Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881-1914). Privacy, Publicity, and Personality

Abstract

The 1902 opening of the Parisian museum dedicated to Victor Hugo started a trend that, a century later, has made the writer house museum into a significant and distinguishing asset to the French heritage industry. Its well organized infrastructure of over 200 literary homes opened to the public doubtless is unparalleled elsewhere, as is the funding by various governmental bodies – local, regional and national – supporting these institutions. In her book on the origins of this phenomenon, Elizabeth Emery argues that in France the rise of interest in such literary homes at the turn of the last century is not just the result of the efforts of some individual admirers of the writers concerned, like Paul Beuve, whose collection of over 4,000 pieces of Hugo memorabilia in 1903 was incorporated into the recently established museum at the Place des Vosges. Concentrating on the two decades preceding the opening of the Maison Hugo, the author shows that curiosity for the domestic interior in general and for those of writers in particular was fostered by the celebrity cult that developed in the popular illustrated press, notably in a genre that offered interviews and pictures of celebrities in their private dwellings.