Material Culture of the French Revolution

I am just back from a two-week research trip to Paris during which I worked in the Archives Nationales, and a trip to the Musee Carnavalet (focused on the history of Paris) got me thinking about material culture. As a result of my research, I’ve become fascinated by Robespierre, and I got to handle a lot of documents that he put his name to. Known as “the Incorruptible,” he was the leader of the Jacobins and is usually singled out as the architect of the Terror. He was a slight man with a weak, high voice, but he came to dominate the Revolution during its most heated phase. Before the Revolution, he was so opposed to capital punishment that he resigned a judicial post because he could not pass the sentence of death against offenders. But during the Terror, he orchestrated the deaths of thousands of innocent people. He was almost puritanical in his personal life, but he was also a dandy with a penchant for dressing well and wearing a powdered wig (which was decidedly old-fashioned by the 1790s).

To my surprise, finding much of anything about Robespierre or the French Revolution in Paris is difficult. There is no museum of the Revolution. The closest you can come to a museum of the Revolution is a set of galleries at the top floor of the Musee Carnavalet. Here’s how one Web site describes the museum:

This museum dedicated to Paris memory is formed of two famous XVIth and XVIIth mansions offering a circuit of more than 140 rooms displaying archeological remains from prehistory to modern times. The rooms from 1789-95 are full of sacred mementos such as models of the Bastille, original Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, tricolore and liberty caps, sculpted allegories of Reason, crockery with revolutionary slogans, and execution orders to make you shed a tear for the royalists as well.

The royalist bias is evident in the quotation and in the museum: you are not invited to shed a tear for Robespierre. Indeed, to get up to the Revolution galleries this summer you had to follow a circuitous detour through the museum (due to repair work on one stair well this summer) and walk up three big flights of stairs, entering the galleries at the end, and working your way from Napoleon back to the calling of the Estates General in 1789. But one benefit of this reverse entry is that the first thing you encounter is a large painting of Robespierre laid out on a table, his jaw broken by a gun shot. This is how he spent his last night before being guillotined in the Thermidorean Revolution of 27 July 1794. It is a triumphalist painting, meant to show Robespierre getting his just deserts. But coming out of context (that is, before you see the galleries and their pro-royalist narrative), it is unsettling and pathetic.

The Revolution galleries contain a lot of fascinating material, but it’s hidden up and away, and few people had ventured up there the day I visited. There are the predictable red liberty caps, pikes, and medals struck in honor of the storming of the Bastille. But I especially enjoyed the display of crockery with revolutionary slogans because these were homemade objects, plates and cups with the words and images of the Revolution on them. Their hominess contradicted the implied thesis of the exhibition that the Revolution was an embarrassing event, manipulated by a handful of maniacs like Robespierre. Also out of place were the objects that related to Robespierre himself. They had a pretty drinking cup that he used, his wash basin, and a memento of him, containing a lock of his hair. There were oddly intimate objects, and the latter two particularly so because they recalled his fastidious nature. Seeing them and then walking out past the large painting of him on the eve of his execution, bloodied and unable to speak, made them all the more affecting.

And so I’m left wondering why the Robespierre-related objects were there in the first place. Why those objects? The wash basin and fancy cup recalled his fastidiousness, and that had both personal and political connotations. He was an idealist, and the Terror was partly a result of his desire for a pure Republic, one cleansed of the very existence of royalists. The momento of his hair recalled his wig and the politics of hair in the Revolution. Although Robespierre is now equated with the lawless, radical sans coulottes, he disapproved of their excesses. They were roaring, macho terrorists who grew long hair and gigantic moustaches in order to make their appearance fierce. Robespierre’s powdered wig and punctiliousness stood in sharp contrast. Unfortunately, these objects were labeled very simply, not contextualized in terms of his life or manners, and so unless you knew a bit about him going in, you wouldn’t get much out of the visit.

I thought you guys might get a kick out of this:

http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php

(And, funnily enough, they have a recording of the song I was named after!)

They have a section for Hawaiian music if you look in Browse Collection, just in case anyone's interested in something like that.

Definitions of Material Culture

Debby Andrews is currently collecting definitions for Material Culture. Would you PEMCI-ites be willing to add your definitions? Here is what Debbie has so far:

Definitions of Material Culture

The things we make reflect our beliefs about the world; the things around us affect the way that we understand the world. There is an unending circularity to thisthat implies less a circle and more a kind of wheel moving. --Lance Winn, with respect to Foucault

Material culture is the history and philosophy of objects and the myriadrelationships between people and things. --Bernie Herman

Material Culture Studies opens the question of the “thingness” of things—what is matter? How does it produce meaning, yield uses, constitute worlds? Material culture studies attends to the situation of “things,” their accreted associations and meanings as they are successively performed. Working with “things” is so rooted in experience, so tuned to how we perceive the world, so inductive, that teacher and student become fellow observers / users, equally able to respond to the strangeness of this “thing,” before them, now. “Things” matter and the knowledge they offer us transforms our sense of the habit worlds we live and make. --Julian Yates

My idea of material culture studies is a quite literal one: I see us engaged in in-depth studies of the materials of human cultures--of anything (any/thing/) for how it reflects and constructs the culture of which it is a part.--Marcy Dinius

The American Institute for Conservation's definition for "cultural property" can loosely substitute for material culture. “The legacy of our collective cultural heritage enriches our lives. Each generation has a responsibility to maintain and to protect this heritage for the benefit of succeeding generations. Conservation is the field dedicated to preserving cultural property -objects, collections, specimens, structures, or sites identified as having artistic, historic, scientific, religious, or social significance - for future generations. -AIC website----Jae Gutierrez

The rise of mass consumption was accompanied by a proliferation in objects and the multiplication of meanings, practices, and “needs” associated with these things. Material Culture Studies helps us to think about the objects, and the cultural, political, and economic systems that created them.--William R. Scott

Material culture is the relationship between people and things.—Arwen Mohun
Further notes from Arwen: Material culture scholars ask questions like: how do historical actors and present day people make and use objects like houses, books, and paintings? What did those objects mean to specific historical actors at specific moments in time? How might these meanings change over time? How have authors and artists used material things as symbols in art and literature? How do the physical characteristics of artifacts—the paper a magazine or newspaper is printed on, the cloth a garment is fashioned from—affect interpretation?

Material Culture is the unpacking or mining of both historic and everyday objects to find the embedded ideas and concepts that define the surrounding society – Joyce Hill Stoner

We're in the news

Maybe you guys all already saw this, but in case you haven't, enjoy:

http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2008/jun/workshop060308.html

Edit:
Ok, for some reason when I posted this, the extension was cut off. It should end with a /workshop060308.html. You might have to add it yourself--I don't have the technical know-how to do this any better.

Material Culture = People

Kate asked a very interesting question about what academics study vs what the public will accept as worthy... 

I've always thought that the study of material culture should appeal to everyone because it is the study of things, and everyone has a relationship with things.  Of course there are many different kinds of things (and people), and often atypical things are more interesting to study... Also, many everyday things are difficult to study because they were so ordinary that no one thought to write about them...  Either way, the public is not predisposed to like academic scholarship, so we have to entice them, draw them in.

My approach has been to try and study things that are familiar, like objects used for travel, in an effort to unravel the relationships between people and their stuff and the historical moment that they live in.  Although I don't often think directly about the method underpinning this approach, there are many scholars from whom I have modeled my approach after.  The first thing that comes to mind is historicism, defined in the OED as an attempt by 19th c. German historians "to view all social and cultural phenomena, all categories, truths, and values, as relative and historically determined, and in consequence to be understood only by examining their historical context, in complete detachment from present-day attitudes."  I'm not sure if it's possible to detach ourselves or our histories from the present day, but I see my job largely as an effort to understand people on their own terms and in their own time.

Many scholars of "material culture" talk about using theory to understand and interrogate objects.  They can list dozens of theorists, and apply all kinds of theoretical "tools" to looking at objects like artists books.  Maybe it's an intellectual deficiency on my part, but I've never been comfortable using theories as "tools," largely because I find that focusing on theory widens the distance between me, the object, and the people I'm trying to learn about.  My eyes tend to glaze over when scholars talk about theory.  But I am also a scholar, so I'm just as likely to use complicated approaches to make sense of complicated things.  Historicism doesn't sound like theory to me... but is it?  

I wonder if public engagement requires a kind of magician's approach, where the mechanism is not visible.  As academics, we always want to be upfront about our scholarly apparatus, so that everyone can see that we've done our homework.  But there must be a way to do that without alienating the public.  When I try to imagine "the public," and consider what they might be interested in, I fall back on the idea that people are naturally interested in other people's lives.  And since everyday lives are literally filled with material culture (I'm thinking of the clothes I'm wearing, the chair I'm sitting in, the desk I'm leaning on, the computer I'm typing on and looking at, the fan that's blowing cool air around, the house I'm in, etc.) - why shouldn't our histories be filled with material culture too?

I, too, remember the first time I was introduced to the study of material culture in an academic setting.  I was in Laurie Sterling's undergrad literature class in nineteenth-century American literature and we were reading A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave and Dr. Sterling brought some images of Douglas that were printed in this book and his later work My Bondage and My Freedom.  We were asked to determine what information or attitudes we thought the images were supposed to communicate to readers of both texts and how the differences of these images indicated a difference in Douglas's messages in the texts or some other change.  I can remember thinking at the time, "why are we looking at pictures?  This isn't what we do" (we, of course, meaning English majors).  Now, ironically, here I am years later doing something very similar with Wilde.  But I am continually amazed by the types of objects that literature scholars use to investigate texts, audiences, authors, reading practices, etc.  While I once felt that my discipline limited me to printed materials, I now see, with the help of scholars such as Julian Yates and his oranges, that the study of many types of objects can and do help inform our understanding of the study of literary texts or the people who encountered them.  In response to Josh's question, then, I see more similarities rather than differences between disciplines studying material culture, because the types of objects we use and the questions we ask of these objects share many commonalities.  Over the last two weeks, whether we interrogated trunks, maps, or artists books, we all brought a set of foundational questions to these objects like "how was this object used?" even though many of our questions were informed by our disciplinary training.

As an aside, I also googled "material culture" to see what hits came up and the first was a website for a store in Philly called Material Culture.  It appears to be an antique store, but I was intrigued by both their use of the term material culture instead of so-and-so's antique store and the way their website seems to align historical value and monetary value: "It's ironic that many of the antique and vintage furnishing and arts sold at Material Culture are priced at a fraction of the sterile, industrial knockoffs that fill the profusion of online catalog sellers and chain stores that pay lip service to art, tradition and sustainability.  Between the high and low there is a middle path; it is there, slightly ahead of the curve, that Material Culture welcomes the public" (www.materialculture.com/aboutus).  They seem to promote the idea that age=authenticity=value and it seems to me that a general public would probably buy this notion.  Is there a difference between a yard sale where someone sells a 1960s egg beater that was handed down from Aunt Martha in order to de-clutter their home and an antique store that sells the same 1960s egg beater as a piece of history?  I'm wondering if there is a disconnect between what scholars study as "material culture" and what the public will accept as worthy for study as "material culture."

Material. Culture. Now.

Josh's post got me thinking: Where did I first encounter "material culture?" Maybe we could share our individual introductions to material culture and from there we might move toward a common understanding of the concept (and possibly a definition?). My first experience with material culture came before I had heard of the term. I took a course entitled "The Automobile in America" as an undergraduate. The entire premise of the course was to take an object, the car, and use it as a lens through which to examine American history. It was wonderful (and I'm not really that into cars). I was one of the only non-engineering students in the class (and the rest of the university, for that matter). I learned a lot in that course, but most of all I learned that objects connect people. Things have the ability speak to people across disciplines, regions, class, time, etc. I later had a meeting with the professor from the "Automobile" class and I told him I was really interested in "stuff" and how it affected/reflected the people who used and/or made it. Then he said, "Yeah, material culture" and the cartoon light bulb over my head lit up. And here I am.
Also, in thinking about defining material culture, it seems that what it is now might differ from how material culture was understood in the past. As Josh indicated, scholars still seem to be defining it. I was in the Winterthur student lounge today, and someone had placed the program graphics for the Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars as the background on one of the computers. The symposium was titled: "Material. Culture. Now." This title seems to indicate that there is a difference between the field now and the field "then." But has material ever truly been defined? Has its appeal come from its ability to defy a singular definition? One publication that outlines a history of the concept's use is the introduction to "American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field" edited by Ann Smart Martin and Ritchie Garrison in 1997. I don't know if everyone is familiar with this work, but it might help to understand where the field of material culture has been.
But where is it going?