Archiving the Revolution: Collecting French History in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

This project will use the Bowes Museum archives and collections as an ideal test case for studying the reception and interpretation of France's revolutionary history. The innovation for the project will come from placing different genres of evidence into conversation: there has been no proper study of the library, the print albums or the autographs, and yet these historical materials illuminate connections across different exhibits. The project will explore why British collectors found in the turbulent recent history of France a continual source of intrigue and warning; and how they tried to deduce and pass on its lessons through conserving its physical traces.