Succession to the French throne
In 1791 the French National Assembly drew up a new, written Constitution to which the King gave his assent, and which governed France for the last year of the 18th century monarchy. For the first time it was necessary to define formally, as a matter of statutory constitutional law, the system of succession, and the titles, privileges and prerogatives of the Crown. In debating the succession to the Crown the contemporary understanding of the law of succession was publicly clarified. It rebutted the assertion by some that the claim by the Spanish line is a late construct, made to satisfy the ambitions of princes deprived of other claims. Indeed, it is evident that the issue of the rights of the Spanish line to the French crown remained an important constitutional issue.
Archives Nationales (France)
The oldest document kept at the AN is a papyrus dated AD 625 coming from the archives of the Basilica of St Denis seized at the time of the French Revolution. This papyrus is the confirmation of a grant of land in the city of Paris to the Abbey of Saint-Denis issued by King Chlothar II. This document is the oldest original one kept by the Archives Nationales, although the Archives Nationales possess medieval copies of earlier records going as far back as AD 528 (but not the originals).
In total the Archives Nationales possess 47 original documents from the Merovingian period (ended in 751). They also possess 5 original documents from the reign of Pepin the Short (751-768), 31 from the reign of Charlemagne (768-814), 28 from the reign of Louis the Pious (814-840), 69 from the reign of Charles the Bald (840-877), 1 from the reign of Hugh Capet (987-996), 21 from the reign of Robert the Pious (996-1031), and then a rapidly increasing number of original documents after Robert the Pious, with for example more than 1,000 original documents from the reign of Philip Augustus (1180–1223) and several thousand original documents from the reign of Saint Louis (1226–1270).
The Archives Nationales also hold the original Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, dating from 1789, which was used to disseminate to the political community the first-ever French Constitution and represents the first printed version of that text. It was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme Register in 2003 in recognition of its historical significance.