The purchase of the past : collecting culture in post-revolutionary Paris c.1790-1890 / Tom Stammers, University of Durham.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stammers, Tom, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Collectors and collecting--France--Paris--History--19th century.

Collectors and collecting.

Cultural property--Psychological aspects.

Cultural property.

Psychological aspects.

History.

France--Paris.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xii, 361 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Summary:

"In 1867 the Petit Trianon at Versailles played host to a display of the personal possessions of Marie-Antoinette. The show was organised as part of the Universal Exhibition, but also expressed Empress Eugénie's cult for the martyred queen. The commission charged with tracking down items that had once belonged to the royal family was overwhelmed by the hundreds of donations that came flooding in 'as if by magic from palaces and houses, from shops and cottages' all over France. Fine art appeared alongside a medley of personal, perishable souvenirs: a toy cannon used by the dauphin; a book of fabric samples from the queen's dresses; an ivory cane used by Louis XVI during his imprisonment; a snuffbox snatched from the murdered body of the duc de Brissac. The committee exclaimed that the peregrinations of these wayward objects could have furnished the plots for 'the most exciting, most curious, most poignant, most touching, most comic novels of reality.' For the past seven decades, the pomp and trappings of royalty had been hawked on the open road or hidden away in private storerooms. The coronation robes worn by Louis XVI were tracked down in Rouen, where a shocked Gustave Flaubert learned that they had been unwittingly used by a theatre troupe to lend glamour to their proceedings. The finely-embroidered bedspread in which the terrified queen had wrapped her son during the assault on the Tuileries eventually came to adorn the closet of a landlady in the Palais-Royal"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Amateurs and the Art Market in Transition (c. 1780-1830)

2. Archiving and Envisioning the French Revolution (c. 1780-1830)

3. Book Hunting, Bibliophilia and a Textual Restoration (c. 1790-1840)

4. Salvaging the Gothic in Private and Public Spaces (c. 1820-1870)

5. Royalists versus Vandals, and the Cult of the Old Regime (c. 1860-1880)

6. Allies of the Republic? Inside the Sale of the Century (c. 1870-1895).

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Stammers, Tom. Purchase of the past

ISBN:

9781108478847

1108478840

9781108748636

1108748635

OCLC:

1125996087