Building the History Museum to Stop History: Nicolas Sarkozy’s New Presidential Museum of French History

Abstract

When he ran for president in 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy promised to build a museum of French history. He declared that he was troubled by the lack of a coherent account of the nation’s great moments and great heroes. On being elected, he started the planning process, finally settling on the Hôtel de Soubise, part of the Archives nationales, as the site of the future Maison de l’histoire de France. Although his project was supported by a certain number of intellectuals, many university scholars, especially the historians, raised strong objections to a concept that returned to the old Third Republic civic history in the style of Ernest Lavisse. The future museum was to offer visitors old-fashioned narrative history of male achievements, with no account taken of new insights that women’s, gender, social, cultural, colonial and immigration history have added to any discussion of what France is or might be. It rejects the idea that there have been, and can be, many ways of being French. The critics of the museum project deplored the instrumentalisation of the nation’s past – one of several such presidential ventures – for short-term political gain. The strike of archive employees, which lasted for several months, scuttled that site as the future home of the history museum. The story is not finished. The discussion of the presidential museum initiative is placed in a larger context in which increased economic neo-liberalism, greater state interventions at home and overseas, and the propagation of a nostalgic-conservative vision of the nation’s past reinforce each other, even as they coexist in uneasy union.