Collectors, Catholics, and the Commune: Heritage and Counterrevolution, 1860-1890.

The violence and vandalism of 1870-71 had a profound effect on stirring the conscience of private collectors in Paris. Taking their cue from the 1790s, they scrambled to safeguard the city's treasures, form new antiquarian associations, and indulge in forms of patriotic philanthropy. The 1870s and 1880s represent a crucial moment in the visibility of the rich collector, offering a new legitimating rhetoric for luxury consumption and marking a growing rapprochement between public service and private possessions. But under commercial pressures, these decades also witnessed a more chauvinist reaction, with fresh attempts to imagine social and ethnic restrictions on who was entitled to be a custodian of the French past. Focusing on the correspondence of bibliophile Baron Jérôme Pichon and on the memory palace of Léopold Double, this article seeks to retrieve an understanding of heritage and conservation radically distinct from the scientific and secular definitions elaborated by government agencies arising out of the French Revolution and the July Monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]