Tom Stammers. The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris, c.1790–1890.

Abstract

The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris is a welcome contribution to the expanding body of literature about the many unexpected cultural consequences of the French Revolution. Its topic is the widespread private collection of historical artifacts and art that occurred in the century that followed the outbreak of Revolution (c.1790–1890). The author, Thomas Stammers, attempts to correct a longstanding misconception that the French Revolution was largely successful when it attempted to replace the many privately held art collections throughout Old Regime France with large national institutions, most notably the Louvre. Instead, he argues that a whole new type of private collector emerged from the ruins of the Revolution, one who alternately challenged and complemented the state’s mission to imagine and preserve the cultural patrimony of France. While only the first two chapters of this book address the French Revolution directly, it is clear from the outset that the Revolutionary decade plays a central role in the nineteenth-century phenomenon of collecting. In his introduction, Stammers describes the Revolution’s impact as “both persistent and polyvalent” throughout the nineteenth century (10). The Revolution was certainly a foundational event for nineteenth-century collecting as it threw an unprecedented number of artworks and artifacts, which previously belonged to the church and aristocracy, into the public marketplace. However, the Revolution also initiated a new way of thinking about the material past as having great social and political power when reimagined as national heritage. Stammers cleverly demonstrates how many private collectors in the nineteenth century adopted a similarly didactic mission for their private collections. One of his most compelling case studies is of Jean-Louis Soulavie, who accumulated thousands of texts and images from the French Revolution in its immediate aftermath, convinced that by systematically arranging and studying his collection, he would uncover the underlying “logic” of the seemingly chaotic Revolution (100). By contrast, many major collectors later in the century were committed to recovering and promulgating a royalist narrative that challenged the nascent republic. In this way, Stammers demonstrates how such “private patrimony” pushes scholars of modern France to “reframe the old debate over whether the French Revolution ‘invented’ the concept of a uniform national heritage … and instead explore how plural and sometimes oppositional sites of memory were preserved within the post-revolutionary state” (299).