to trace elsewhere may suddenly emerge in considerable detail simply because they once applied for a residence document, became involved in political activity or attracted the attention of the police.

The presence of a dossier therefore does not automatically mean that someone was a criminal or considered dangerous. The Sûreté opened files for many administrative reasons, including applications for identity papers, passports and naturalization, as well as political surveillance and judicial matters.

How to Search the Fonds Today

The central Sûreté nationale files are preserved at the National Archives↗ . Finding an individual dossier has become considerably easier because the alphabetical registers created by Soviet archivists, sometimes called the répertoires russes, have been digitized and indexed.

Between 2020 and 2022, the Archives nationales and Geneanet completed a collaborative indexing project covering more than 613,000 individual dossiers dating from approximately 1870 to 1940. Researchers can now search for a name online, identify the corresponding dossier number and archival reference, and then use that information to request the original file at the Archives nationales.

Checking spelling variants remains worthwhile, particularly for foreign names that Soviet archivists had to transcribe decades after the files were created. If a name appears in the index, the result provides the clue needed to move from a simple database entry to the surviving police dossier itself.

Some parts of the central file are currently subject to temporary consultation restrictions while the Archives nationales carries out a large digitization program, so researchers planning a visit should check the current access conditions before ordering records.

The unusual journey of these documents ultimately preserved something that routine administration might have gradually erased. Records created to identify, monitor and control people have become, generations later, a way of recovering the faces, movements and personal circumstances of people whose lives may have left few other traces.