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Whose History: Art, History and the Nation State in Early Third-Republican France

An earlier version of this article was first presented at the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes international conference, ‘Institutions and Power’, Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge (March 2007). Its themes were developed in a related paper, winning a British Academy Overseas Conference Award (June 2009), on art biography as a tool for artists’ modelling of self-identity (Montclair State University, US: October 2009). The published article was accepted by peer-review for the 2011 monograph, Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Encompassing seventeen selected articles by international experts, this volume provides analyses at the forefront of nineteenth and twentieth-century art, cultural, literary and visual-cultural scholarship of significant long nineteenth-century power relations across interlinked spheres: artistic, literary, cultural and scientific. ‘Art, History and the Nation State’, contributes to these innovations in two significant ways. Focusing on institutional creations of ‘art history’ as a cultural discourse linked to extensions of cultural power, this article develops new knowledge of the cultural figures, writings and frameworks, through which such ideas came into being. But the article also raises fresh questions about the ideological ownership of the period’s competing models of ‘art’ and its ‘histories’. It examines how constructs of artistic ‘genius’, souvenir and biography are re-invented, feeding powerful artists’ stories and lives, generating in turn, emblems and narratives of cultural power, from the grandiloquent to the intimate, through which Republican cultural politics increasing sought to identify, project itself and its future. In this way, the article adds to the monograph’s new scholarship and perspectives on the nature and agencies of power in the long’s nineteenth-century’s relentlessly institutionalizing drive. Reviewed in the world-leading journal, French Studies, the article is highlighted as showing how ‘the inscription of power can be identified very effectively’ in the ‘illuminating breath’ of this collection (Tilby: FS, 2012, 66, 4: 573).