The Catholic Library World Editorial Committee selected David C. Miller, a retired scholar formerly with Longview College in Kansas City, Missouri, as the recipient of the John Brubaker Award for 2019-2020 for his study "Armand-Gaston Camus: Catholic Scholar, Revolutionary, and Founder of the National Archives of France" from the December 2019 issue.
The Brubaker Award was established in 1978 to recognize an outstanding work of literary merit published in Catholic Library World during the publishing year prior to the award presentation, and Miller's study of Armand-Gaston Camus (1740-1804) clearly deserves this distinction. Building on his previous scholarship on Camus in the Catholic Historical Review, Miller’s work considers how Camus’s background of Gallican Jansenism, dedication to Classical learning, and legal brilliance combined with his support for the ideals of the French Revolution to influence his tenure as the founder and first general director of the National Archives of France. He astutely considers Camus’s views on selecting records for preservation and how he negotiated the various phases and personalities of the Revolution to defend and advance the work of the archives. Miller also devotes considerable attention to Camus’s much-criticized insistence on disregarding archival provenance by choosing to separate records into artificial categories based on chronology or subject matter. He provides a qualified defense of the archivist by pointing out how this practice, borrowed from contemporary librarianship, was considered an acceptable practice in Europe at the time. For his skillful examination of Armand-Gaston Camus’s administration of the French National Archives viewed within its Revolutionary context, the committee gratefully presents the 2019-2020 Brubaker Award to David C. Miller.