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The study of documents and files in state archives is a familiar and common way for scholars today to learn about the past. Nevertheless, state archives were not initially intended to serve the purpose of historical research. The present article examines the function of archives for nineteenth-century society and the state in terms of the politics of government. It goes on to consider how, before archives became an instrument of government and social policy, their holdings could be made accessible to historians in the first half of the nineteenth century. While early nineteenth-century political reforms failed to anchor the historical use of archives institutionally, the early modern tradition of petitioning state administration offered a conventional way to reconcile the politically interesting “academic exploitation” of the archives’ treasure with the government’s concern for the integrity of its arcane sphere and the imperative of secrecy. Via various actions and communications, an administratively controlled “opening of the archives” thus took place. Above all—and this is the central thesis of the article—in working with old archives historians not only acquired documents and files but also a specific legal concept of truth. Fundamentally linked to archival documents, this drew on the legal evidence that they contained and in turn gave the historical account itself a new epistemic status as “true.”