La Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) has just launched at the end of March, RetroNews a new site providing free access to several million articles from the main national, regional, local and colonial news titles published between 1631 and 1945.
RetroNews it is therefore 3 centuries of press articles from newspapers that have mostly disappeared (Le Temps, Le Petit Parisien, Le Matin, Le Petit Journal, Le Gaulois, etc.) but some of which are still very much present (Le Figaro, Humanity, West Lightning become Ouest-France et, The Cross).
At its launch, the site included 15 million digitized articles from 50 general news press titles, taken from the archives and collections of the BnF. Each week, thousands of new articles will be published with a target of 30 million articles online by 2018.
Likewise, you will regularly have access to thematic and educational files written by a team of teachers from the National Education system (First projection of the cinematograph by the Lumière brothers in 1885, The beginnings of the construction of the Panama Canal in 1881, etc.)
For Nathalie Thouny, deputy director of BnF-Partenariats,
RetroNews offers readers inventive features: speed and efficiency of research, optimal visualization of results to easily explore 3 centuries of press. The site also narrates history and brings it to life to make it more accessible. A forum is open to historians, journalists, teachers to better read the present in the light of the past.
RetroNews works according to the model freemium which will allow you to access for free, after creating an account, all the available articles, for consultation only. There are also two paid offers, a pro offer allowing you to reuse the articles for commercial use and a premium offer at €12.5 per month which will allow you to:
- to access advanced search and content exploration features
- to export excerpts to your site or blog
- to have a dedicated online workspace
- to access all educational files
- to create, publish and share an unlimited number of folders
In short, RetroNews is a very nice site that will please web wanderers as much as teachers, researchers and historians!
Article updated on March 3, 2025 by Byothe
