The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris C.1790-1890 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781108478847)

Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle poque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments - not just financial but also emotional and imaginative - in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.

Author: Tom Stammers
ISBN-10: 1108478840
ISBN-13: 9781108478847
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/25/2020
Pages: 370
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.47lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.88d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2021