The fonds is the chief Archive Unit in the Continental system and the basis of all rules of arrangement. The most important of all principles of Archive Management is named from it le respect pour les fonds. . . . A fonds is an organic whole and that any

The fonds is the chief Archive Unit in the Continental system and the basis of all rules of arrangement. The most important of all principles of Archive Management is named from it le respect pour les fonds. . . . A fonds is an organic whole and that any Administration, or one or more of its fonctionnaires, can create a fonds d'archives provided that these include résolutions or procès-verbaux; the inclusion of archives of such a type making it autonome. Roughly speaking, we may take it that they would make the qualities of a fonds d'archives depend on its including those which, when the administration which created it was active, constituted the final authority for executive action. For our purposes we may do better perhaps to represent this quality in terms of Administration rather than terms of documents, the forms of which are not necessarily constant. Fonds we may render, for lack of a better translation, Archive Group, and define this as the Archives resulting from the work of an Administration which was an organic whole, complete in itself, capable of dealing independently, without any added or external authority, with every side of any business which could normally be presented to it. This, it may be said, is to make the Archive Group a division much wider, much less strictly defined that the Fonds.