Poetique de la collection au XIXe siecle. Du document de l'historien au bibelot de l'esthete

Abstract

Pety's book considers the dynamic relationship between nineteenth-century French literature and the collection, more specifically how the former reflected and crystallized the complex structural processes inherent to the intellectual and physical construction of the collection. It examines how both fields have been inflected by cultural and epistemological changes, and how the collection, as evidence of a historical conscience, testified to a specific relationship with temporality. Divided into three parts, the book first locates the place of texts and objects in the construction of historical narratives. In the nineteenth century, documents were inextricably linked to the notion of historical self-reflexivity, and historians increasingly came to use objects in addition to written sources as part of their methodology of investigating and comprehending the past. The author argues that history and collections were both linked to a linear conception of history, and shared the same epistemological ground. A sophisticated examination of the Goncourt brothers’ extensive reliance on historical documents highlights the evocative power of artefacts, and the link between aesthetic emotion and the process of historical enquiry. The author makes a further analogy between the historian and the collector in their mutual quest for objects/documents: like the bibelot, the historical document is kept, and its physicality revered. Here the Goncourts’ method of historical investigation through élite objects from the realm of the intime is contrasted with Champfleury's appropriation of more humble historical records through which the political history of France could be understood. Germane to both enterprises, the valorization of objects was seen as a means of reclaiming and resuscitating the past.