The French Revolution of 1789 marked a breech with the past on a scale unprecedented in Western history. The foundations of what was to become known as the Ancien Régime were shaken to the core, even wrecked, with iconoclastic violence. The revolutionaries found it in their best interest for this break with the past to seep into the public's consciousness. Hence the demolition of the Bastille, the decree to remove all symbols reminiscent of the Ancien Régime, the storming of the royal tombs in Saint-Denis (only partly prohibited by Alexandre Lenoir), and the decapitation of the king and queen of France. And hence, finally, the profound wish to regenerate both society in general and its individual participants, a longing for time and history to start anew. This desire to break with the political and social past seems to be contradicted by one of the most important cultural achievements of the French Revolution: the creation, or at least, establishment of the museum as an institution on a national scale. This contradiction leads us to question the way in which the past was presented in the revolutionary museum and how this was perceived and experienced by its visitors, in France and beyond.

Stations of the Revolution

There is a strange paradox in the way the Revolution relates to the past. The term ‘revolution’ suggests a return to a system and a form that society must once have known, before corruption set in. The Revolution's legitimacy is partially founded on this return to supposedly traditional values, rights, and privileges. Some of these could only be found in and projected unto a mythical past, usually in a strongly idealized society, far away in time, be it of classical or indigenous cut. On the other hand, the revolutionaries wanted to represent the post-revolutionary era as a new order, as something never seen before. If too many references to the past were made, it could be experienced as a cumbersome, even potentially dangerous, anti-revolutionary dead weight. The establishment of a new order was in itself an accomplishment of immense historical importance, but the event was mostly represented, experienced and more often reflected upon in ahistoric forms and terms rather than in historic ones.