Légion française des combattants et des volontaires de la Révolution nationale Cochinchine

Description

This record is part of a group of data resources tracing European persons who were resident or serving in East Asia during the early 20th century and who were displaced as a result of national border changes and conflicts. It is one component of Divisive Power of Citizenship—a project of the Institute for European Global Studies, Basel.

This record relates to approximately 3,000 members of the Union of the so-called "Légion française des combattants et des volontaires de la Révolution nationale" in Cochinchine, South Vietnam. Original documents now held at the Archives Nationales d'Outre Mer—Mairie d'Aix-en-Provence, were compiled on the 8th of December 1942, and the list of persons is marked as complete. Admissions to the Légion after that date are not included.
The Légion, which was established by Philippe Pétain in August 1940, combined the existing Veteran's organization. By November 1941, admission to the Légion was opened for non-combatants as well. It served as a means to propagate Vichy Ideologies thoughout the empire.
In the Divisive Power of Citizenship and Loyalty (DPCL) project, this sub-collection has provided one of the most useful datasets for helping to identify and trace members of the population in French Indochina during World War 2.

Multiple datasets generated from the source material, including transcriptions of person entries (names, dates of birth and death where available, profession and often location, remarks and operating unit) and structured person instance data derived from them are provided. Key historic person instance information (appearances in documents), serialized as JSON according to a formal schema is available, together with the JSON Schema itself. This is intended for use by external applications, and can also be searched interactively using a DPCL presentation website (see below) which explains the datasets further. In contrast to transcription data, which represents the printed and hand-written source material, and is often organized inconsistently, the historic person instance data provided here enables reliable searching across multiple archival sources. The historic person instance JSON is lightweight to enable scalability across large numbers of sub-collections/archives: it does not contain all of the information sometimes transcribed, such as remarks and military operating unit. However it does provide IIIF canvas IDs, connecting the person instance to the page in the source document where it originally occurred.

Where annotations can be generated from transcriptions they are provided as Web Annotation Data Model (WADM) annotation collections serialized as JSON, which are linked to source documents via PIDs. The annotation data can be used independently with the IIIF service provided here, to connect person instances interactively to their occurrence in the source documents. Provided principally for analysis preservation and verification purposes, the transcription data is less suitable for automated searching than the historic person instance JSON (above).

These datasets are also deposited in the Zenodo global catch-all repository as record DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5666615, which also provides DataCite metadata accessible via OAI-PMH.

A project website at https://www.divisive-power.org/ offers case studies well as search facilities which have access to all of the DPCL datasets, and additionally to other Divisive Power of Citizenship datasets.

This work is funded by Swiss National Science Foundation grant 100011_184860/1 "Divisive Power of Citizenship"

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