Musealizing Napoleon (1837–2011): From Traditional Representations to a Dualistic European Master Narrative, by Felicity Bodenstein (Université de Paris-Sorbonne)
Abstract
The paper will successively establish why national museums in the past generally constructed the image of Napoleon as a “Grand homme”, a heroic leader and patron of the arts, providing a more unified, consensual vision and tendentiously hagiographic presentation of Napoleon than the more divided domain of general written historiography. It will also show how permanent presentations and temporary exhibits in the last two decades have attempted to revise different aspects of the museum's master narratives of Napoleon by desacralizing the representation of his physical body, underlining his role in one of Europe's most horrific wars and examining from a political point of view the artistic productions of his time and thus moving towards a more dualistic narrative. These recent museographical reinterpretations of Napoleon's role in exhibitions held across Europe seem to have allowed him to incarnate many ambiguous aspects of the European idea and the sometimes-contradictory nature of its history as his memorial role as moved from the national to a more European paradigm.