The Purchase of the Past(English, Hardcover, Stammers Tom)

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The Purchase of the Past(English, Hardcover, Stammers Tom) is written by Stammers Tom and published by Cambridge University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1108478840 (ISBN 10) and 9781108478847 (ISBN 13).

Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Epoque, 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.