Is there a place online where one can download papers that have appeared in the Astérisque if "your institution subscribes"? I am especially interested in back issues: Astérisque series published a lot of interesting papers which I would like to read, yet it seems to me the only way to access them is to take a trip to your library and pray that it has them in print. This being ridiculous in 21st century, I wonder if there is a place online with *.pdf versions of the issues…
[Math] Where to find Astérisque online
journalsonline-resources
Related Solutions
First, there's no need to focus on online copies, as asked for in the question. We used to have things called libraries which contain journal articles in them. :) Try looking there.
More seriously, I think your task is to a large extent hopeless. Most of those works were never translated into English. But there are numerous English language sources which describe some aspect of how class field theory was originally developed and you should start there.
Here are some:
G. Frei, Heinrich Weber and the Emergence of Class Field Theory, in ``The History of Modern Mathematics, vol. 1: Ideas and their Reception,'' (J. McCleary and D. E. Rowe, ed.) Academic Press, Boston, 1989, 424--450.
H. Hasse, ``Class Field Theory,'' Lecture Notes # 11, Dept. Math. Univ. Laval, Quebec, 1973. [This is basically adapted from his paper in Cassels and Frohlich, but has some nuggets that were not in C&F.]
K. Iwasawa, On papers of Takagi in Number Theory, in ``Teiji Takagi Collected Papers,'' 2nd ed., Springer-Verlag, Tokyo, 1990, 342--351.
S. Iyanaga, ``The Theory of Numbers,'' North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1975. [The end of the book has a nice exposition of how alg. number theory developed up to class field theory.]
S. Iyanaga, On the life and works of Teiji Takagi, in ``Teiji Takagi Collected Papers,'' 2nd ed., Springer-Verlag, Tokyo, 1990, 354--371.
S. Iyanaga, Travaux de Claude Chevalley sur la th\'eorie du corps de classes: Introduction, Japan. J. Math. 1 (2006), 25--85. [Are you OK with French?]
M. Katsuya, The Establishment of the Takagi--Artin Class Field Theory, in ``The Intersection of History and Mathematics,'' (C. Sasaki, M. Sugiura, J. W. Dauben ed.), Birkhauser, Boston, 1995, 109--128.
T. Masahito, Three Aspects of the Theory of Complex Multiplication,
``The Intersection of History and Mathematics,'' (C. Sasaki, M. Sugiura, J. W. Dauben ed.),
Birkhauser, Boston, 1995, 91--108.
K. Miyake, Teiji Takagi, Founder of the Japanese School of Modern Mathematics, Japan. J. Math. 2 (2007), 151--164.
P. Roquette, Class Field Theory in Characteristic $p$, its Origin and Development, in ``Class Field Theory -- its Centenary and Prospect,'' Math. Soc. Japan, Tokyo, 2001, 549--631.
H. Weyl, David Hilbert and His Mathematical Work, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. {\bf 50} (1944), 612--654. [Hilbert's obituary]
I did write up something myself about a year or so ago on the history of class field theory just to put in one place what I was able to cobble together from these kinds of sources. See
http://www.math.uconn.edu/~kconrad/blurbs/gradnumthy/cfthistory.pdf
which contains the above references as the bulk of the bibliography (I did not just type all those articles references above by hand!) The main thing which had baffled me at first was how they originally defined the local norm residue symbol at ramified primes. I give some examples of how this was determined in the original language of central simple algebras.
Comments. For my book Classics on Fractals I published translations of various relevant papers. I wrote to the copyright owners (such as learned societies who published the journals) for permission to do this. (This was back in the Olden Days, 20 years ago, when email was not as common as today.) My publisher (Addison-Wesley) gave me the wording to use in making the requests. In a few cases, the publishing organization asked for some payment in return for permission, or for a copy of the published book. In a few cases the original copyrighting organization no longer existed but some successor organization provided permission. For 3 (out of 20) papers I got no response, or did not find anyone to ask. But I kept the documentation of what I had done in case they would surface later (none has in 20 years).
Best Answer
The first 180 volumes of Astérisque are now electronically available for free
http://www.numdam.org/journals/AST/
EDIT: now 300+ volumes