Abstract/Résumé/Resumen
This article delineates a view of the evolution of the archival thought after the nineteenth century, as well as its consequences in the technical and administrative organization of the National Archives, that undergoes evident processes of modernization. The author shows the characteristics and the risks of a modernization that not always obeys certain principies of continuity at the time that accentuates the new dynamic of the National Archives of Brazil, in the moment that such evolution occurs.