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 bric-a-brac of the old regime: collecting and cultural history in post-revolutionary france
* The author is a PhD candidate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, CB2 3AP. He may be contacted at tes27{at}cam.ac.uk
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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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If most scholars today accept the late Francois Furet's sober verdict, that ‘the French Revolution is over’, then they continue to wrestle with how and when it became ‘history’.1 This is a complex question. The revolutionaries themselves were the first to grapple with their own ‘historicity’, expressed in their ambiguous repudiation of that newly coined entity, the ancien régime.2 On the one hand, the Revolution and its achievements continued to feed ceaselessly into all areas of French political and cultural life. Excellent studies have demonstrated how the ideals and personalities of 1789 animated and incarnated collective identities throughout the nineteenth century, acting as the catalyst for the formation of distinct, partisan ‘traditions’.3 In this sense, the Revolution never faded into a distant or sanitized past. On the other hand, for all its talismanic power in the present, it was also subjected to endless retrospective descriptions and analyses. Indeed, it has long been recognized that the Revolution influenced how ‘history’ was defined in the first place, marking a seismic moment in the growth of popular historical consciousness.4 In the aftermath of the millenarianism of the Year II, French men and women from all classes embraced the national past with renewed vigour and fascination. The Revolution helped generate this awareness, but it also acted as the prism through which historical events were reimagined and represented.5 History was scoured for portents of the upheavals of 1789. The past was thus conceived as a political arsenal and battleground, scarred by successive guerres de mémoire.6
This paper will examine the question from quite a different angle: namely that of material culture. For the Revolution did not just stimulate a widespread attraction to the past, it also shaped how this history would be written and with what sources. By tracing the impact of the revolutionary upheaval on objects and things—and not just in the 1790s, but also deep into the nineteenth century—we can appreciate how material culture helped undergird the flourishing of historical awareness. The idea that the Revolution might have played a positive role in this domain would have seemed strange to its early conservative opponents. For the head of the Archives Nationales, the Marquis de Laborde, ‘the most artistic country on earth, the country richest in works of art’, under the Convention became ‘covered in ruins’.7 Yet it was precisely this disruptive fury—pillaging chateaux, dissolving monasteries, dismantling clerical libraries—that helped redistribute and reclassify a whole host of historical souvenirs. The most obvious locus for examining the new status of such objects was of course the public museum. It has been argued that the closed world of the connoisseurs was shattered at the Revolution, and that art was inserted into a national, civic culture. Emblematic of this process for many scholars is the salvage work of Alexandre Lenoir, and the foundation of the Musée des Monuments Français.8 While the most hateful emblems of the old order perished in bouts of popular iconoclasm, other vestiges of the French past were rehoused and ‘recuperated’ as tools for republican pedagogy and artistic emulation.9
Yet in the face of this fascinating scholarship, the persistence of the private collectors has often been overlooked. Rather than sounding the death-knell of collections particulières, swept away in a tide of nation-state initiatives, the Revolution and its attendant dislocations also provided fertile ground on which amateurs and speculators could thrive. Instead of rehashing the old polemics about the Jacobin vandalism, scholars need to pay more attention to the fate of objects that were displaced, rather than destroyed or displayed, by revolutionary fervour. By switching our inquiries from museums to private collections, we also help retrieve the diversity of motives—psychological, financial, scholarly, affective—that prompted individual agents to conserve and appropriate the past. In this way, the world of collectors might act as a counterweight to the reduction of French history to purely political considerations.10 Relics from the past circulated among a wide array of individuals and enthusiasts, outside of state institutions or surveillance. And this was particularly true for materials relating to the Revolution. When successive regimes shunned the painful reminders of the guillotine and civil war, it was lone individuals who stored and sheltered the strange alluvium of the First Republic. It was these individuals, largely forgotten in surveys of the foremost interpreters of 1789, who played a crucial role in the reception and transmission of the revolutionary heritage.11
Moreover, as one of the foremost experts of the history of collecting, Krystof Pomian, has argued, private collections have long functioned as ‘sources of cultural innovation’.12 While such an observation has been amply confirmed in research on literature and visual arts, it is arguably also true for historical thinking.13 The importance of collections lay not only simply in the conservation of items but also in their analysis; the collection provided a space for exploration and ‘curiosity’, in which mementos could be assembled and reassembled in a wide variety of series.14 And contrary to the contemporary stereotype of the reclusive collector, guarding his hoard against intruders, private cabinets actually proved an indispensable point of call for historians in search of fragile and unusual sources. Indeed, for the first historians of the Revolution, there were few alternatives. The place of material culture therefore needs to be worked back into the history of historiography.15 Before the professionalization of the discipline under the Third Republic, with the consolidation of public archives and the adoption of rigorous methods of documentary criticism, a vibrant strand of amateur historians sought to piece together the events of the late eighteenth century using the humblest scraps and shards of the era. In this work of reconstruction, they built directly on the first generation of collectors, those contemporaries of the Revolution who began to preserve even in the midst of the maelstrom.
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From its opening chapter, the Revolution presented an irresistible opportunity to scavengers of historical artefacts. In the summer of 1789, the smouldering ruins of the Bastille were overrun with eager collectors, picking their way through the charred remnants to lay their hands on ancient manuscripts. Among this group of gleaners was the playwright Beaumarchais, looking for trophies of his bravery, as well as Matthieu-Guillaume Villenave, autograph connoisseur.16 As the ancient monarchy was broken up, wily individuals scrambled for valuable debris. Scientist and revolutionary sympathiser the abbé Soulavie trawled the stalls of the Seine during the 1790s to amass over 25,000 prints and engravings. He acted for the sake of future historians who would one day consult his ‘irreproachable’ sources to expose the lies and distortions spread by printed propaganda.17 Yet many collectors did not have such disinterested purposes; profit, rather than posterity, was their primary concern. For instance, when the royal château of Sceaux was demolished in 1794, its library of theological works was slated to be pulped into artillery cartridges. A quick-witted Paris bookseller persuaded the cart driver to hand over the doomed cargo, in exchange for the same weight of scrap paper, and then made a fortune selling on the treasures to antiquarians in England.18
No wonder that many suspected that some vandals were motivated less by republican zeal than by ‘the spirit of speculation’. Temporarily hiding their pilfered trophies, these opportunistic iconoclasts later sold their stash to ‘lovers of royalty or religion’ at exorbitant prices.19 Yet if it brought rewards, conservation also ran serious political risks. During the paranoid years of the Terror, keepsakes from the old regime carried the whiff of counter-revolution. One boy from the provinces stuffed his pockets with records looted from the Bastille in 1789, only to see his mother burn the whole stash four years later. As troops massed nearby for the siege of Lyon, she feared that safeguarding lettres de cachet signed by a former King Louis might be political suicide.20 In Paris, houses were subject to routine search by officers from the local sections. Duplanil, a scholar and translator, was lucky to escape with his life after a chance inspection revealed drawers full of manuscripts signed by monarchs and aristocrats, such as Louis XIV and Turenne. The fact that his correspondents were long dead did not apparently dispel suspicions that he was in league with enemies of the people. Duplanil escaped with his life, but his precious papers were pulped into ammunition.21 No wonder that finds were concealed with the greatest care. The stone heads of France's kings, lopped off from the west front of Notre-Dame cathedral, were uncovered intact in a cellar as late as 1975.22
Yet for the bold collector, the upheavals of the 1790s offered an unparalleled chance to lay hands on a host of unique, profitable and peculiar historical objects. An assistant to Lenoir, one Ledru, was able to salvage coronets, sceptres, burial robes and even mortal remains from the desecration of Saint -Denis. Later mayor of Fontenay-aux-Roses, and uncle to the radical politician Ledru-Rollin, he constructed a personal ossuary from the broken royal tombs. Giving tours around his ghoulish collection, Ledru would recall with a shudder the day he gazed upon the exposed cadavers of the French kings—Louis XIII still sporting his moustache and Louis XIV unchanged except for an ebony hue in his face. Ledru kept his collection a secret from all except trusted savants, since he feared having to return his booty to the state.23 Equally bizarre, and dating from the attack on the Sorbonne in 1793, the Armez family came to own the partially preserved head of Cardinal Richelieu. Abbé Armez was given the grim curio by a local hat-maker, who had kept it hidden in the rear of his shop. This tradesman had snatched the head out of the tomb while the other members of his revolutionary delegation were on their lunch-break, but handed it over to the abbé in a fit of post-Thermidorian anxiety. The skull stayed in the Armez family for many years, with various schemes floated to entrust it to the Comité historique des Arts et Monuments.24 In the end, the head was solemnly interred back in the Sorbonne vaults only in 1867, in the presence of the Archbishop of Paris, the Richelieu family and several eminent academicians.25
In laying the head to rest, the Archbishop fervently wished that this ‘filial duty’ and ‘work of repatriation’ would also exorcize the cruel legacy of the Revolution. ‘It is the wisdom of the present which has just protested against the inexperience and the deviations of the past’, he boasted. ‘It is right to show that violence never has the last word, but that reason always ends up being vindicated.’26 Yet time and again, such confidence proved misplaced. The nineteenth century would continue to wrestle with the question of restoring countless dispersed objects to their original owners. Though the returning Bourbon monarchy may have been inaugurated in a symbolic blaze of reburials and restitutions—whether the remains of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, or the heart of Turenne—the redistributive process went on far beyond 1815.27 Looted objects continued to surface out in the open market. In 1846, after the death of a local resident in Saint-Denis, a sale was organized offering an extraordinary mass of fragments scavenged from the basilica in 1793, including assorted parts of Pepin the Short, the hand of Louis XII and the skull of abbé Suger. The government was so eager to suppress the scandal that it intervened to put a halt to the sale.28 Though Ledru's family begrudgingly sent his collection of regal remains to the Ministry of Public Works during the Second Empire, it was only in 1894 that these grim souvenirs were returned to the Basilica from which they had been stolen ninety-nine years before.29
In parallel to the proliferation of state museums under the July Monarchy, there thus existed a nebulous network of private collections, crammed with rich pickings gleaned out of the revolutionary turmoil. Mirabeau's skull adorned the home of Dr Joseph Sue, father to the melodramatic novelist, while Voltaire's finger, snapped off during his exhumation in 1791, languished in an amateur natural history cabinet in Troyes.30 In their breadth of coverage and degree of organization, these private hordes often aspired to equal or surpass public museums. Fossé d'Arcosse, a bureaucrat at the Cour des Comptes who became a leading collector in the bumper years of the Restoration, transformed his house in Versailles into ‘the living memorial’ of his life's passion, a fervent dedication to ‘the cult of everything which interests history, the fine arts, and literature’. He set an example to other collectors in chronologically grouping together autographs, rare books and engravings related to the same period. Here were assembled ‘historical souvenirs from all eras, specimens from all the arts’, including crass caricatures, forgotten masterpieces by Boucher and knick-knacks from the French kings. Yet in spite of his eclectic tastes, the collection was hailed as that of a ‘philosopher’, a ‘work of time, of science, of taste,’ a ‘thousand times handled, leafed through, collated, annotated.’31
In contrast to some recent interpretations, it would thus be a mistake to imagine private collections simply as capricious sanctuaries, diametrically opposed to the educative purpose of modern museums.32 For collectors often stressed scientific rigour as much as personal whimsy, and aspired to a broader public usefulness. The skull of Richelieu owned by Armez was exhibited to a select group of historians, including Victor Cousin, and in 1840 was loaned out to an artist charged with painting the cardinal's portrait in the state council chambers.33 This alternative network of resources merits far greater scholarly attention. For the aftermath of the Jacobin vandalism witnessed not only the birth-pangs of national museums, but also a ‘golden age’ for flea-markets, scrap-yards and amateur collectors.34 From the Empire onwards, the streets and stalls of Paris teemed with displaced treasures and scattered riches. Journalist Henri Rochefort fondly recalled the abundant bargains to be found amidst the second-hand stalls of the Empire and Restoration. ‘From 1810 to 1825’, he reflected, ‘not a day passed which was not marked by the discovery of some new abandoned or buried masterpiece’. Thanks to the ‘artistic upheaval triggered by the revolution’, which scattered paintings and precious objects in all directions, individual collectors had, inexpensively, been able to build up galleries which were now of an ‘almost inestimable value’.35 The Revolution had set loose countless objects from their traditional settings, and swept them into new circuits of exchange, display and interpretation.
As a result, the capital was flooded with the debris of the old regime, helping to stimulate and supply the growing vogue for historical souvenirs.36 The first significant sale of historical autographs took place in 1822 under the auspices of Villenave. Although it generated little income at the time, it signalled the arrival of a cultural practice that would mushroom over the coming decades, and eventually advance claims to being a historical science in its own right.37 As well as the buoyant trade in jottings and lettres intimes by France's famous sons and daughters, sold at the Salle Silvestre or through specialist retailers like the Charavay dynasty, there was also a frenzy of interest in the Parisian auction houses. By 1852, under pressure for larger premises, the salesroom moved on the Hotel Drouot, ‘the Bourse of art and bric-a-brac’. Whether medals, books, prints, furniture, petty curios, all these ‘crumbs of the past’ had become instructive, fashionable and eminently collectable.38 In the opinion of one critic, its walls lined with wonders were, on any given day, ‘full of enough curiosities to make the fortune of three or four provincial museums’.39 The Hotel Drouot acted as the magnet for the refuse of the Revolution, sweeping up everything from a cafetiere belonging to Madame du Barry to an edict penned by Fouquier-Tinville. For Jules Clarétie, it resembled ‘an immense mausoleum where, pell-mell, as in an ossuary, all the detritus of Paris gathered, high and low life’.40
This context of collecting seems particularly important for the fresh avenues opening up in historical writing by the mid-nineteenth century. The richness of potential sources lurking along the Seine contrasted markedly with the difficulties amateur historians encountered in using public resources. Many Parisian archives were still not catalogued, had restricted access, and relied on curatorial nepotism. Ministerial archives in particular, such as foreign affairs, were almost entirely off limits.41 High-profile thefts and the black market contraband in ancient papers remained a source of scandal across the century.42 Maxime du Camp lambasted the staff of the old Bibliothèque de Paris for borrowing titles indefinitely, losing volumes and undermining the value of the collections.43 Beyond the book stacks, a very partial vision of history was on offer inside state museums. The historical galleries at Versailles, and the Musée des Souverains at the Louvre, dwelled overwhelmingly on medieval heroes, illustrious battles and court regalia.44 All these limitations were exacerbated for historians interested in the eighteenth century, where the materials were considered too recent to fall within the remit of conservation.45 As a result, many amateur historians eagerly supplemented the paucity of official materials with their own purchases and the support of private collectors. In the process, historical writing and thinking became enmeshed in a context that significantly inflected intellectual approaches to the past.
We therefore find many lines of historical inquiry emerging directly out of the booming trade in bibelots and bric-a-brac. The Goncourt brothers, who perfectly embodied the fusion of the historian with the collector, began their purchases in the summer of 1848, when once more ‘everything was thrown out in the street’.46 But they were far from alone. Their professed intellectual ancestor, the historian Amans-Alexis de Monteil, had constructed his texts out of ‘those voices, those rumours, those prayers, those shards, those rags of the past that the revolution of 1792 had scattered to the four winds’.47 Yet the widespread turn to the informal resources of the antiques market was not merely born of necessity. It also reflected a growing conviction in the explanatory potential of material culture. Archivist and amateur historian Mathurin de Lescure, keen rival to the Goncourts, sounded the charge to his contemporaries in 1864, marshalling them towards the ‘dung-heap of the ancien régime, piled up by the revolutionary scavengers. There are often pearls in this trash’.48 The historian was here cast an urban archaeologist, diligently piecing together the spirit of the past from the fragments and scraps that survived in the present, whatever their aesthetic merit and wherever they might be found. After all, as Victor Hugo suggested in the sewer sequences of Les Misérables, the true history of Paris might best be written from the dustbin—what the city concealed, rejected and tried to throw away.49
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There is a second aspect of the Revolution's relationship with material culture that we need to consider. Not only did it rip out the fixtures and fittings of the old regime, furnishing the Romantic generation with an abundance of new tools for reconstructing the past, but it also produced its own glut of plates and pikes, bonnets and banners, pamphlets and petitions, seals and swords.50 Crafted in the heat of struggle, these items were often crudely designed, cheaply produced and ephemeral in nature. Jauffret, an early historian of the theatre under the Revolution, articulated the common view that as far as art was concerned, ‘nothing like that existed during the revolutionary period’.51 ‘What we normally call by the name of literature’, another student of the era wrote, ‘disappeared ... like a grain of sand in the whirl of the storm’.52 Supposedly devoid of aesthetic merit, and politically subversive, the patriotic knick-knacks and print culture of the Revolution were almost entirely ignored by state institutions. This was part of a concerted policy of oubli. In contrast to the state-sponsored commemoration of distant epochs from the French national past, the eighteenth century, and especially the Revolution, were conspicuous by their absence. As many modern commentators have argued, the Revolution represented a ‘black hole’ at the heart of French historicism.53 In light of this vacuum, the impulse for the preservation of revolutionary paraphernalia came almost entirely from below, and more particularly from those who had lived through the hopes and disappointments of that age.
Peter Fritzsche has recently claimed that the fall of the Bastille represents the first instance of ‘flashbulb’ memory in European history, namely an event which forced contemporaries to recall where they were and what they were doing when they heard the startling news. It thus provided a mental landmark which all those who lived through came to invoke in their own experience.54 It is interesting to speculate how far this ‘testimonial impulse’, this awareness of a unique and unprecedented event, also stimulated both rich and poor citizens alike to conserve its ephemeral manifestations. To this extent, the preservation and circulation of revolutionary memorabilia has clear affinities with the ‘cult of seditious objects’ that flourished around Napoleon.55 Who conserved revolutionary souvenirs, and for what reasons? How widespread was the practice? For those whose career peaked during the Revolution, or who knew some of its leading actors, the urge to collect obviously overlapped with autobiography. Thus the conventionnel Portiez de l’Oise accumulated a large collection of decrees and political posters, which were sold off after his death by his widow.56 Similarly, Corbeau de Saint-Albin, friend of Desmoulins, secretary to Bernadotte, and eventual founder of the liberal newspaper the Constitutionnel, threw himself into piling up mementos and portraits of the Committee of Public Safety. He drew directly on his own collections when penning his popular biographies of Napoleonic military heroes.57
Family members and relatives also played a crucial role in safeguarding the possessions of radical politicians. Until 1789 was officially embraced by the Third Republic, many of these potentially seditious items were kept away from prying eyes, and often reserved for a circle of reliable initiates. One such shrine was the home of Lucas de Montigny, the adopted son of Mirabeau. When not working as a civil servant for the Prefecture of the Seine, Montigny dedicated himself to the ‘family mission’ of bringing together every scrap of paper or memento relating to the famous orator.58 ‘Journeys, expenses, outlays of all kinds, nothing cost too much to attain this goal’; the end result was a ‘rare collection of books, bronzes and autograph manuscripts’, which he permitted historians and statesmen to peruse.59 For some, especially relatives, conservation could be an almost religious duty. In 1859, the upstanding and devout Madame Lebas still cherished a Marseillaise-singing parrot once owned by her father, the landlord of Robespierre. Indeed, she could not say the name of her ‘Saint Maximilien’ without making the sign of the cross.60
For others, modern collectibles represented a sound investment. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, souvenirs of leading Jacobins changed hands at derisory prices: in 1829, writings by Saint-Just went for just 4 francs, while Robespierre's decree setting up the revolutionary tribunal cost merely 15 francs.61 Although successive political regimes may have been committed to a policy of forgetfulness, unwelcome reminders of the revolutionary years regularly surfaced in the Parisian marketplace. Lockets, papers and keepsakes belonging to revolutionary politicians were regularly auctioned off by impoverished relatives. In 1828, the personal effects of notorious public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, fetched over 330 francs in a sale overseen by his widow.62 In 1847, confronted with spiralling personal debts, Clement-Henri Sanson, grandson of the infamous dynasty of executioners, was forced to sell off the macabre family silver. Swords, axes and cutlasses changed hands easily, though the inconvenient size of the prize guillotine made it harder to sell. When Sanson offered the guillotine to the Musée d’Artillerie, the director was flatly refused; instead the machine's blueprints were sold to Madame Tussaud's in London, where a working replica was installed.63
By reconstructing the afterlives of some of the most iconic symbols of the Revolution, we can clearly see how hiding and trading radical memorabilia was a cross-class affair. Marat's bath, having been sold off to a scrap-iron dealer in 1793, was bought by a rising star lieutenant of the Grande Armée, who bequeathed it in turn to his god-fearing daughter. On her deathbed, she left it to her close ally, the curé Rio. Hence the bathtub of the ‘ami du peuple’ lurked improbably for over twenty years hidden in a chicken shed on the ‘Ile aux Moines’. When it came to light again in 1885, the priests struggled to find any national institution willing to house the infamous piece.64 Equally strange is the odyssey of Charlotte Corday's skull. Although uncertainty surrounds how it was first acquired, the cranium of Marat's murderer passed through several hands until around 1840 it served as a grim table-decoration, terrifying select dinner guests at the house of the aforementioned prankster Corbeau de Saint-Albin.65 It then probably passed to education minister Victor Duruy, then Prince Roland Bonaparte, before turning up in the anthropological section of 1889 Universal Exhibition.66 Probably purchased from the executioner in 1793, whoever first acquired the skull appeared to have bribed others into silence by handing out her front teeth as gifts.67
However unusual these objects, the tangled itinerary of both relics nonetheless sheds light on the context in which revolutionary material circulated. It is a strange web of connections stretching from lowly flea-markets to wealthy scholars and connoisseurs. Many owners had no interest in reconstructing political ‘traditions’ out of their finds. The foremost collector of French Revolution ephemera in the nineteenth century was no friend whatsoever to the principles of 1789. The marquis de la Bedoyère was a renowned bibliophile and connoisseur of luxuriant bindings, who had embarked on building up revolutionary material after a chance visit to a junk shop in the Midi in 1805. It is ironic that his decision to collect such materials came in the midst of a trip in which he repeatedly lamented the devastation wrought by the Jacobins in the south.68 The marquis' treasure trove mushroomed over fifty years to comprise over 100,000 pieces, including 60,000 pamphlets and placards; 4,000 volumes of history, memoirs, almanachs; 2,000 newspapers, 4,000 historic engravings and eighty folders of handwritten letters. Despite being a former member of the royal guard of Charles X, Huchet de la Bedoyère was committed to even-handedly assembling materials from across the entire political spectrum. Whereas historians had stoked up the bitterness of the past, collectors like the marquis envisaged their tangible, incontrovertible records as facilitating a ‘time of justice and reconciliation’—an end to the interminable memory wars.69
Thus, though the market value for revolutionary items may have grown over the century, this should not be seen as an infallible marker of reviving republican ideals. The price of old regime personalities also soared. It was the historical, rather than political, valence of an object that carried the greatest weight.70 Benjamin Fillon, who inherited much of the Bedoyère and Deschiens stockpiles, similarly disavowed any ideological agenda. A collector since 1839, Fillon also dabbled in the distinctly un-revolutionary pursuits of Poitevin ceramics and numismatics. Voluntarily leaving Paris following the Bonapartist coup of 1851, Fillon embraced collecting as a means of exchanging the ugly realities of modern politics for a ‘patrie idéale’. He valued the art produced during the First Republic primarily on formal or historical grounds, for its ‘spontaneity of invention’ or as evidence for the ‘manners of an era or private character’. His collection was scrupulously bipartisan, featuring republican almanachs alongside many mementos of counter-revolutionary insurgency from his native region, the Vendée.71 In order to bring the past more vividly to life, Fillon placed contemporary engravings in juxtaposition with his autographs, giving ‘an exact idea of the milieu in which the authors of these documents lived’.72 There could be many motives behind collecting revolutionary paraphernalia—recreational, escapist, prurient and scholarly—and political militancy often played a smaller role than the quest for impartiality, comprehensiveness and even ‘positivist’ objectivity.
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Having discussed why it was that individuals amassed historical artefacts, we now need to investigate how they were used. For arguably the nature of these materials helped open up new avenues in social and cultural history. By the mid-nineteenth century, personal stockpiles were contributing significantly to French historiography, and especially to the historiography of the Revolution. Amateurs bragged that ‘the more the work is significant and important, by subject and name, the more the author relies upon the generosity of private collections’.73 The 1860s in particular witnessed a string of seminal publications, which drew heavily both on intensive archival research and leading autograph collectors.74 Historical writing emerged out of circles of amateur sociability, knitted together by a common passion and pursuit. Charles Vatel opened his much-fêted 1864 study on Charlotte Corday with a long list of all the dozens of individuals who had supplied him with sources, ashamed that historians too often failed to acknowledge their gratitude. For Vatel, the collectors were not simply facilitators, but collaborators in his project. In his reckoning, ‘a historical compilation is an essentially collective work; it is only possible with the help of all the persons who, possessing documents or souvenirs, documents or traditions on the subject of the work, are willing to bring their stone to the edifice’.75
However, the harmonious co-operation of collectors could not be assumed. Following a spate of high-profile forgeries and frauds, the authenticity of artefacts was always contentious. Collaboration between historians and collectors remained fraught with tension, hedged around with suspicions of ingratitude, pilfering, even confiscation by the state.76 Moreover, the sharing of materials was rarely a passive transaction of supply and demand. On one hand, working with different sources prompted historians to refine new techniques of looking at and handling evidence, and reshaped their interpretive assumptions. On the other hand, collectors refused to languish as unacknowledged accomplices to the historian, but took pride in being coevals in a shared scientific endeavour. The editors of the autograph review Isographie regarded their growing expertise as a worthy counterpart to the methodological rigour of the Ecole des Chartes.77 From this, it was but a short step to collectors who both published and interpreted their treasures. An alternative figure, the historian-collector, was born; and with him, came new ways of retrieving the past.
In a string of publications, a range of historian-collectors drew on their own eclectic possessions to expand the ways in which the recent past was visualized. In 1819, Pierre Hennin, a diplomat and antiquarian, published a numismatic history of the Revolution, where the principal actors and events were resurrected through a panoramic survey of the imagery embossed on its coins. ‘I have attempted to produce a work which might be agreed upon by all Frenchmen’, he wrote in the preface, ‘whatever their opinions of the events of the Revolution and our country's affairs’. Hennin lamented the horrors of iconoclasm, which had ravaged the public collections, and regarded his work as a warning against descending into further strife and factionalism.78 With the development of printing technologies, illustrating historical incidents with engravings and lithographs became immensely popular.79 This interest in portraits and pictures soon widened out to encompass other cultural barometers. By the Second Empire, aspects of the revolutionary mindset were frequently deduced from contemporary poems, cartoons, clothing and songs.80 Most famously, in 1867 the ideologue of Realism, Jules Champfleury, reinterpreted the Revolution based on changing motifs found among his collection of mass-produced, patriotic pottery. Director at the Sèvres porcelain factory, Champfleury insisted that such transient, if tasteless, items provided fresh ‘information on manners’ and ‘evidence of patriotic aspirations’, unobtainable from written sources.81
The most celebrated of all collectors-cum-historians of this period were undoubtedly the brothers Goncourt. Though they may have deplored Champfleury's want of taste, they too began their historical career with the study of revolutionary artefacts.82 Neglected by scholars today, their 1854 Histoire de la société française pendant la Révolution represented a bold foray into cultural history. Constructed out of over 15,000 autographs bought from the Charavay brothers, the text furnished a glittering mosaic of inventories and epigrams, panorama and analysis, knitted together through virtuoso stretches of dense, descriptive prose. Their theme was how ‘a country of comedy, opera, novels, little histories and trifles’ had become in a matter of months ‘a mêlée of ponderous voices, each carrying not a witty paradox, but the war of parties.’83 To map and evaluate the full scale of this transformation, the Goncourts’ chapters examined topics which ranged from duelling and slang to furniture and pornography. For instance, the authors allocated far more space to Palloy and his Bastille merchandise than to the fall of the fortress itself. Stripped of their finery, French ladies were depicted decked out with the latest commemorative jewellery, such as tricolour snuff-boxes, rings inset with Bastille stones and crystal earrings inscribed with constitutional slogans.84 The Goncourts later concluded that the terminus point of the entire revolutionary process had been ‘the materialization of man’.85 For their many admirers, the brothers’ fetish for artefacts and minor details signalled nothing short of a whole new philosophy towards the past; a means of ‘creating history out of the very detritus of history itself’.86
But predating these methods, and perfectly embodying the convergence between cultural history and collecting practice, was the work of Auguste Challamel. In an 1843 survey of the character types found during the Revolution, he decried the scarcity and transience of revolutionary culture. Mostly ‘occasional, topical works, as quickly forgotten as produced’, it was only in ‘private collections’ that visitors could find rare pieces like the accessories used in republican fêtes, still ‘remarkable in their fragility’. Himself a collector of songs and music from the Revolution, he was highly sensitive to how objects, texts and tunes could be modified and appropriated by successive regimes. He owned the score of a patriotic hymn composed by Gossec, which under the Restoration had been converted into a religious motet. For him, such transformations in the life of an artwork or an image offered vital clues to transformations in popular mentality. Evidence of these contested symbols could still be seen scratched into the walls and doorways of the French capital. ‘A pike has replaced a fleur-de-lis, an eagle then replaced the axe, a fleur-de-lis then replaced the eagle, and finally a Gallic cockerel has replaced the fleur-de-lis. On these stones are inscribed the principal revolutions which have unfolded over the past fifty years’.87 These stones could really speak, if the historian knew exactly how to listen.
A turning-point in young Challamel's career came when he entered a basement on the rue des Boulangers, in the wretched Faubourg Saint-Manceau. The unpromising façade concealed one of the wonders of the age: Colonel Maurin's ‘ethnographic collection of the Revolution’. Maurin had been an outstanding lieutenant-colonel in the Grande Armée, and from 1820 consecrated his retirement to amassing revolutionary memorabilia. The acknowledged doyen of Parisian collectors, Feuillet de Conches, was staggered by the abundance of objects gathered together. ‘It was he who had the keys of the Bastille, and small Bastilles made out of the ruins of the fortress by the patriot Palloy; and police books found in the prison, and all the tools of Latude's escape, and letters from Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, princes and émigrés intercepted by the Blues; and the incredible costumes and equally bizarre weapons of the sans-culottes’. Beholding this treasure-trove, Feuillet remarked ‘it was like the site of the Bastille still smouldering’. Among the countless artefacts, Maurin displayed the remains of Louis’ throne, seals from Jacobin associations, as well as buttons emblazoned with democratic insignia.88 On visiting, Challamel himself was understandably overwhelmed by this unexpected historical hoard. ‘It seemed, when one visited this collection’, he wrote, ‘that all the monuments constructed between 1789 and 1804 revealed themselves, that men left their tombs and began speaking, that the pamphlets began to circulate once more’.89
Challamel was not the only historian to be bowled over by Maurin's grotto. For many historians of the period, it was quite simply ‘both the museum and the archives of the French Revolution’. Formed over forty years of diligent labour, Maurin had acquired the complete papers of leading conventionnels like Courtois and Francastel, as well as all of the possessions of that Barnum of the Bastille, ‘Patriote’ Palloy. Skilfully cultivating relationships with relatives and descendants, he bought from Marat's sister many items belonging to her martyred brother.90 When leading republicans were calling in vain for a ‘Musée de 1789’, Maurin offered the closest, amateur equivalent.91 Countless scholars relied on loans from the colonel for their work.92 Paul Lacroix petitioned the National Assembly in 1848 to buy up these precious materials for its own woefully deficient library. The Maurin museum was unique in its insertion of printed sources alongside ‘all the monuments of figural history: busts, medals, weapons, insignia, prints etc.’. These precious ‘relics and traditions of a momentous era’, currently dwelling in the colonel's modest house, deserved space at the château of Versailles, if not at the Louvre, as the ‘living souvenir’ of a period whose history was still being written.93 There were howls of protest when the state did not intercede, and the collection became carved up between several buyers in 1862, including the marquis de la Bedoyère.94
Challamel's response to this sans-culotte storehouse was, however, unique. It entirely inspired his first work of history, Histoire-Musée de la République française, published in 1842. Here, Maurin's collection was treated not simply as an auxiliary to research but a meaningful locus of study itself. It offered both raw materials, but also a guiding itinerary through the cultural history of the republic. Challamel christened his work with the hybrid title of a ‘Histoire-Musée’, emphasizing its blend of political narrative and museum catalogue. ‘The first time we entered this historic sanctuary’, Challamel recalled, ‘the plan of our book was conceived, explained, adopted’. Like other amateur historians, he regarded ‘private collections’ as an essential supplement to ‘fill the gaps’ in his research, ‘more complete, from this special perspective’ than the disordered muddle of the Bibliothèque Impériale. Hence he also drew on the manuscripts and objects preserved by the collectors Villenave, Hennin and Deschiens.95 In addition, he hit the salerooms and street vendors, scouting out the cheap verse and political doggerel that clogged up the bookstalls lining the Seine. He hoped that orientation towards tangible, concrete evidence would help liberate history from factional polarities. His humble aim was to present the evidence clearly, to ‘narrate, when so many others had pleaded for or against the revolutionary cause’.96
Challamel eschewed any overarching interpretation, and rather sought to recreate the period through its individual fragments, ‘its mobile physiognomy and its multiple thought’. The juxtaposition of detailed reproductions, facsimile manuscripts, eye-witness testimony and portraits of the actors—‘like still-living traces of their existence’—paralleled the folios and cabinets of the Parisian collecting elite. His richly illustrated volumes mined a golden seam of seemingly worthless details to illuminate the moeurs and ‘diverse decorations’ of the past. He interrogated the conversations of the salons and the broadsides of the clubs, the iconography of the festivals and the renaming of civic space.97 Alongside the analysis of leading intellectuals, he took particular delight in minor genres, convinced that ‘the most original aspect of the revolutionary literature, is the genre of epigrams, bons mots, songs and vaudevilles’. His discussion of Talma, Chénier, David and Grétry was juxtaposed with facsimile reproductions of caricatures, ‘which played such a great role, and which our book has frequently seized on to reveal public opinion’.98 Challamel explored the mania for antique fashions through children's names, street titles, forms of address and public ceremonial. His discussion of neo-classicism appealed to the evidence from footwear and fashion, from drawing-room incense braziers to ladies’ coiffure à la Titus.99
Thanks to his alliance with collectors, Challamel thus investigated a body of sources largely absent from the grandiose narratives of his more illustrious contemporaries. As Jules Renouvier, the first art historian of the Revolution, argued in 1860, historians had become so fixated with the ideas that inspired political culture that they often ‘passed in front of the monuments, without truly seeing them’.100 Surveying the historiography of the Revolution in 1897, Maurice Tourneux also paid tribute to Challamel as the author, ‘who had the distinction of first directing attention onto the pictorial and graphic aspects of the Revolution’. In the same thought, he singled out the Goncourts, who had ‘gathered their materials out of a mass of newspapers, pamphlets and brochures, until then disdained by political and military writers’.101 What united both writers was their shared participation in a forgotten milieu of amateurs and autographes. In the face of government indifference, and the disdain of ‘philosophical’ history, it was amateur collectors who recuperated the fragments of the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary moment. If the Revolution caused the disruption and dispersal of countless objects, it also acted as a catalyst for novel methods of recovery, in both physical and textual forms. In this light, as in many others, 1789 stands as a model instance of that scourge of modernity, ‘creative destruction’.102
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Why has the role of material culture in the transmission of the Revolutionary heritage been obscured? Collecting certainly did not fade away in the later decades of the nineteenth century—in fact, stockpiling Revolutionary remnants became established as an impeccably polite and respectable pastime. For the 1889 centenary, the Societé de la Révolution Française staged a sumptuous exhibition of artefacts at the Salle des Etats in the Louvre. Contributions came from descendants (such as President Carnot), devotees (like Ernest Hamel and Dr Robinet) as well as connoisseurs and independent collectors such as Charavay, Champfleury, Victorien Sardou and Jules Clarétie. Robustly non-partisan, the show furnished a ‘complete image’ of the era, by joining together ‘arms, flags, patriotic ceramics, furniture, all sorts of utensils, costumes and souvenirs conserved by the subjects’ families’.103 The neglect of the collectors’ activities springs more from a certain historiographical bias. For if the amateur scene flourished, governments remained suscipicious of subversive items. Even under the Third Republic, no French library in the 1880s and 1890s was willing to take on François Chèvremont's shrine to Marat.104 Reconstructing the reception of the Revolution mainly from the perspective of the state and its institutions means that scholars have sometimes ignored alternative spaces of representation and inquiry.105
Moreover, the professionalization of the historical discipline from the 1870s onwards encouraged the depreciation of material culture in favour of texts, documents and archives. For the new generation of positivist historians, who equated the centralizing state with disciplinary rigour, scattered private collections formed obstacles to the historical craft. Collectors were caricatured as old regime anachronisms: vandals, drudges or dilettantes, whose rambling books had the coherence of ‘an antique shop, an island archipelago’.106 If specialists in art and literature have largely remained more interested than historians in the role of private collections, this has come with its own limitations. Mining the texts of Balzac, the Goncourts, Zola and Huysmans, many cultural historians have revisited the nineteenth-century tropes of the collector as a dandy, a flâneur or a monomaniac.107 Though such constructs are revealing about the discourse surrounding collectors, less attention has been paid to collecting in practice. Rather than retreating into idiosyncracy and aestheticism, many collectors believed they had important public duties to perform in shaping understandings of the past. The fruitful interpenetration between historians and collectors found earlier in the century requires further exploration.
Among the legacies of the Revolution, then, should be counted the new opportunities for collecting and thinking about the bric-a-brac of history. On the level of political culture, relocating and restoring these wandering objects to their rightful owners, or finding them appropriate new shrines, became symbolic issues of national pride. From Napoleon's ashes to Marie-Antoinette's toilette, physical relics of the French past significantly shaped how public opinion imagined the ‘patrimoine’. For instance, in 1862, celebrated critic Jules Janin orchestrated a campaign for the repatriation of Voltaire's heart, one more bibelot dispersed by the Revolution, and disgracefully ‘hawked here and there for nearly a century’.108 However, in addition to public agitation, this article has stressed the role of private individuals in the work of salvage, acting on a wild diversity of motives. In this, we need to consider not only what was conserved but also how it was deployed. Private collections were not neutral holding posts until the state widened its heritage horizons; they also offered the potential to throw up novel classifications and ‘subversive’ interpretations of evidence.109 Collectors bequeathed to their historian collaborators not only a wealth of otherwise inaccessible sources but also distinctive ways of examining material culture.
In light of our own much-heralded ‘cultural turn’, the achievements of the petite histoire nursed in this environment deserve reappraisal. For the exciting recent publications on eighteenth-century chansons, costumes and restaurants reveal a striking affinity with the research interests of these forgotten nineteenth-century amateurs.110 In both cases, there is a renewed fascination with how the Revolution came to be represented in everyday life, and enacted by ordinary people. In both cases, this marks a challenge to the previous orthodoxies about what constituted ‘serious’ history. Alfred de Liesville, whose sumptuous collection of radical ephemera is now housed in the Musée Carnavalet, rejoiced in the 1870s: ‘the inner wall of scholarship, defended with jealous regularity by its followers, has been breached like everything else by the revolutions’. He believed that a whole new ‘archaeology’ was being born, one that would treat the ‘newspapers, memoirs, songs, images, caricatures, coins’ of the modern world as seriously as it studied the fragments and vestiges of antiquity.111 His vision may have proved premature, but it does reflect the liberating possibilities opened up by material culture. The Revolution had shattered the solid chronicle of Bourbon France into a thousand fragments, and out of the rubble early cultural historians unearthed new sources, new tools and new habits of thought. As Chateaubriand wryly noted, what we assume to be ‘progress in the human mind’ is, more often than not, ‘the simple result of events, the disturbance and the disappearance of objects’.112
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In the course of writing this paper, the author is very grateful for advice from Larry Klein, Peter Mandler, Malcolm Crook and Julian Wright as well as the two anonymous peer reviewers.
1 F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 1–79; S. Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution, 2 vols (Ithaca, NY, 1995). 
2 See F. Furet, ‘Ancien Régime,’ in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, eds F. Furet, M. Ozouf, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1989); L. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA, 1984).
3 S. Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford, 1994); R. Gildea, The Past in French History (Oxford, 1994); S. Mellon, The Political Uses of History: A Study of Historians in the French Restoration (Stanford, CA, 1958).
4 For diverse approaches, see S. Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (NY, 1995); R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. K. Tribe (Cambridge, MA, 1985); R. Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY, 1993).
5 See C. Amalvi, De l'art et de la manière d'accommoder les héros de l'histoire de France: essais de mythologie nationale (Paris, 1988), esp. Introduction.
6 S. Citron, Le mythe national: l'histoire de France en question (Paris, 1987); D. Lindenberg, ‘Guerres de mémoire en France’, Vingtième Siècle: Rev Hist, 42 (1994), 77–95.
7 A. de Laborde, Les archives de la France, leurs vicissitudes pendant la Révolution, leur régénération sous l'Empire (Paris, 1867), p. 27.
8 F. Bercé, Des monuments historiques au patrimoine du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris, 2001); F. Choay, The Invention of the Historical Monument, trans. L. M. O'Connell (Cambridge, 2001); P. Léon, La vie des monuments français: destruction/restauration (Paris, 1951); E. Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven, CT, 1989).
9 D. Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine 1789–1815 (Paris, 1997).
10 For similar calls to put the individual back into collective memory and widen our conception of the ‘culture of history’, see S. Crane, ‘Writing the individual back into collective memory’, Am Hist Rev, 102 (1997), 1372–85; B. Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953 (Oxford, 2006), esp. pp. 8–22.
11 On the various attempts of historians to rewrite the revolution over the nineteenth century, see C. Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism (Cambridge, 1993); A. Gérard, La Révolution française: mythes et interprétations (Paris, 1970); P. Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA, 1995).
12 K. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, trans. E. Wiles-Portier (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 275.
13 For the connections between literature and private collections in this period, see J. Watson, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities (Cambridge, 1999); M. Rheims, L'enfer de la curiosité: de Marat au bain au petit pan de mur jaune (Paris, 1979).
14 See J. Elsner and R. Cardinal (eds), The Culture of Collecting (London, 1994); S. Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC, 1993).
15 For moves in this direction, see F. Haskell, History and its Images; Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven and London, 1993); A. Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology, trans. I. Kinnes and G. Vardnell (London, 1996).
16 V. Fournel, Les hommes du 14 juillet: gardes-françaises et vainquers de la Bastille (Paris, 1890), p. 116; P. Lacroix, Mélanges bibliographiques (Paris, 1871), pp. 258–63. For Villenave' extraordinary collection, see Catalogue des collections d'autographes, de manuscrits, de pièces imprimées sur l’histoire de France, et de livres, composant le cabinet de feu M. Villenave, homme de lettres (Paris, 1850).
17 J. L. Soulavie, Pièces inédites sur les règnes de Louis XIV, Louis XV et Louis XVI, ouvrage dans lequel on trouve des mémoires, des notices historiques et des lettres de Louis XIV etc., 2 vols (Paris, 1809), i. pp. ii–iv; ii. 433–9.
18 J. Delort, Mes voyages aux environs de Paris, 2 vols (Paris, 1821), i. 75.
19 A. Challamel and W. Tenint, Les français sous la Révolution, avec quarante scènes et types (Paris, 1843), p. 181.
20 F. Funck-Brentano, Catalogue général des manuscrits: Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal; Archives de la Bastille (Paris, 1892) ix. xxxi.
21 P. J. Fontaine, Manuel de l'amateur des autographes (Paris, 1836), p. 17.
22 A. Hussey, Paris: The Secret History (London, 2007), p. 198.
23 F. Feuillet de Conches, Causeries d'un curieux: variétés d’histoire et d'art, tirées d'un cabinet d'autographes et de desseins, 4 vols (Paris, 1862) ii. 175–9. Ledru's grave-robbing formed the basis of a fantastic tale in A. Dumas, Les mille et une fantômes [1849], ed. N. Wagner (Geneva, 1980), ch. 9.
24 For an alternative report, conveyed by François Grille, see Bulletin archéologique (1846), iv. 154.
25 T. Lhuillier, Les tombeaux des Richelieu à la Sorbonne (Paris, 1867), pp. 5–17.
27 For the debate about returning Turenne's heart to his descendant, the Comtesse De La Tour d'Auvergne, see F. Grille, Le bric-à-brac, avec son catalogue raisonné, 2 vols (Paris, 1853), i. 67–73.
28 ‘Ossements des rois de France à l'encan’, Bulletin de l'Alliance des arts 5 vols (1846–7), pp. 207–8.
29 ‘Souvenirs d'un Directeur des Beaux-Arts: Post-Scriptum’, L'Artiste (1883), ii. 111–18; Dr. Cabanès, Le cabinet secret de l'histoire, 4 vols (Paris, 1905), ii. 399.
30 L'Intermédiaire des chercheurs et des curieux (1885), xviii. 453, 536; (1887), xx. 452.
31 C. Asselineau, ‘Préface’, Mélanges curieux et anecdotiques tirés d'une collection de lettres autographes et de documents historiques, ayant appartenu à M. Fossé d'Arcosse (Paris, 1861), pp. xi–xiv.
32 K. Pomian, ‘Collections: une typologie historique’, Romantisme 112 (2001), p. 18.
33 Lhuillier, Les tombeaux, p. 14.
34 For contemporary literature on the development of collecting, see J. Champfleury, L'Hôtel des Commissaires-priseurs (Paris, 1867); E. Bosc, Dicitonnaire de l'art, de la curiosité et du bibelot (Paris, 1883); C. Blanc, Le trésor de la curiosité, tirés des catalogues de vente, 2 vols (Paris, 1857).
35 H. Rochefort, Les petits mystères de l'Hôtel des ventes (Paris, 1862), pp. 46–7.
36 P. ten-Doesschate Chu and G. P. Weisberg (eds), The Popularization of Images; Visual Culture under the July Monarchy (Princeton, NJ, 1994); J. Smith Allen, Popular French Romanticism: Authors, Readers, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse, NY, 1991).
37 See M. de Lescure, Les autographes et le goût des autographes: portraits–caractères–anecdotes–curiosités (Paris, 1865).
38 E. Bonnaffé, Causeries sur l'art et la curiosité (Paris, 1878), p. 7.
39 E. Texier, Tableau de Paris, 2 vols (Paris, 1852–1853), ii. 285.
40 J. Clarétie, ‘Préface’ in L'Hôtel Drouot en 1881, ed. P. Eudel (Paris, 1882), p. viii.
41 L. Lalanne, Curiosités bibliographiques (Paris, 1845), pp. 190–91; Lescure, Les autographes, pp. 146–8.
42 The most notorious case was that of Guillermo Libri, who used his reputation as a member of the Institut and Inspecteur Général des Bibliothèques during the July Monarchy to steal from State libraries. Exposed in 1848, his case generated much polemic and sharply divided the intellectual world. See J. Naudet, Lettre à M. Libri au sujet de quelques passages de sa lettre à M. de Falloux (Paris, 1849); H. Bordier, F. Bouquelot, L. Lalanne, L'affaire Libri: réponse à M. Mérimée, 2nd edn (Paris, 1852).
43 M. du Camp, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, 6 vols, 7th edn (Paris, 1883–1898), iv. 202.
44 See T. W. Gaehtgens, Versailles, de la résidence royale au musée historique (Paris, 1984); for the Musée des Souverains, see A. Lemaitre, Le Louvre: monument et musée, depuis leurs origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1878), pp. 337–8, 383–5.
45 P. den Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France 1815–1914, trans. A. J. Pomerans (Princeton, NJ, 1998), p. 66.
46 A. Delzant, ‘Les livres du XVIIIe siècle’, in Bibliothèques des Goncourt: XVIIIe siècle; livres, manuscrits, autographes, affiches, placards (Paris, 1897), p. x.
47 J. Janin, ‘Notice historique’, to A. A. Monteil, Histoire des français des divers États ou histoire de France aux cinq derniers siècles, 5 vols, 4th edn (Paris, 1853), i. xxv.
48 M. de Lescure, Les amours de Henri IV (Paris, 1864), p. viii.
49 See V. Hugo, Les misérables, Part V Book II: ‘L'Intestin du Leviathan’.
50 For a rare discussion of revolutionary ephemera, see R. Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford and London, 2002), esp. pp. 13–57.
51 E. Jauffret, Le théâtre révolutionnaire 1788–99 (Paris, 1869), p. vi.
52 E. Maron, Histoire littéraire de la Révolution: Constituante et Législative (Paris, 1856), p. 1.
53 L. Orr, Headless History: Nineteenth-Century French Historiography of the Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1990), p. 17; P. P. Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley, CA, 1994); S. Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France 1815–30 (CA, 2001), pp. 39–75.
54 P. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA, 2004), pp. 11–14, 42.
55 S. Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon (London, 2004), pp. 72–98.
56 See Catalogue d'une collection de pièces relatives à la Révolution de France, avant et depuis 1789 jusqu’à l'an XII inclusivement (Paris, 1817).
57 H. de Saint-Albin, Documents relatifs à la Révolution française: extraits des oeuvres inédites de A. R. C. de Saint-Albin (Paris, 1873), pp. 1–112.
58 G. Lucas de Montigny (ed.), Mémoires biographiques, littéraires et politiques de Mirabeau; écrits par lui-même, par son père, son oncle et son fils adopté, 8 vols (Paris, 1834), i. viii–xx.
59 E. D.-S. ‘Montigny’ in Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne [1843–63], ed J. F. Michaud, 45 vols (Bad Feilnbach, 1998), xxv. 413–14; A. Laverdet, ‘Préface’, Catalogue des autographes et manuscrits de M. Lucas de Montigny (Paris, 1860).
60 V. Fournel, Dictionnaire encyclopédique d'anecdotes anciennes, modernes, françaises et étrangères, 2 vols (Paris, 1872), ii. 202; Cabanès, Le Cabinet, iii. 301–4.
61 Lescure, Les autographes, p. 67.
62 G. Lenôtre (Théodore Gosselin), Paris révolutionnaire (Paris, 1907), pp. 385–6.
63 A. Dumas, Causeries (Paris, 1860), p. 139; P. Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (London, 2002), p. 109.
64 Lenôtre, Paris révolutionnaire, pp. 238–45. When Le Figaro announced the rediscovery of the bath in October 1885, there was considerable public curiosity, and the item became a tourist attraction in the town of Sarzeau before eventually being installed among the Musée Grévin waxworks.
65 J. M. Quérard, Les supercheries littéraires dévoilées; galerie des auteurs anonyms, 5 vols (Paris, 1847–1852), iv. 180; Cabanès, Le cabinet secret, iii. 222–3.
66 See P. Topinard, ‘Essais de crâniométrie: à propos du crâne de Charlotte Corday’, L'Anthropologie, 1 (1890), 1–26; as well as Lombroso's analysis in Rev Sci, 28 (1890), 412–13.
67 Lenôtre, Paris révolutionnaire, p. 236.
68 H. de la Bedoyère, Journal d'un voyage en Savoie et dans le Midi de la France en 1804 et 1805, 2nd edn (Paris, 1849).
69 M. France (ed.), Description historique et bibliographique de la collection de M. le comte de la Bedoyère sur la Révolution française, l'Empire et la Restauration (Paris, 1862), pp. i, iv–v, xi–xii. See also Catalogue des livres rares et précieux, dessins et vignettes, composant la bibliothèque de M. le comte H. de la Bedoyère, 2 vols (Paris, 1862); A. France, ‘Le comte Henri de la Bedoyère’, Le bibliophile français: gazette illustrée des amateurs de livres, d'estampes, et de haute curiosité, 4 (1870), pp. 259–63.
70 The most expensive autographs of the 1870s were penned by Voltaire, Corneille and Molière. E. Charavay, Lettres autographes composant la collection de M. Alfred Bovet (Paris, 1887), pp. xxiii–xxiv.
71 Catalogue des objets d'art et de haute curiosité, composant la collection de feu Benjamin Fillon (Paris, 1882), pp. 7–18.
72 E. Charavay (ed), Inventaire des autographes et documents historiques réunis par M. Benjamin Fillon (Paris, 1878), p. viii.
73 Lescure, Les autographes, p. 292.
74 E. Campardon, Le tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris, 2 vols (Paris, 1866); E. Hamel, Histoire de Robespierre, d'après des papiers de famille, les sources originales et des documents entièrement inédits, 3 vols (Paris, 1865); J. F. Robinet, Danton: mémoire sur sa vie privée, appuyé de pièces justicatives (Paris, 1865).
75 C. Vatel, ‘Frontispiece’, Charlotte Corday et les Girondins, 3 vols (Paris, 1864–72).
76 Feuillet de Conches, Causeries, i. lii–lix. For autograph forgery scandals, see H. Bordier and E. Mabille, Une fabrique de faux autographes, ou, récit de l'affaire Vrain-Lucas (Paris, 1870).
77 S. Bérard and H. de Chateaugiron, E. Charavay (eds), Isographie des hommes célèbres, ou collection de facsimilé, de lettres autographes et de signatures, 5 vols (Paris, 1828–80), i. viii.
78 M. Hennin, Histoire numismatique de la Révolution française, ou description raisonée des médailles, monnaies, et autres monuments numismatiques relatifs aux affaires de la France (Paris, 1826), pp. xiv–xviii.
79 For a popular example, see A. Maurin, Galerie historique de la Révolution Française 1787 à 1799, 5 vols, 5th edn (Paris, 1849).
80 Among important cultural histories in this period, see T. Muret, Histoire par le théâtre 1789–1851, 3 vols (Paris, 1865); C. Nisard, Des chansons populaires, chez les anciens et chez les français, 2 vols (Paris, 1867); V. Fournel, Tableau du vieux Paris. Les spectacles populaires et les artistes des rues (Paris, 1863).
81 J. Champfleury, Histoire des faiences patriotiques sous la Révolution (Paris, 1867), p. xiii. On Champfleury and his relation to popular art forms, see Hier pour demain: arts, traditions et patrimoine (Paris, 1980), pp. 122–4.
82 E. de Goncourt and J. de Goncourt, Journal; mémoires de la vie littéraire, ed. R. Ricatte (Paris, 1989), iii. 288.
83 E. de Goncourt and J. de Goncourt, Histoire de la société française pendant la Révolution (Paris, 1854), pp. 2–4.
85 E. de Goncourt and J. de Goncourt, Histoire de la société française pendant le Directoire (Paris, 1855), p. 439.
86 Cited in P. Sabatier, L'ésthétique des Goncourts (Paris, 1920), pp. 540–2.
87 Challamel, Tenint, Les français, p. 185.
88 Feuillet de Conches, Causeries, ii. 203–4.
89 A. Challamel, Histoire-musée de la République française, depuis l'Assemblée des Notables jusqu’à l'Empire, 2 vols, 3rd edn (Paris, 1862), i. v–vi.
90 L. Paris (ed.), Cabinet historique (Paris, 1862), p. 288; J. Charavay (ed.), Catalogue d'une importante collection de documents autographes et historiques sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1862).
91 ‘Et le moment n’est-il pas venu, après tant d'accumulation de tableaux de batailles, de recueillir les objets fabriqués pour et par le peuple, qui formeraient la suite naturelle et logique au Musée des Souverains: le Musée de 1789?’ Champfleury, Histoire des faiences, p. xii.
92 For tributes to Maurin's generosity, see L. Blanc, Histoire de la Révolution française, 12 vols (Paris, 1847–1862), ii. 367; L. Gallois, Histoire des journaux et des journalistes de la Revolution française 1789–96, 2 vols (Paris, 1845–1846), i. 363–4.
93 P. Lacroix (P. L. Jacob), ‘Variétés bibliographiques’, Bulletin de l'Alliance des arts 6 vols (1847–8), pp. 369–71.
94 See Annuaire-Bulletin de la société de l'histoire de France (1863), p. 135.
95 Challamel, Histoire-Musée, i. v–vi.
98 Ibid., ii. 510–13, 538–42. This interest in caricature places Challamel in connection with Champfleury and amateur Charles Laterrade, who collected popular prints from the Revolution. See Collection Laterrade: troisième catalogue: estampes, fin du règne de Louis XVI, Révolution, Empire, Restauration, ed. A. Rochoux (Paris, 1859).
100 J. Renouvier, Historie de l'art pendant la Révolution, considérée principalement dans les estampes (Paris, 1863), pp. 1–5. Renouvier was bitterly critical, however, of the allegedly ‘trivial’ details deployed Challamel and the Goncourts.
101 M. Tourneux, Les sources bibliographiques de l'histoire de la Révolution française (Paris, 1898), pp. 25, 71.
102 D. Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (London, 2003), pp. 1–57.
103 Catalogue des objets formant l'Exposition historique de la Révolution française (Paris, 1889), p. ix.
104 J. Pons, ‘François Chèvremont, bibliographe de Jean-Paul Marat’, Ann Hist Rév Française, 311 (1998), pp. 120–1.
105 For important recent scholarship which has stressed the role of amateurism and localism in nineteenth-century France, see J. P. Chaline, Sociabilité et érudition: les sociétés savantes en France XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris, 1995); C. O. Carbonell, Histoire et historiens: une mutation idéologique des historiens français 1865–1885 (Paris, 1976); S. Gerson, The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 2003).
106 C. V. Langlois and C. Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris, 1898), pp. 8–10, 108–110.
107 R. Saisselin, Bricobracomania: The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New York, 1984); W. Muensterberger, Collecting, An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, NJ, 1994).
108 J. Janin, ‘Histoire du Coeur de Voltaire’, in Le Dernier Volume des Oeuvres de Voltaire: Contes, comédies, pensées, poésies, lettres; Oeuvres inédites, eds J. Janin, E. Didier (Paris, 1862), pp. 5–31.
109 On ‘anomalous’ and ‘subversive’ collections, see S. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London and New York, 1995), pp. 310–11, 323.
110 R. L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2000); D. Roche The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Régime’, trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge, UK, 1994); L. Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca, NY, 1996). On the ‘cultural turn’ more generally, see L. Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley CA, 1989).
111 A. R. de Liesville, Histoire numismatique de la Révolution de 1848, ou description raisonné des médailles, monnaies, jetons, repoussées etc. relatifs aux affaires de la France (Paris, 1877), pp. vii–viii.
112 R. F. de Chateaubriand, ‘Préface’, Oeuvres complètes: études historiques (Paris, 1834), iv. 34.
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