The public display of parts of the collections (paintings and furniture) of the kings of France on the first floor of the Luxembourg Palace in Paris was an initiative similar to that taken by many European monarchs during the second half of the eighteenth century and was the direct result of the Enlightenment. It was also proof of just how much art, politics, and society had changed since the reign of Louis XIV.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the French royal art collections were regarded as more national than royal. They had become part of the cultural patrimony of the state, to be preserved for posterity, with the king as their protector rather than their sole owner. The king was responsible for maintaining, restoring, and conserving the collections, in the same way that he was responsible for the maintaining the state and its good government. Works of art and antiquities had become symbols and sources of national pride and collective ownership. Despite remodeling the original Louvre Palace into the baroque style, Louis XIV had built an entirely new palace at Versailles, to which he  moved his court and the best of the royal collections after 1682. The Louvre Palace, still the primary royal residence in Paris, and the home of the Academie Royale, became the repository for artworks that did not fit the decor of Versailles. However, for many Parisians, the Louvre remained the most important cultural site in France, the place for the ceremonial display of the French national art and power.

In 1745, Charles-Francois Lenormand de Tournehem, uncle of King Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, was appointed director of the batiments de roi (the king’s buildings). To demonstrate the king’s generosity; to revitalize the Academie Royale’s schools of painting, sculpture, and architecture; to promote historic painting; and to restore the government’s control of the arts, Lenormand took the popular idea of a display in the Tuileries and set it up in the unoccupied Luxembourg Palace, originally built for Queen Marie de’Medici. And so it was that the first public art gallery in France opened.

Entry to the gallery on the second floor of the Luxembourg was free of charge and was much visited by the enlightened Parisian public, both men and women, bourgeois, educated consumers of high culture and potential patrons of the Academie Royale. From the very beginning the display was arranged to instruct visitors through the comparison and juxtaposition of different art styles. However, the poor state of the collection and its longterm neglect were obvious and were criticized by its visitors. In response to this, a survey and catalog were undertaken, and damaged works of art were properly conserved. The display remained open and popular until 1779 when the Luxembourg Palace was reoccupied as the city residence of the Comte de Paris, the brother of the new king Louis XVI.

Since the 1760s the idea of turning the Louvre into a national museum devoted to multiple fields of knowledge, rather than to just the visual arts, had become popular with the Parisian intelligentsia. This new museum would display its collections according to taxonomic classifications similar to those of a natural history museum, based on the historical evolution of different styles of art.

The Louvre Museum in Paris. (PhotoDisc, Inc.) Plans to compensate Parisians for closing the Luxembourg Gallery with a new and larger display in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Palace were already underway by the time the former closed. However, the new director of the king’s buildings, Joseph Siffred Duplessis, Comte d’Angiviller, was more interested in using the new gallery for political rather than educative ends. He wanted it to demonstrate the king’s generosity to his people and promote France’s artistic, cultural, and political superiority by making it the very best of its kind in Europe. This new display, comprising the king’s collection of old masters, examples of grand French history painting, and statues of great Frenchmen, was envisaged not only as bolstering and confirming France’s national identity and pride but also as increasing political support for the regime and the king.

During the 1770s and 1780s the Comte d’Angiviller’s plans for the grand gallery of the Louvre were drawn up and discussed. Arguments about the details of the construction of large lanterns to maximize natural light in the Louvre were in full swing when the French Revolution rudely interrupted. With the fall of the monarchy the royal collections at Versailles and Paris were declared national property, and the Louvre was the subject of a National Assembly decree within days after the Paris mob attacked the Tuileries. It was placed under the control of the new minister of the interior, Jean-Marie Roland, and became the depot for storing the newly confiscated property of aristocrats, émigrés, churches, and dissolved royal academies. A commission was established to decide what was worthy enough to be accessioned into what would become the new central museum of arts and sciences.

In 1793, Dominique Garat, philosopher and man of letters, replaced Roland, and began to organize the collections and displays so they could be opened to the public as part of the commemoration of the first anniversary of the birth of the republic. There was also a broader political purpose. It was felt that the calm and order displayed in the museum would be a symbol of the calm and order of the new republican government of France. The borders and provinces of the country might be in turmoil, but in Paris civilization reigned.

No matter what the regime, the Louvre remained an important ideological space. For the republic it manifested the benefits of republican ideology, one based on rational philosophy and the belief in progress. It demonstrated that republicans were not barbarians; they were capable of appreciating and promoting the arts and the sciences of Western civilization, but they were just more democratic about doing it. The Louvre became a symbol of revolutionary achievement, and all of its contents were the collective property of the French people.

During the 1790s there were many debates about what would hang and what would be displayed in the national museum. Obviously, royal portraits; paintings about royalist achievements, events, and history; and religious art would not encourage the right kind of republican sentiments, and so these remained in storage. However, any qualms about subject matter disappeared when war booty was put on display. In 1794, within five days of their arrival in Paris, the paintings confiscated by the French army from collections in what is now modern Belgium were displayed to Parisian crowds. The need for a museum of antiquities was recognized as early as 1794. Antiquities were thought not to present the same potential ideological problems that had been posed by the subjects of paintings, but their very diversity sparked debates about what qualified as antiquities—there were so many different kinds. The need to systematically display and interpret antiquities was the subject of other debates. Did you put them together as inscriptions, medals, gems, mosaics, or instruments, even if they were for different, that is, religious, military, or civil, uses? Did statues go with bas-reliefs if they were from the same period or the same country? Did you divide them up into art to be placed with the other arts in the Louvre or historical documents to be kept in the national library? Notwithstanding all this behind-the-scenes wrangling, visiting the Louvre proved to be immensely popular with the French public. There are contemporary descriptions about fashionable women rubbing shoulders with artists, peasants, the elderly, children, and soldiers. While access to the Louvre’s collections embodied the republican principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, there were no education guides to make them more accessible. The display was still all about collective ownership and nationalism. Many visitors to the display of looted art put together in1797 at the Louvre after Napoleon’s conquest of Italy may not have appreciated that it was the greatest collection of art ever brought together under one roof—what they did know was that it now belonged to them and to France.