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French History Advance Access originally published online on July 11, 2008
French History 2008 22(3):295-315; doi:10.1093/fh/crn026
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The bric-a-brac of the old regime: collecting and cultural history in post-revolutionary france

Tom Stammers*

* The author is a PhD candidate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, CB2 3AP. He may be contacted at tes27{at}cam.ac.uk


  Abstract

The French Revolution unleashed an earthquake not just in the world of governance and ideas but also in the world of things. It generated profound changes in both political and material culture. This paper discusses some of the legacies of the Revolution for the distribution and exhibition of historical artefacts, and also for how nineteenth-century historians approached and interpreted their sources. For in their iconoclastic fury, the revolutionaries undoubtedly gave an unanticipated boost to amateur historians, urban antiquarians and practitioners of cultural history. Exploring the close connections between the collector's passion and the historian's craft in the middle of the nineteenth century, the paper traces how the acquisition and scrutiny of objects displaced or produced by the French Revolution encouraged new forms of historical writing, and new possibilities for the historical imagination.


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