The Purchase of the Past

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.