series in the collections of the National Archives. The Archives nationales were created at the time of the French Revolution in 1790. It was a state decree of 1794 that made it mandatory to centralise all the pre-French Revolution private and public archives seized by the revolutionaries, completed by a law passed in 1796 which created departmental archives (archives départementales) in the departments of France to alleviate the burden on the Archives nationales in Paris, thus creating the collections of the French archives as we know them today. In 1800 the Archives nationales became an autonomous body of the French state. Archives of France The National Archives are under the authority of the Archives of France administration (Service interministériel des Archives de France) in the Ministry of Culture. The Archives of France also manage the 101 departmental archives located in the prefectures of each of the 100 departments of France plus the city of Paris, as well as various other local (municipal) archives, plus 12 more recent regional archives (which store the archives of the regional councils and their agencies). The departmental and local archives contain all the archives from the deconcentrated branches of the French state, as well as all the archives of the pre-French Revolution provincial and local institutions seized by the revolutionaries (parliaments, chartered cities, abbeys, and churches). In addition to the of physical records and 74.75 terabytes of electronic archives kept by the National Archives and its sister agencies, the National Overseas Archives (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence and the (ANMT) in Roubaix, this as of the end of 2020 (373 km and 74.75 TB at the National Archives strictly speaking, and 86 km at ANOM and ANMT), another of physical records and 225.25 terabytes of electronic archives were kept in the regional, departmental and local archives in the end of 2020, in particular the church records and notarial records used by genealogists. The archives of the Ministry of Armed Forces (Defence Historical Service, ca. of physical records) and the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (, ca. of physical records) are managed separately by their respective ministries and do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Archives of France administration. Collections The National Archives have one of the largest and most important archival collections in the world, a testimony to the very ancient nature of the French state which has been in existence for more than