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 entered the program for professional education in Documentation established by Suzanne Briet and others at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) and later named 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 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 and 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 focus on 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)

• “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, reflecting his view that it was important to index relationships between concepts as well as the concepts, e.g. (ra9a)5i Philosophy of science applied to behavior ra9(a5i) Philosophy of the science of behavior. • Pagès taught at the INTD 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. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dw393m6

• Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel (Essai de documentologie). Review of documentation 15, fasc. 3: 53-64. Reprinted with an introduction and anEnglish translation (“Documentary Transformations and Cultural Context” as a special issue of Proceedings from the Document Academy 8(1) 2021. DOI: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/docam/vol8/iss1/ • 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.

Archival papers Bibliothèque Henri Piéron, Université Paris Descartes, Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris: Fonds Pagès. https://calames.abes.fr/pub/#details?id=FileId-2950

Further reading

• Hommage à Robert Pagès [Special issue] Bulletin de psychologie 2009/3 (Numéro 501) http://www.cairn.info/revue-bulletin-de-psychologie-2009-3.htm • André Demailly. 1992. Robert Pagès et l’analyse codée. Documentaliste 29, n 2 (1992): 59-72. • André Demailly. La psychologie sociale. H.-A. Simon & R. Pagès. Lyon, Editions l’Interdisciplinaire, 1993. ISBN 2-907447-15-7. • Olivier Le Deuff. O. Robert Pagès, une nécessaire redécouverte par les sciences de l’information. Savoirs cdi, April 2018. https://www.reseau-canope.fr/savoirscdi/societe-de-linformation/le-monde-du-livre-et-des-medias/les-penseurs-de-linformation-de-la-documentation-et-de-la-pedagogie/robert-pages-une-necessaire-redecouverte-par-les-sciences-de-linformation.html • Day, Ronald E. Robert Pagès’ concept of the “auto-document” as a forerunner to neo-documentation’s philosophy of documentality. Journal of Documentation Vol. 80 No. 4, (2024) pp. 813-823. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2023-0123