The Purchase of the Past: Collecting culture in post-Revolutionary Paris, c.1790–1890

Abstract

Few people are better qualified to tackle a sweeping analysis of the political, social and emotional motivations of collectors in France during the century following the French Revolution than Tom Stammers, as his bibliography testifies. The Revolution turned upside down the existing culture of collecting, which had been tied to the institutions of the monarchy. Stammers describes the Revolution as triggering a century in which collecting was reimagined, problematized, mobilized and contested. Royal, aristocratic and clerical collections entered into commercial circulation, resulting in a new, more democratic Parisian geography of commerce. Many collectors wished to reconnect modern France with its pre-revolutionary origins and charted the history of the objects they collected with increasing documentary research. Stammers seeks to redress the balance of historical methodologies by examining the overlooked but crucially important role played by the motivations of antiquaries and collectors in illuminating our understanding of French nineteenth-century intellectual production. He...