Abstract

Expropriation or Reappropriation of the Past French National History in Museums after the Revolution

By expropriating ecclesiastical goods, royal treasures, the property of emigrants and of the dissolved academies, the French Revolution set in motion a process of rethinking historical heritage. This handing over of monuments and works of art – artefacts of the past – to the state made them available for a new discourse: the complete history of the French nation. They became “historical monuments”, material sources or testimonies of a past they now had to reproduce in its totality, chronologically and across classes. The monuments were consequently subjected to a semantic reinterpretation: they forfeited their monarchic and religious meanings, acquiring instead historical and national overtones. This process of rethinking and revaluation was by no means linear, nor was it consistent. The first museum exhibition of the national past was opened to the public only after Robespierre's downfall. The historic exhibits were not housed in the Louvre, which restricted itself to universal masterpieces, but in the Musée des monuments français (1795–1816). This and not the Louvre was the place where the uniqueness, the autochthonous, the specific of the nation was harboured and arranged according to centuries, an entire national history on display.

The vibrant staging of the past, the reproduction of the “colour” of past centuries on show in this museum prompted several representatives of the “nouvelle école historique” to declare that it had paved the way for the return of historical studies.