Abstract

When the monarchy in France collapsed in 1789, the ambitious project of Louis XVI's minister of the arts, the Comte d'Angiviller, to transform the Grand Gallery of the Louvre palace into the most splendid museum of art in Europe collapsed with it. D'Angiviller himself fled the country and the first Revolutionary government was left to complete the Louvre project and to claim it as their own. On 10 August 1793 the doors of the Musee du Louvre were opened and the public was invited to inspect works of art that had once belonged to the king, his courtiers, and the Church, but which now belonged to the Republic, and a space that was no longer a royal palace but a palace of the people. The purpose of this essay is to examine aspects of the formation of the Musee du Louvre at the height of the French Revolution and the symbolic values it possessed at the time.

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