‘A landmark of the transience of all earthly greatness, glory and power!’ Versailles and the Myth of the Ancien Régime in the Writings and Collections of the Swedish Marquis Claes Lagergren (1853−1930)

Abstract

Born a Swedish farmer’s son, Claes Lagergren trained as a tradesman in Paris in the early 1870s. An unexpected inheritance made him financially independent and enabled him to begin his travels in Europe. Whilst in Rome, he converted to the Roman Catholic faith, an important step in a social career that rapidly introduced him to the upper echelons of Roman nobility – and particularly to those families that had stayed true to the Pope in the aftermath of the unification of Italy. Lagergren was introduced to the Papal court and to Pope Leo XII, who favoured him. Eventually, he was honoured with the title of marquis and became one of the Pope’s chamberlains. The Marquis was a diarist and published his memoirs in nine volumes in the 1920s. His writings are a barely explored source of his political and cultural views – and of his love for Versailles. During his many visits to the palace, informed by his reading of guidebooks and memoirs, he wrote about his sensations and experiences of the former royal site. Politically, Lagergren considered himself a legitimist who honoured the values of the Ancien Régime, and he treasured the Restoration. From this perspective, Versailles and its palace constituted a strong symbol and lieu de mémoire of pre-revolutionary Europe. In the early 1880s, Lagergren married the wealthy American Caroline Russell. The couple bought seventeenth-century Tyresö Castle, outside Stockholm − a home that Lagergren would bequeath to a Stockholm museum, the Nordiska museet, after his death in 1930. Tyresö became a place where Lagergren displayed his collections, in particular portraits of members of the French Bourbon dynasty that he had seen at Versailles.