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4/14/2014 The Emotional Museum. Thoughts on the “Secular Relics” of Nineteenth-

4/14/2014 The Emotional Museum. Thoughts on the “Secular Relics” of Nineteenth-Century History Museums in Paris and their Posterity http://cm.revues.org/834 1/23 Conserveries mémorielles Revue transdisciplinaire de jeunes chercheurs #9 | 2011 : Les représentations du passé : entre mémoire et histoire 3. Les musées et les sites historiques : un passé représenté The Emotional Museum. Thoughts on the “Secular Relics” of Nineteenth-Century History Museums in Paris and their Posterity FELICITY BODENSTEIN Résumés Français English Cet article examine le discours élaboré dans les musées d’histoire à Paris au cours du XIXe siècle à trav ers la présentation d’effets personnels et priv és « ay ant appartenu à » des personnages historiques célèbres, des artistes ou écriv ains. Comment et pourquoi a-t-on choisi de présenter des objets en soi aussi banals et profanes que le mouchoir de Napoléon ou une boucle des chev eux de Marie-Antoinette ? Dans le cadre rationnel du musée public, quel sens peut-on encore donner à ces objets qui ne fournissent pas d’information documentaire et qui n’ont pour ainsi dire pas de v aleur esthétique ? De fait, cette tradition muséographique a encore toute sa place dans les musées d’aujourd’hui, surtout dans les musées maisons et les musées biographiques. Nous allons considérer son apparition depuis la Rév olution comme la transposition de pratiques commémorativ es chrétiennes dans le monde laïc de l’État républicain, mais aussi comme le transfert d’un culte priv é dans le domaine public. Cela nous permet d’examiner le caractère affectif des rapports que ces objets établissent av ec l’histoire. This article examines the discourse elaborated in Paris’ historical museums during the nineteenth century through the display of personal, priv ate objects “hav ing belonged to” famous historical figures, artistes and writers. How and why do we exhibit objects in and of themselv es as banal as the handkerchief of Napoleon or locks of Marie- Antoinette’s hair? In the scheme of the rational public museum, what meaning was and is still giv en to these objects of little documentary or artistic importance? 4/14/2014 The Emotional Museum. Thoughts on the “Secular Relics” of Nineteenth-Century History Museums in Paris and their Posterity http://cm.revues.org/834 2/23 Indeed this museographical tradition still holds an important place in museums today , especially in biographical or personal museums, its appearance during the Rev olution and its subsequent dev elopment will be considered as the transposition of a commemorativ e practice taken from Catholicism and introduced into the secular world of French Republican museum but also as a transfer from the priv ate to the public sphere. This allow us to examine the agency of such objects as triggers that allow history to be experienced as an emotion. Texte intégral Inspired by the possibilities of new interactive media, the twenty-first century museum often maintains its visitor’s attention by stimulating his senses: sound, smell and touch, as a response to our yearning for affect. In some cases this has lead curators to consciously develop an emotional dimension that the rational museum for a long time had officially sought to banish. Our particular concern here will be to examine how history museums offer their visitors the experience of an emotionally colored past, rather than a purely intellectual reconstruction that can remain fragmentary without the binding power of sentiment. Though our demonstration will mainly rely on examples of Parisian museums in the Nineteenth-century, we would like to state that the museological strategies that they will serve to illustrate have been recently adopted by the organizers of the Cité de l’immigration in Paris and by the Musée de l’Europe in Brussels, museums which both opened their doors in October of 2007 . In the press release which accompanied the opening of the Cité de l’immigration, in the Palais de la Porte Dorée,1 the visitors’ circuit is described as “open, interactive, based on a series of immersive, emotional and pedagogical experiences; trajectories, movements, biographical fragments are brought to life thanks to individual tales and testimonies, visual installations and projections, games and objects.”2 The Musée de l’Europe, which has not yet found a definite home, inaugurated its existence with an exhibition entitled: “This is our History: a moving expo on Europe”. Here again scenographical intentions are unambiguously expressed: “We want to awaken public interest in Europe’s History, especially in young people, by appealing to their emotions, by making them feel that this history concerns them too as their past and their future.”3 In a bid to contribute to the construction of European identity, or to change our attitudes towards immigration these exhibitions rely on some of today’s latest media technology. Museum discourses generally refer to their implementation as a means to make the visitor feel like an actor rather than a passive spectator of his “own” history. Both of these exhibits have however also chosen to integrate classical object-orientated approaches which have been totally abandoned in other new history museums, such as the Historial Charles de Gaulle, monument audiovisuel, inaugurated in February 2008 in the Invalides in Paris and which as the title suggests is based exclusively on audio-visual footage. So our previous examples may be seen as an attempt to overcome “a gulf [that] has opened between those museums which value these new approaches [interactive, dramatic] and those that want to maintain the primacy of their collections” (Spalding, 2002: 51). 1 Y et what do these displays stand to gain from the presence of what are sometimes rather banal everyday objects? It would appear that in the examples cited above, objects have been used for their capacity to materialize an otherwise abstract past, as the means to overcome absence through the 2 4/14/2014 The Emotional Museum. Thoughts on the “Secular Relics” of Nineteenth-Century History Museums in Paris and their Posterity http://cm.revues.org/834 3/23 intriguing power of presence (Maniura, Shepard, 2007 ). In the Musée de l’Europe’s first exhibit, the artist Dominique Blain provided a highly aesthetic vision of Europe born out of the Second World War, embodied through posters, chewing gum wrappers and nylon stockings that are supposed to incarnate a common experience of hope. The Cité de l’immigration has included a Galerie des dons in its circuit, inviting visitors to deposit objects for display that were meaningful to their personal experience of immigration with an explicative text that according to the press release will allow singular traces, everyday objects to become souvenirs, or rather more, symbols. Like Proust lending us his madeleine, the memories of history’s actors are lent to the spectator and the private experience of recollection through a personal object is made public and collective.4 Let us now reconsider this general trend to capture public imagination through memorial and emotional strategies related to objects, by looking at the origins of this kind of display in the modern museum from the French Revolution onwards. Our analysis will essentially be based on one particular category of display in museums related to French national history: objects labelled as “having belonged to” either famous historical, artistic or literary personalities, or, as we have called them, secular relics. Our aim is to show how such objects contributed to the specificity of historical narrative in the museum, a question that has been addressed in recent years by such authors as Laurent Gervereau in France or Jörn Rüsen in Germany. In attempting to define the nature of this specificity, Jörn Rüsen underlined the importance of taking into account often overlooked or underestimated aesthetic factors that contribute to giving historical documents meaning and to establishing narratives in the museum. He argues that they characterize one of three forces at work in the construction of historical discourse: the political, scientific and artistic (Rüsen, 1988: 11). As we recognize these forces, we may yet ask how historical museums deal with the evocation of man’s personal experience of the past, where can it find a place in this trilogy and how should museum curators deal with emotional factors? We will try and show that the emotional museum can provoke, promote or accompany any or all three of these forces. By examining how the memorial value of personal objects was used and sanctified in the museum our objective is to provide an historical basis for a better understanding of how museums use objects to bear witness to history. For by adopting displays like the ones described above – by placing nylon stockings in a glass case related to the after- war years – the museum uses an apparently direct means of visualizing historical narrative. Y et, such items are more than just simple illustrations of an event or an epoch. As distinct from texts or two-dimensional images which represent the past in an already abstracted form, objects that were once used, held, caressed, contemplated, smelt or even eaten are immediate, concrete and moreover of a fundamentally sensual nature. They are not only synecdochical figures of an historical event; they are synecdochical figures of the human experience of history. It is the direct and vivid experience of history in the museum which will interest us here as a ritual form of uploads/Histoire/ felicity-bodenstein-the-emotional-museum.pdf