The museum of history in France: a national culture about to disappear?

Abstract

This essay investigates the transformations of the museums of history in the French public sphere during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows the different types of museums according to different dimensions of histories, such as the Annals of France Museum, the period-rooms of the romantic historiography, the museum laboratory and archive, the mass-media museum and the immersive museology of history. It also analyzes how academic history or popular history was translated into spatial forms in order to maintain its publicity within the informational public sphere. Finally, it tries to expose how the concreteness of memories and real traumatic experiences were sometimes appropriated in order to render the abstractions consecrated by history less nebulous.