The Purchase of the Past Stammers Hardback Cambridge University Press

The Purchase of the PastCollecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.17901890\nAuthor(s): Tom Stammers\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9781108478847, 978-1108478847\nSynopsis\nOffering 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. O.