Robert Pagès

Robert Pagès was born on Aug 25, 1919, in Belmontet (Lot), France, and died in Levallois-Perret (Hauts-de-Seine) on July 25, 2007. He became an anarchist activist and a student of Georges Canguilhem. Pagès completed his Licence de philosophie in Toulouse in 1940 and later a Diplôme d’études supérieures de philosophie. After the Second World War he studied psychology at the Sorbonne. In 1946 Pagès entered the program for professional education in Documentation established by Suzanne Briet and others at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM). In 1951 this program was designated the Institut National de Techniques de Documentation (INTD).

In 1950 he joined the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and then in 1952 joined the Laboratory for Social Psychology (Laboratoire de psychologie sociale) which was founded by Daniel Lagache at the Sorbonne. Pagès and later transferred to the University of Paris VII. Pagès was designated Head (Chef) of the Laboratory from 1954 to 1970, then Director from 1970 until his retirement in 1985.

Pagès married Michèle Anselme. They had a daughter Brigitte, later Tara Michaël and a son Yves Pagès.

Professional Career

Robert Pagès and his laboratory were influential in the development of social psychology in France. He wrote extensively on methodology, on psychological pressure (“emprise”), and many other topics. He was skeptical of formal models which he regarded as detached from reality. He preferred in vivo small group experiments from which one might extrapolate to a wider population. This preference and his strongly socialist perspective led him to the work of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Jean-Baptiste Godin (1817-1888), and past experiments in idealistic communities. As a documentalist he was concerned with the social role of documents and the design of indexing languages with an emphasis on using grammar to represent relationships.

Works relating to documentation (Selected)

• "Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel" [Documentary Transformations and Cultural Context] Review of Documentation 15 Iss. 3 (1948): pp. 53–64. Reprinted with an introduction and English translation in "Robert Pagès: Documentary Transformations and Cultural Context" [Special issue] Proceedings from the Document Academy [1].
• “Analyse codée” [Coded analysis]. Pagès led the development of a very concise indexing language known as CODOC (from COde DOCumentaire, documentary code) for materials in the social psychology laboratory It reflected his view that it was important to index relationships between concepts as well as the concepts and optical coincidence equipment was used in his laboratory for searching. The notation was very concise. Relationships were indicated by superior numerals and, like algebra, parentheses used to show grammatical structure as, e.g.

    (ra9a)5i   Philosophy of science applied to behavior
    ra9(a5i)   Philosophy of the science of behavior.

• Pagès taught at the Institut National de Techniques de Documentation 1953-1960.

Publications (selected)

A checklist of Pagès’ writings lists some 300 items, but the great majority exist only as typescript or duplicated gray literature. Michael K. Buckland, Robert Pagès – Bibliography. Berkeley, CA, 2022. [2]

• "Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel (Essai de documentologie)" Review of documentation 15, fasc. 3 (1948): 53-64. Reprinted with an introduction and English translation (“Documentary Transformations and Cultural Context” as a special issue of "Proceedings from the Document Academy" 8(1) 2021. [3]
• Problèmes de classification culturelle et documentaire. Paris: Union Française des Organismes de Documentation, 167 pp.
• Itinéraire du seul; essai. Paris: Laffont, 1962.
• L'exigence, roman. Paris: Laffont, 1964.

Further reading

• "Hommage à Robert Pagès" [Special issue] Bulletin de psychologie 2009/3 (Numéro 501) [4]
• Demailly, André. 1991. La psychologie sociale. H.-A. Simon & R. Pagès. Lyon, Editions l’Interdisciplinaire, 1993. ISBN 2-907447-15-7.
• Demailly, André. 1992. "Robert Pagès et l’analyse codée". Documentaliste 29, n 2 (1992): 59-72.
• Le Deuff, Olivier. "Robert Pagès, une nécessaire redécouverte par les sciences de l’information". Savoirs cdi, April 2018. [5]
• Day, Ronald E. "Robert Pagès’ concept of the 'auto-document' as a forerunner to neo-documentation’s philosophy of documentality". Journal of Documentation 80 No. 4, (2024) pp. 813-823. [6]

Archival papers

Bibliothèque Henri Piéron, Université Paris Descartes, Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris: Fonds Pagès. [7]