Figure 1
Bréviaire royal de Saint-Louis de Poissy, fourteenth century, classified as a national treasure in October 2014.
1Hannah Arendt (1961: 202) wrote that “only what will last through the centuries can ultimately claim to be a cultural object.” This assertion is particularly relevant for “trésors nationaux” (national treasures), privately-owned goods protected from circulating on the market due to their artistic value and their place within the history of the arts, techniques, and knowledge. This designation holds much significance: it draws on an imaginary of treasure, a notion of historical objects, which leads to a form of “instrumentaliz[ation] of desire,” with the term “treasure” itself relating to “a rhetorical image projected onto objects” (Besseyre & Cordez 2008). As a collective noun, treasure refers to an assortment of items that convey the authority of the body that possesses them: objects used in liturgical services and sacred texts for cathedrals or ecclesiastical chapters; vaults of royal archives and symbolic objects from the monarchy of the Middle Ages; and finally, rare and precious objects collected due to their exceptionally high value, such as relics of churches, crockery, silver or gold ornamental objects, settings of jewels, precious fabrics, and tapestries handed down within a dynasty or between families over a long period of time. The term groups together objects whose value is indisputable. Treasures are not generally on show, apart from during ceremonies in which their monstrance is highly ritualized. In these cases, exhibiting them aims less to prove their value than to render perceptible the power of their owners. “Treasures” thus elicit deference “in terms of how these goods are taken out of the usual network of circulating precious objects” (Réach-Ngô 2019). They are the result of evaluation and canonization processes that determine, not without various cultural, economic, and political blind spots, the objects that reach the level of “masterpiece” and acquire the status of “signs” within the corpus of art products (Hutter & Throsby 2008; Lamont 2012).
2Taking into account this semantic field and these overlapping definitions, there is no better term than “national treasures.” The phrase emerged during the French Revolution from the pen of the agents responsible for collecting and safeguarding precious objects seized from religious communities and émigrés, first in France and then abroad. In 1793, Alexandre Lenoir referred to the paintings seized in Paris as “national treasures […] held in temporary storage” (Lenoir 1793: 12). Despite the military events and the internationalization of the market during the twentieth century, emphasis was placed upon privately-owned cultural goods remaining on national soil. The Carcopino law of 23 June 1941 was enacted to monitor the circulation of these goods and prevent them from disappearing abroad: it imposed a specific legal status on works of art and made requesting an export licence obligatory. Despite its initial inefficacy during the Occupation, the law remained in effect until 1993 (Tosi 2016: 118–123).
- 1 Law no 92–1477 of 31 December 1992 relating to goods subject to movement restrictions and the coope (...)
3Since 1st January 1993,1 the cultural goods prohibited from leaving France at the end of a classification process are deemed to be “national treasures,” initially as a temporary measure and then definitively. This notion responds to a rationale of border control, which is contrary to the spirit of the European community and constitutes an exception to the rationale behind The Treaty of Rome (art. 30): each Member State can formulate their own definitions of “cultural goods” and “national treasures” on the condition that it does not impinge too much upon the free circulation of goods (Fingerhut 1995: 22). This principle gives public powers the means to carry out selections within the world of heritage whose contours are necessarily vague. It functions as a regulatory authority at the centre of various overlapping discourses and actors—collectors, dealers, scholars, activists—with the aim of organizing the heritage field and, through its constitutive objects, ensuring the perpetuation of the State itself, i.e. as indissoluble and not bound by time (Henryot 2022). On this basis, the idea of a “cultural good,” the substitute for a work of art in legal texts, is heavily imbued with meaning: it favours the appropriation of objects by the State in the name of the public good (Moulin 1997). Among other classification processes that protect goods from circulating on the market and the risks of denaturation and destruction, such as the “Monument historique” (historical monument) label which can apply to both objects and monuments (Bady et al. 2018) and the international statuses awarded by UNESCO (Labadi 2013), the concept of “national treasure” is considered a form of political action from a cultural and symbolic perspective.
- 2 Code du Patrimoine, art. R 111–1, “Categories of cultural goods requiring an export authorization t (...)
- 3 Following the modifications enacted by law no 2000–643 of 10 July 2000.
- 4 Anne Distel and Claire Chastanier [collections department, Direction des Musées de France], “Qu’est (...)
4The year 1992 is a key date in the development and consolidation of this approach. The Single Market, established on 1st January 1993, led to the necessary introduction of the law of 31 December 1992, which abrogated the Carcopino law. Its text covers the surveillance of cultural goods at France’s borders and the “national treasure” classification process. This process is simple: prior to any sales, dealers in the art market are required to request an export certificate from the French Ministry of Culture for any goods that meet the value and dating criteria outlined in the heritage code, the Code du patrimoine.2 These goods must have been present on national soil for at least fifty years. The Ministry then has four months to deliver a substantiated assessment that either authorizes or refuses the export. This assessment is made by the advisory commission, the Commission consultative des trésors nationaux (CCTN), which brings together State representatives and experts who draw on specialist reports. According to the nomination recommendations that appear in the French government’s legal information gazette JORF, these experts represent the domains of antique books, museums, auction houses, academia, and art galleries. The panel is presided over by a high-ranking civil servant whose mandate has been renewed on a rolling basis since 2001. If it is decided that the certificate will not be granted, it is signed off by the Minister of Culture. Thereafter, the item must remain in France for a period of thirty months during which the State can make the owner an offer to purchase it. If this offer is refused at the end of the legal time limit, the certificate can then be granted or refused indefinitely.3 The item could be classified by order, but in such cases, owners can demand compensation equal to its market value, which led the State to abandon this solution. If the item is acquired, it becomes part of the national collections. The law thus lends itself to two readings: on the surface, it allows for works to be kept in France, yet on a deeper level, it makes cultural goods a lever for nationalization (Cornu 2000; Saint-Pulgent 1993). Public powers nevertheless make moderate use of this prerogative. Between 8,000 and 9,000 export certificates are requested each year, and only a dozen, or around 0.1%, are refused.4
5This system, which is severely criticized by individual owners, art dealers, art critics, and even legal experts (Gaillard 1998), is based on a complex and highly subjective definition of “national treasure,” an extra-legal concept of variable content (Cornu & Leniaud 2018; Perelman & Vander Elst 1984) which consequently results in shifts in judgement. The criteria for determining if an item is a national treasure or not are: its importance within the history of art and for research; its links with national history; its links with the collection of works of a French artist or writer; its aesthetic and literary importance; and the absence or rarity of equivalent items in existing national collections (Le Ray 1998). In other words, these criteria do not readily translate into objective decision-making.
6My hypothesis is that the implicit information on which the CCTN bases its judgments is to be found within the room left for interpretation, likely by drawing on elements of specialist language for each evaluated item. Designed to bolster national cultural institutions’ accumulation of exceptional goods, the CCTN makes choices that implicitly show the relationship between works of art, state institutions, and national culture. The histories of national identities (Thiesse 2022 [1999]), “national characters” (Claret 1998), and “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991 [1983]) shows the extent to which cultural institutions, primarily museums, are also “relics of French identity” (Thiesse 2010: 116), working between the voluntarism of the elites and mass culture. Cultural institutions hoard goods that have the capacity to establish “founding fictions,” a collective and inalienable heritage in the name of which “even individual property, however legitimate, must be submitted to the national interest in this case” (Thiesse 2000). On this basis, I postulate that national treasures can point to the construction of an official national imaginary under the aegis of the State.
7This article proposes to define the contours of this imaginary, the modalities of its construction, and the extent to which the public adheres to the story composed through the works presented as exceptional. To do so, it combines two methods. First, a statistical approach to goods that have been refused an export certificate since 1st January 1993 seems an apt way of precisely describing the corpus of “national treasures” and how it has developed. Second, two corpuses of texts were submitted to the lexicometric analysis tool IRaMuTeQ (R Interface for multidimensional analysis of texts and questionnaires): the CCTN’s assessments published on the Légifrance database, and a corpus of 695 articles that mention the classification from 1993 onwards, drawn from the Europresse digital database of the national and regional, general and specialist press.
8Based on a register of refusals to 30 April 2019 (“Liste des trésors nationaux ayant fait l’objet d’un refus de certificat”) published by the Ministry of Culture, complemented by searches on Légifrance, I drew up a list of 257 cultural goods which were refused an export certificate between 1993 and the end of 2022. Whilst 65 of those items were eventually returned to the art market, my analysis focuses on the initial intention of refusing a certificate, whatever subsequently happened.
Figure 2
Chronology of certificate refusals.
Credit: Fabienne Henryot.
- 5 BnF, Mission Archives, 2014/073/292: acquisition of the Heures de Jeanne de France.
9On average, 8.6 goods were classified each year, with some significant variations across the years: from three in 1997, 2020, and 2021 to sixteen in 2000 (Figure 2). The unpredictability of the art market and fluctuations in the availability of goods can account for these variations. The clearest evidence of this instability is the reduction in classifications in 2020 and 2021, which was linked to the pandemic bringing the market to a standstill. Aside from these unpredictable events, the number of classifications appears reasonably stable, with between seven and twelve items classified most years. This data seems to indicate that the CCTN is implicitly or explicitly encouraged to limit its refusals of certificates to a predetermined number of goods for two reasons. The first is to avoid trivializing the notion of rarity: too many classifications would ruin the efficiency of the process. The second relates to the moral obligation of making an offer to purchase the item; classifications are therefore dependant on the availability of funding from the State supplemented by private or public patronage and use of other public funds. The example of medieval hours books, prayer books created for private worship from the fourteenth century onwards and sometimes elaborately decorated (Henryot 2022), offers a case in point. In 2010, three exceptional hours books simultaneously appeared on the market. The Livre d'heures de Jeanne de France, commissioned for Charles VII’s daughter, was confided to Christie’s by the Marquet de Vasselot family who wished to sell it. The Weiller sale, another event in the art world, included the Heures de Claude de France and the Franco-American gallery Les Enluminures proposed to sell the Heures de François Ier to the French National Library (BnF). The classification of three hours books would have been unthinkable: it would have suggested that a number of these rich manuscripts were on the market and their acquisition would have amounted to a considerable public expense. The documents relating to the classification and acquisition of the Heures de Jeanne de France5 in the BnF archives make it clear how cruel this dilemma was. Despite negotiations with the sellers, the BnF eventually had to renounce the acquisition of the Heures de Claude de France and the Heures de François Ier, which were both bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
10Budget restrictions may also explain what appears to be a downward trend. On average, ten classifications were made before 2006 and only seven from 2007 onwards whilst, during the same period, requests for export certificates have visibly increased.6
Figure 3
Types of classified goods (all categories).
Credit: Fabienne Henryot.
Figure 4
Types of classified goods for written and graphic heritage.
Credit: Fabienne Henryot.
11Exploring the types of classified goods reveals the material manifestations of the national imaginary (Figure 3). Paintings and drawings are by far the items that are most often classified (39.3% of certificate refusals). The decorative arts (furniture, jewellery, ceramic art, musical instruments) and sculptures represent 22.2% and 9% of refusals respectively. Archaeological objects, scientific instruments, and militaria (arms and uniforms) make up only a small number of refusals. Written and graphic heritage had the second highest proportion of refusals with 23%. This distribution highlights the overlap between political representations of art and the historical evolution of the appreciation of the graphic arts since the end of the Middle Ages when the visual arts occupied the “summit of the hierarchy [with sculpture and architecture], due to their luxurious nature, use of precious materials, links to prestigious commissioners and sacred subject matter” (Heinich 1985: 931). The emergence of academies of art in Europe perpetuated this recognition to the extent that painting became the very epitome of a work of art. Written heritage, the other major source of national treasures, affirms the predominant place of writing in cultural representations: books and texts are manifestations of authority, the sacred, and literary creation, as well as a tool for standardizing thought and a record of memory (Chartier 1987).
12Though the chronological breakdown of this typology does not show any clear evolution (Table 1), there is an evident trend towards a diversification of the goods classified: initially dominated by paintings and drawings, written and graphic heritage and the decorative arts in relatively equal proportions have gradually begun making up a larger percentage of the classified goods. The emergence of state institutions with a highly political remit may offer a partial explication for this diversification. The increase of manuscripts and archives within the classification of national treasures from 1996 onwards can be linked to the inauguration of the BnF the same year, which replaced the ancient Bibliothèque nationale. Building up France’s literary and intellectual memory on behalf of the nation, a memory whose physical manifestations continue to grow, the BnF became the natural destination for the classified literary manuscripts and archives.
| Time Period |
Decorative Arts
|
Graphic Arts
|
Sculpture
|
Written and Graphic Heritage
|
Other
|
| 1993–1995 |
3
|
19
|
2
|
4
|
3
|
| 1996–2000 |
9
|
24
|
3
|
14
|
2
|
| 2001–2005 |
16
|
18
|
6
|
11
|
1
|
| 2006–2010 |
11
|
13
|
4
|
5
|
3
|
| 2011–2015 |
12
|
6
|
4
|
13
|
4
|
| 2016–2020 |
3
|
17
|
4
|
10
|
3
|
| 2021–2022 |
4
|
3
|
0
|
2
|
0
|
Distribution of certificate refusals according to date and object type (five-year period).
Credit: Fabienne Henryot.
- 7 See, for example, Manifeste pour le patrimoine écrit et graphique (1988), Paris, Fédération françai (...)
13All the paintings refused an export certificate are by artists whose genius is widely recognized. The items listed are: Miró (La Fermière, refusal in 1993); Rubens (La Décollation de saint Jean-Baptiste, 1993); Poussin (L’Agonie au jardin des Oliviers, 1993; La Fuite en Égypte, 2004); Georges de La Tour (Saint-Jean-Baptiste dans le désert, 1994); Picasso (collage and gouache from 1914, 1995); Manet (Berthe Morisot au bouquet de violettes, 1996); Degas (Portrait d’Édouard Manet, 1997); Fragonard (L’escalade and La poursuite, studies, 2000; Le Jeu de la palette and La bascule, 2017); Monet (Effet de vent, 2000); Gauguin (La Paix et la guerre, 2001); Ingres (Portrait du comte de Molé, 2006); Champaigne (Portrait de Louis XIII, 2015); Le Nain brothers (Le Christ enfant méditant sur la crucifixion, 2018); drawings by Francesco Primaticcio and Michelangelo among others. The experts’ attention seems particularly focused on paintings that are already part of the national and even European pantheon. On this basis, the classification ratifies a certain “gallery of busts” and draws an elliptical history of art, which conforms to what the general educated public and an academic history of art affirms to be masterpieces. More can be said about written and graphic heritage, a composite category whose name is borrowed from the combined terminologies of professional lobbies and public powers since 19807 (Giust-Desprairies & Thedoridis 1989). The diversity within this category of written and graphic arts is not initially apparent in the division of national treasures. Among the 59 classified items belonging to this category, most are ancient manuscripts (39%) and literary manuscripts (36%). Other types of heritage documents are represented in smaller proportions: prints (7%), institutional or family archives (5%), posters and photographs (10%), and music manuscripts (3%). In addition, most of the manuscripts are medieval and illuminated; much more rarely are they from later periods and text-based (with the exception of authors’ drafts, which fall under literary manuscripts in this current typology). The rationale behind the national treasure classification is detached from any requirement to be representative. Its intention is to create a rich collection based on goods collectively judged to be precious due to their association with mental images and a consensual national “dictionary.” For literary creation, it features Rimbaud, Éluard, Proust, Mallarmé, Char, Verlaine, Cocteau, Artaud, Chateaubriand, Sade, and Breton; and a dozen elaborately decorated manuscripts made between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, confirming the concept of the “Primitif français” for medieval manuscripts a century after its invention (Passini 2012).
Figure 5
Chronological distribution of classified goods.
Credit: Fabienne Henryot.
14The chronological distribution of the classified goods confirms a very convincing image of the French artistic imaginary (Figure 5). 13 objects were created prior to the sixth century; none come from the Carolingian period; 15 were made between the sixth and fourteenth centuries. The works dating from the fifteenth century alone are the most numerous (19) and for the era of the kings named Louis (XIII, XIV, XV, and XVI), there are 82 classified goods. 110 goods date from the modern period. This chronology once again reveals a very academic vision of the history of art. The fifteenth century is considered a foundational period for national identity: it is the matrix of “France as nation” (Beaune 1991 [1985]), the century of Joan of Arc, Jacques Cœur, the beginning of the French miniature, and the rise of vernacular language for administration and in literature. The Renaissance appears somewhat overshadowed but, in reality, it prolonged the developments of the previous century. In essence, the fifteenth century was already in the process of “rebirth” and the century of the House of Valois confirmed the transformations initiated some decades earlier: royal cultural politics through patronage; increased exploration of the Americas; new refinement in the art of living; and the secularization of art. These developments are reflected in the refusals to grant export certificates for a “portolan atlas, manuscript on parchment” of Italian origin (1999), tiling from the Champagne region (2005), different pieces of secular silversmithery from the “Trésor de Pouilly-sur-Meuse” (2009), the manuscript of Douze Césars [Twelve Caesars] illustrated by Jean Bourdichon around 1520 (2013), and some Chinese porcelain acquired by Henry II’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (2016). The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offer a vision of state-sponsored art financed by the monarchy and the emergence of French-style furniture. 30 of the 57 cultural goods that fall within the decorative arts are pieces of furniture created during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most often for the royal apartments in Paris and Versailles. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a more diverse vision of creation emerges. Whilst the nineteenth century is dominated by the era of the First Empire (militaria, decorative arts, sculpture, and paintings relating to Napoleon), the twentieth century demonstrates a bolder interpretation of national treasure: fairground art (2002), a collection of cycles and motorcycles (2000), furniture by Jean Dunand (2000) and Le Corbusier (2001), surrealist manuscripts (2017) and paintings (2015), paintings by Duchamp (2016), and decorative objects clearly made for utilitarian purposes. These choices are not only dictated by the traditional criteria of rarity and age, but also by “what is […] called historical judgement” (Moulin 1997: 483), which introduces a significant amount of subjectivity into monitoring the market. Across all categories of goods classified, material or symbolic, there is evidence of the nation (Thiesse 2000): in particular, its language (handwritten manuscripts from French literature), cultural and historical monuments (paintings and sculptures), sites of memory (Versailles), and lifestyle.
15Despite what the term “national treasure” suggests, the cultural goods classified are not necessarily French. The variety of the cultural areas covered in these classifications shows the public powers’ mission—and the means given to it—to accumulate global artistic excellence from over the centuries. Among the classified goods, there are Italian drawings by Rosso Fiorentino (2001), Primaticcio made in red chalk (2003), and Michelangelo (2008 and 2019); a “medical papyrus, recto-verso inscription in hieratic script, sheets of papyrus initially from a roll of around 10 m, Egypt, New Kingdom, Eighteenth Dynasty” (2005) and a “shroud inscribed with funerary texts in hieratic script, Egypt, end of the Middle Kingdom or start of the New Kingdom, linen, drawn in black, red, and white ink” (2009); a harpsicord made in Hamburg at Albrecht Hass’s workshop in 1740; and Dutch paintings from the Golden Age, including one attributed to Frans Hals (2008). The old dream of France’s cultural universality, the cosmopolitan ideal of the Enlightenment that was theorized from the Revolution onwards when dispossessions occurred across the whole of Europe, appears to be still alive today. The treasure is national in the sense that it constitutes a form of wealth for the nation, whether it is of French origin or not. As evidence, the duration of the presence on French soil stipulated in the law (at least fifty years) is paramount. If this condition is not met, an export certificate cannot be refused. Owners have attempted to exploit this contradiction to oppose refusals, notably in the case of Van Gogh’s Garden in Auvers when the fact that the painting had been abroad since its creation was cited. Against this contestation, the government’s advisory body, the Conseil d’État argued that “public interest from the perspective of art history” took precedence over the “French” origin of the work (Albert 2010). However, this universalist vision of items likely to garner national consensus also relates to the fact that “national treasures” reaffirm the canonization of works and artists declared to be major. By its very nature, a canonized work escapes obsolescence; it has meaning across heterogeneous and changing cultural contexts (Heinich 1996 [1991]). Without being a canonization authority properly speaking, the CCTN confirms cultural hierarchies and scales of values established at its periphery, in the world of art experts, curators of cultural goods, and dealers whose representatives are at its centre.
16These choices are never made explicit in the texts issued in the classification process. In the absence of more direct sources, such as the classification files, transcriptions of debates within the CCTN, or even the goods whose classification may have sparked some debate before eventually being abandoned, a close examination of the vocabulary used to justify the refusal of an export certificate sheds some much needed light on decision-making.
- 8 Texts relating to the decisions made prior to 2002 cannot be accessed on the website Legifrance.gou (...)
17The following analysis is not intended to raise questions over the expertise of the heritage professionals responsible for examining the objects and deciding upon their rarity and their authenticity. It simply seeks to understand the modalities of language and arguments by which a work becomes a national treasure whilst others, no less prestigious, can freely circulate on the market. To do so, I have extracted the published explanations from 163 assessments made by the CCTN (“avis de la Commission consultative des trésors nationaux”), representing all the assessments between 2002 and 2022.8 The sample accounts for more than two thirds of all certificate refusals, thus guaranteeing its representativity. This homogenous corpus of texts underwent a statistical lexical analysis to identify the semantic links between lexical fields independent of the classifications previously proposed (date of work; type of item). Beyond the strictly legal field, this textometry captures the “significant interest for national heritage from the perspective of history, art, or archaeology” cited for each item. Ultimately, it can point to the assessed objects’ foundations and properties on what the attribution of value is based in a given context regardless of any constraints. Analysing the written assessments is pertinent as the arguments have become increasingly longer over time: initially confined to five or six lines of text at the beginning of the 2000s, they are now extremely detailed. The 163 assessments analysed equate to 44,844 occurrences (words), with an average of 275.12 words per assessment. These occurrences can be grouped together in 6,507 different “forms” (or words), including 53.7% unique words.
18Excluding the expected terms “certificat” (certificate), “exportation,” “demander” (to request), “trésor” (treasure), and “national,” a first category of active forms reveals the underlying purpose of the assessment: justifying the classification of the item. The most frequent terms are “œuvre” (work), “siècle” (century), and “français” (French), situating the cultural goods within the field of art, a given time, and a national framework considered as a “value,” understood as an ideological fact (Heinich 2017). The following terms systematically belong to the vocabulary of the exceptional: “remarquable” (remarkable, 117 times), “important” (105), “rare” (87), “exceptionnel” (exceptional, 66), “majeur” (major, 60). These words stress the creation of a sense of uniqueness more than they show it.
19Each century is attributed a specific lexicon that relates to a particular imaginary, which is revealed through the calculation of lexical specificities (Table 2). The High Middle Ages (until the thirteenth century) are depicted through Christian art, part of an institution and rites structuring society, with overrepresented forms such as “saint,” “fête” (festival), “croix” (cross), “Christ,” “cathédrale” (cathedral), and “Vierge” (Virgin). The fourteenth century saw the beginnings of a royal mythology, which took material form in funerary statuary. In the fifteenth century, manuscript art emerged and thrived due to royal commissions. The sixteenth century is exclusively Italian and graphic art. The seventeenth century is dominated by Louis XIV and political art (busts and royal portraits), whilst the eighteenth century saw the flourishing of art at Versailles, which discretely contrasts with the previous century through the importance placed on the private spaces: the term “bureau” (desk), which was overrepresented for the seventeenth century, is significantly replaced with “commode” (dresser) and “appartement” (apartment) the following century, two words relating to private life rather than the royal political theatre that Louis XIV had established. The nineteenth century is dominated by Napoleon, poetry, and the invention of photography. The term “modernité” (modernity) has a specificity index of 3.19; it can be grouped with two proper nouns that appear in relation to the nineteenth century, Hugo and Caillebotte. The twentieth century is marked by artistic and literary experimentation. Breton, Dali, and “surréalisme” (surrealism) have indexes greater than ten; “archives,” “écrivain” (writer), “document,” “auteur” (author), and “monde” (world) indicates a documentary approach to modernity.
Table 2
| Century of production for classified goods |
Overrepresented forms (index of specificity > 2) |
| Antiquity |
Empire, funéraire (funerary) |
| vi, xi, xii, xiii |
Saint, manuscrit (manuscript), fête (festival), école (school), page (sheet), feuillet (page), plate, croix (cross), atelier (workshop), Christ, cathédrale (cathedral), Vierge (Virgin) |
| xiv |
Tombeau (tomb), pleurant, saint, funéraire (funerary), monument, roi (king), Berry, marbre (marble), sculpture |
| xv |
Heures (hours), saint, René, Jean, Berry, livre (book), page, feuillet (page), enluminure (illumination), illustration, manuscrit (manuscript), Vierge (Virgin), duc (duke), époux (spouse), donner (to give) |
| xvi |
Renaissance, italien (Italian), Ange, Michel (Michelangelo), feuille (sheet of paper), dessin (drawing), étude (study) |
| xvii |
XIV, Louis, buste (bust), tableau (painting), couronne (crown), roi (king), royal (royal), iconographie (iconography), portrait, bureau (desk), illustre (illustrious) |
| xviii |
Château (palace), Louis, XV, XVI, Orléans, meuble (piece of furniture), ébéniste (cabinetmaker), décor (decoration), nature, reine (queen), Versailles, mobilier (furniture), royal, commode (dresser), appartement (apartment), peinture (painting) |
| xix |
Empire, portrait, poème (poem), photographie (photography), raison (reason), modernité (modernity) |
| xx |
Breton, Dali, surréalisme (surrealism), écrivain (writer), archive, document, auteur (author), manifester (to express), monde (world) |
Most represented words according to century of production.
20This reading of national history corroborates the statistical approach carried out using the typology of classified items. It attests to highly political choices and a form of distinguishing items that is based less on rarity than on prestige. According to the criteria of availability and social representativeness, it would perhaps be more pertinent to classify a medieval sickle than a painted manuscript. Yet this is not the purpose of the national treasure classification: counter to a museum-led rationale of ethnology and civilization (Côté 2011), it seeks to write a glorious European history under French influence across all art forms and provide a reference framework for a French tradition of artistic excellence within literary and artistic creation.
21Applying the calculation of specificities this time to the types of classified goods indicates different attributions according to the type of object assessed (Table 3). Whilst sculpture, painting, and written heritage draw upon a more neutral lexical field relating to the techniques used (painting, composition, colours, calligraphy, book illustration), two categories of objects reveal clear references to an imaginary anchored in time: objects of decorative arts and militaria almost always refer respectively to royalty and the Napoleonic age. These are ideological objects, the material referents that convey values and are likely to reinforce a shared understanding of periodization. The argument presented in 2011 for the classification of ceremonial dress belonging to Maréchal Ney, Napoleon’s comrade in arms and most loyal of all the loyalists, an “emblematic figure of the imperial epic who, through his military acts and tragic destiny, occupies an important place in the national imaginary” is very revealing. This piece of clothing was “likely made in 1804 for the coronation of Napoleon on 2 December” and “closely follows the recommendations of Jean-Baptiste Isabey, the artist responsible for establishing new models for the ceremonial costumes of the court.” This outfit is not the uniform of a soldier, the commander of the Garde who risked everything at Waterloo in 1815; rather it is an element of a larger “painting,” that of the coronation, a scene captured for eternity by Jacques-Louis David’s paintbrush and disseminated widely in collective representations, notably through school textbooks. This costume confirms the importance of political rituals but also the “reemergence of orders for luxury items as an imperial initiative, the formation of a new dress code, and the skills of French craftspeople participating in its creation.” In short, an embroidered cape and a jacket are at once the tangible proof of the historical episode of the coronation, beyond its depiction by the Emperor’s artists, and that of the social revival set in motion by Napoleon after the Revolutionary years of crisis. The outfit, in and of itself, signifies the historical turning point of the Empire.
Table 3
| Type of object |
Overrepresented forms (index of specificity > 2) |
| Decorative Arts |
Meuble (piece of furniture), mobilier (furniture), Louis, décor (decoration), provenance, royal, prestigieux (prestigious), roi (king), château (palace) |
| Graphic Arts |
Tableau (painting), peintre (painter), peinture (painting), artiste (artist), dessin (drawing), œuvre (work), composition, portrait, sujet (subject), manière (manner), figure, magistral (masterful), Michel (Michelangelo) |
| Sculpture |
Figure, ancien (ancient) |
| Written and Graphic Heritage |
Manuscrit (manuscript), document, ouvrage (work), texte (text), livre (book), complet (complete), auteur (author), connaissance (knowledge), album, version, inédit (unpublished) |
| Militaria |
Empire, premier (first), France |
Most represented words according to type of item classified.
Figure 6
Dendrogram of the lexicon of CCTN assessments.
Credit: Fabienne Henryot.
Figure 7
Factorial analysis of the lexicon of CCTN assessments developed using the 5 classes from the dendrogram.
Credit: Fabienne Henryot.
- 9 The corpus of the 163 assessments from the CCTN was automatically split into 1238 segments, and 84. (...)
22The hypothesis that each national treasure must centre upon a significant moment in French history can be verified using a descending hierarchical classification (Reinert Method).9 The dendrogram (Figure 6) highlights the major groups: class 5 of vocabulary relates exclusively to the classification process, and classes 1, 2, 3, and 4 which are distinguished by specific discourses on the classified items. Among the second grouping, the classes 2 and 4 display some proximity: these groups represent written and graphic heritage (4) and graphic arts (2), which are significantly individualized, likely because they employ specific technical vocabulary. A factorial analysis of the correspondences for all five classes (Figure 7) however shows a strong interpenetration of the lexicons of these two classes. For different reasons, classes 1 and 3 also display proximity. Class 1 draws upon a semantic field relating to the public good, which the State protects, and storytelling as an important component of heritage, the subject of highly narrativized discoveries. The CCTN assessments also function as a reminder of the role of public powers in shoring up cultural goods and in the balance between territory and culture due to legal procedures and the dedicated conservation institutions, museums, and libraries in particular. Class 3 highlights the vocabulary of the Ancien Régime monarchy, conveyed through artefacts from the decorative arts. Whilst this information had previously emerged, it is interesting to underscore its proximity to the role of current public powers in the conservation and heritage creation of cultural goods (class 1). Clear lines of kinship between the Republic and the former monarchy are presented here. The Republic draws from the artefacts of the monarchy a form of patrimonial legitimacy through the interplay of “reverse filiations” as Jean Davallon (2000) has previously shown. The Bourbon monarchy’s illustrious history was utilized at the turn of the twenty-first century as a collective mirror of French grandeur, believed to elicit the adherence of all (which will be verified below) and reflects a positive image that generates collective confidence (Reynaud 2016). The cultural goods held up as “national treasures” are not treasures in and of themselves: they are called upon to bolster a political project and an argumentative rhetoric allowing the whole of society to collectively feel rich and to see material proof of it. It also represents a demonstration of the power of the French State, for which the classification is at once a sovereign prerogative of remaining defiant against private interests in the name of public interest and an instrument of regulating the cultural and symbolic hierarchies that underpin cultural goods. This show of strength is also justified by the guarantee of offering the selected items the inalienability and imprescriptibility of public collections.
23This ideology of heritage is strongly expressed in the CCTN assessments by employing three principles: rarity and value, the essential characteristics of a treasure; the market and its obligations; and properties specific to objects of art described using a specific lexicon, which attests to the expertise of the Commission members. First, rarity and value are evidenced through superlative vocabulary (“chef d’œuvre” [masterpiece], “monument”) and by assigning each item the function of being a “témoin” (witness) or a “jalon” (foundation). A national treasure is supposed to be the representative of art’s materialization at a given time. The chain of national treasures must constitute a sort of fragmented fresco based on material points of reference (paintings, manuscripts, furniture) that cement key moments in French artistic excellence. Rarity is also appreciated in light of the French collections that form a whole, a living organism. The argument that the item has no “equivalent in public collections,” or even contributes to completing mismatched and partial public collections, is put forward in almost all decisions. In 2010, one of the justifications given for the classification of pieces of the silver epergne made by the Parisian silversmith Antoine-Sébastien Durand was that “these precious examples of great Parisian silversmithery under the reign of Louis XV, whose development is extensively documented, certainly represent one of the last opportunities to complete this prestigious table service, part of which is already held in French public collections.”
24Second, these foundations are determined in an opportunistic manner based on the instability of the market. The forms “marchand” (dealer), “provenir” (to originate from), “découverte” (discovery), “trace,” and “perdre” (to lose) significantly refer to the economic constraints whilst also giving meaning to them. The classified item must have an irreproachable pedigree, certain origins, and an undisputable claim to authenticity. Tracing the thread of transmission of paintings or manuscripts also allows to confer upon them an additional value based on narrativization. For a “sculpted ivory plaque representing the heads of twelve tribes from Israel” classified in 2011, beyond its unique, exceptional, magistral character and the attribution of likely French origins through comparison with other sculpted objects from the same period, the assessment highlights its
doubly prestigious provenance in terms of the history of collections as it was part of the Carrand collection, one of the most important and oldest French medieval collections from the nineteenth century, then at the end of that same century, it became part of Victor Prosper Martin Le Roy’s collection, also very renowned in this domain, which his son-in-law Jean-Joseph Marquet de Vasselot would inherit.
25Each object is part of a tale in which chance, family cohesion, institutions, grey zones, and fortuitous rediscoveries form many of the intriguing and thus seductive elements.
26Third, no heritage creation is possible without expertise and the extensive lexical fields for each artistic category—in particular, graphic arts, manuscript and illustration art, decorative arts—show that this certification is not contestable. These types of terms are the unique words identified by the lexicometry tool, such as “évangéliaire” (gospel book) for ancient liturgical manuscripts, “éclisse” (rib/side) for musical instruments, and “écotée” for a twelfth-century medieval enamelled cross made in the Limoges area classified in 2012 whose four segments resemble the branches of a tree. As Françoise Benhamou (2010: 116) highlights, though a work’s notoriety acts as a driving force, it is ultimately the “almost unopposed influence of the expert” that carries it forward.
27The lexicometric analysis thus provides much insight into the heritage creation process. The State’s cultural services do not identify treasures, they make them. Among the objects that appear on the market, they determine which of them would be able to convey a strong national imaginary founded on three pillars: on one hand, the matrixes of France, Christianity and the monarchy; and on the other, literary creation, a universally recognized manifestation of unique national genius. This ability to decree heritage through identification, expertise, and classification is a prerogative of the State, which is reaffirmed in every assessment made using these overlapping lexicons. Entire, even perceptible, parts of former or contemporary national history that emerge from colonial or postcolonial history are left to the side: there is no trace of them at all in the lexical index. The emergence of questions regarding the repatriation of cultural goods over the last decade for less strictly legal than ethical reasons (Maniatis 2018; Murphy & Tillier 2019) may have had a lateral effect on the classification of “national treasures” by focusing its attention on a history that is, if not consensual (an impossibility), at least spectacular and grandiose. The effectiveness of these lexicons must however be verified by examining, as far as is possible, the discourses employed in the media as an intermediary between state classifications and public opinion.
28To survey, if not “opinion” itself, at least the available means to share information about national treasures, their emergence and their becoming, the same analysis tools were applied to a corpus of newspaper articles from the Europresse database. Following a search for the character chains “trésor national” and “trésors nationaux” in articles published since 1993, it was necessary to manually filter the 11,775 results since this expression proved to be extremely ambiguous. Only 695 articles, representing 6% of the results, were relevant for this study. “National treasure” can just as easily apply to footballers, cinema actors, pop singers, baguettes, winemaking, public hospitals, and, consistently over time, pandas, a symbol of China which oversees all the animals of this species in zoos across the world to the point of occasionally causing diplomatic incidents. These different applications invite some caution: for many people, a national treasure is not necessarily a work of art.
29The articles were published in 38 different newspapers, a third from the national press and two thirds from the regional press which most often simply relayed press statements from the Louvre or the BnF without developing a story. Only 75 of the 257 classifications made since 1993 were mentioned in the press. For some items, this lack of coverage might have been because they were not acquired by the State in the end whereas others were likely not judged newsworthy enough. For example, neither the “dresser from Louis XV’s bedroom at Fontainebleau in rose wood, violet wood, golden bronze and violet Breche marble” made by the cabinetmaker Gilles Joubert around 1775 and classified in 2016, nor the Turgot family archives classified in 2011 appeared. This selectivity is significant in and of itself: the press is a filter that contextualizes France’s national history of art written through a long chain of national treasures.
30The corpus of 695 articles represents 380,669 occurrences, or 22,381 forms including 43% unique words. A simple examination of the active forms by order of frequency shows that discourses in the press are based on different approaches to the CCTN assessments: “musée” (museum, 1,478 times), “vente” (sale, 952 times), “euro” (1,341 times), “Louvre” (784 times), “acquérir” (to acquire, 630 times), and “culture” (610 times). A national treasure is presented as a collective good whose acquisition is undertaken for the benefit of all. Public institutions are designated as places that both preserve and exhibit national treasures: places of hospitality for the works and the public.
Figure 8
Dendrogram of the lexicon of newspaper articles.
Credit: Fabienne Henryot.
31According to the dendrogram of descending hierarchical classification (Figure 8), three discourses relating to national treasures are found in the media: the importance of contemporary creation and an immediate form of memory; the legitimacy of the State to protect cultural goods in the collective interest; and the preciousness, which can be measured in the amount spent by public powers to acquire the classified item.
32First, treasure most often refers to a contemporary creation (38.8%), immediate memory, and more marginally to a historical painting (12.8%). The press thus offers an inverted echo of the CCTN’s choices and arguments. Whereas the CCTN overvalues objects in relation to France’s Christian past and the Ancien Régime monarchy, public opinion is more aware of items evoking the idea of modernity whose contours are sufficiently malleable to encompass anything that demonstrates artistic, moral, political, or social progress. Poetry, especially surrealist, gender, and finitude are so often the words that delineate this modernity.
33Whatever objects are classified, manuscripts or painting, the serial novel of the “discovery,” to use Umberto Eco’s notion (1993), appears as a distinguishing element of heritage consensus. What is emphasized is the novel of the object, rather than the aesthetic or documentary characteristics of the object itself. The object is a story; it lends itself to enunciations, forms of sociability and sharing, and thus communication (Tardy 2003). It is a fact of language before even being the product of administrative processes and in this sense, it becomes part of the public sphere (Cerclet 1998). The fictionalization of the objects is almost systematically corroborated in the press, with some of them having significant narrative potential. The words that present the most occurrences are “grenier” (attic), “Labarbe,” and “Toulouse,” which all refer to the “novel” of the painting Judith Beheading Holofernes attributed to Caravaggio. This work suddenly reappeared at a private home in Toulouse before being assessed by the auctioneer Maître Labarbe who then drew attention to it. Labarbe recounted in La Dépêche du Midi (13 April 2016):10 “it was by chance whilst cleaning an attic where there was a blocked entry of water that the owner made this extraordinary discovery.” All the ingredients for a crime novel are in place. Debates among experts raged. A painting with this title is mentioned in the testament of painter Louis Finson, a friend and student of Caravaggio, but it subsequently disappeared. The investigation was able to make a link with an ancestor of the owner, a soldier in Napoleon’s Grande Armée who participated in the Spanish campaign which would have given him the opportunity to bring back the painting. The painting was valued at 120 million Euros. Without experts being able to come to a consensus over its attribution, the export certificate was finally granted on 21 December 2018, much to the displeasure of some observers. These chance discoveries are so frequent that they appear as pure media constructions. For example, Le Télégramme reported the remarks of another auctioneer on 9 June 2018: “a few months ago, a lady sent us a photo of a painting saying that it must be worth a lot of money…”. The work in question was a painting by Le Nain representing the Christ child praying in front of a crucifix. These remarks also defend the cause of the market and its dealers, the auction houses whose infallible judgement and intuition are showcased. In 2017, a Rodin suddenly turned up at a retirement home in the room of an old woman who had died without any known heirs. Her assets were put under the guardianship of the State whilst the notaries and genealogists identified some nephews. Cimabue’s painting The Mocking of Christ, which was refused an export certificate in 2019, decorated the kitchen of a house in Compiègne and had been “promised to the rubbish tip” (Le Parisien, 23 December 2019).11
- 12 Valérie Sasportas, “Les déboires des ‘Mémoires’ de Chateaubriand,” Le Figaro, 27 November 2014.
34Manuscripts also provide the substance for novelesque fantasies. The extraordinary story of the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom offers a case in point: though there is truth to it, the manuscript would eventually be reduced to this tale. The text was written at the Bastille prison on sheets of paper provided by Sade’s family and stuck together to form a twelve-metre roll. The “divin marquis” hid it between two stones in the wall of his cell and the roll was found by a Revolutionary who participated in the fortress’s demolition during the summer of 1789. It was bought by an aristocrat, then passed onto a German psychiatrist who published it in 1904. After becoming part of Charles de Noailles’s collection in 1929, it was stolen and resold before ending up in the hands of Gérard Lhéritier, the founder of the company Aristophil, whose downfall in 2017 following accusations of fraud led to it being put on sale and classified as a national treasure. A banker, the grandson of a former curator at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, provided the necessary sum for the State to acquire it. This story has it all: clandestinity, the author’s scandalous reputation, theft, the art market and dishonest dealers, psychiatrists interested in sexuality, and patronage based on emotional bonds and not fiscal benefits. Newspapers are also teeming with indications that fall within storytelling and add value to the documents: for example, Chateaubriand kept a draft of his Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave) at the foot of his bed so he could modify it until his last breath, and confided a copy for safekeeping to a friend under the form of a deposit and not a gift, which still influences the legal status of the manuscript today (Le Figaro, 27 November 2014).12
35Becoming part of public collections can also offer a plot twist in the narrativization process. The headline “Scandal: Debord at the Bibliothèque nationale!”13 adorned the pages of Ouest-France on 12 April 2013. Holding Debord’s archives at the BnF was said to represent a distortion of the position of the Situationist leader who made a radical criticism of the conditions of existence engendered by capitalism (Pinchard 2014). More generally, the notoriety and canonization of authors and works are often the result of adopting positions against the legitimate and dominant culture. The BnF used the following justification for the classification of Édouard Glissant’s archives (Le Point, 19 September 2015):14
We rose up so that national histories were opened up to the realities of the world. So that national vertical memories can be imbued with the sharing of memories. So that national prides can be fuelled by the recognition of the shadows and the light within their history.
36The value of Glissant’s archive is to act as the bad conscience of France, representing a strange subversion of the national treasure process. Moreover, it is often transgressive and marginal authors, like Sade and Verlaine who are canonized in this way. In Le Monde (18 May 2012),15 Philippe Artières and Matthieu Potte-Bonneville expressed concern about the risks that the classification of Michel Foucault’s archives posed in pinning down a work that had always proved impossible to contain within strict intellectual and material limitations. They also feared that the archives could become inaccessible as a result of this change in status, from research to heritage:
We want to make people understand that the archives do not at all constitute a treasure. Treasures bring to mind chests, excite collectors, and attract treasure hunters. We fear that treating the archives in this way may spark the temptation to restrict access to them, making them an object of prestige rather than research, and to almost clandestinely circulate disparate fragments, pieces of brilliance ripped from the collection when, on the contrary, it is circulations within the corpus that bear fruits.
37The classified objects thus are presented in the public sphere as touchstones of collective fantasies, less through their nature than by their story. A longitudinal study of press articles based on the sample years shows that this has not always been the case, and the role of newspapers as mediator is a relatively recent occurrence. The calculation of specificities for three years (1999, 2009, and 2019) shows that mentions of national treasures initially remained purely factual based on the implementation of a legal instrument in favour of works of art. The most represented terms for the year 1999 are “tribunal”, “franc,” “loi” (law), “interdiction,” “sortie” (exit), “gouvernement” (government), “1992” (referring to the law of 31 December 1992), and “Cézanne.” Ten years later, articles had begun developing cases that were more likely to communicate an opinion in referring to the works or the corpuses that mark important foundations in thought. In 2009, the headlines were about Guy Debord and the most represented terms were “spectacle” (from the title of his seminal work, La Société du spectacle), “situationniste” (Situationist), “archive,” “Yale,” “Racine” (the surname of the director at the Bibliothèque nationale), and “Ingres” in the domain of painting. Finally, in 2019, reporting on the national treasure was largely constructed as a news story around the case of the Caravaggio painting. This evolution can be explained by the increasing use of popular patronage, but it also desacralizes national treasures by monopolizing attention on cultural goods that provoke debate at the risk of leading to the conclusion that the “treasures” are not actually treasures.
- 16 “Marché de l’art: les ‘trésors nationaux’, armes d’expropriation massive ?,” Art Critique, 1st Febr (...)
- 17 Didier Rykner, “L’Art déco méprisé par le ministère de la Culture,” La Tribune de l’Art, 7 April 20 (...)
- 18 Id., “Une association s’oppose au décret sur les seuils d’exportation,” La Tribune de l’Art, 26 Feb (...)
- 19 Id., “La collection Ribes, nouvelle Bérézina pour le patrimoine français ?,” La Tribune de l’Art, 9 (...)
- 20 Id., “Deux vitraux de Saint-Denis revendiqués par le ministère de la Culture,” La Tribune de l’Art, (...)
- 21 Violaine de Montclos, “Didier Rykner, le flic du patrimoine,” Le Point, 2020, no 202005.
- 22 Didier Rykner, “Quand le ministère dit – enfin – la vérité sur la procédure des certificats d’expor (...)
- 23 Id., “Grands départements, acquisitions et trésors nationaux : un système à bout de souffle,” La Tr (...)
38A second category of media discourse seeks to offer a reminder that a treasure is the manifestation of the State’s legitimacy to protect cultural goods in the collective interest (27.7% of segments classified). This point is reinforced as each classification renews the State’s capacity to neutralize cultural goods, whatever is the essence of the arguments invoked by the CCTN. This prerogative does not seem to cause any controversy in the press, perhaps because the newspapers surveyed do not or rarely fall within the specialist press. Other media sources that do not appear on the Europresse database often take the national treasure classification as a pretext to express despair at either the negligence of public powers or the abuses of power. For example, the online journal Art critique views the policy as a “massive weapon of expropriation”.16 La Tribune de l’Art has made these warnings, which are only the opinion of the publication and its writer Didier Rykner, somewhat of a speciality. In response to Bernard Boutet’s Self Portait, Place Vendôme not being classified and Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann’s chaise longue and Jean Dunand’s ashtray whose export bans were lifted to allow their respective sales in New York (December 2019) and London (June 2021), he wrote on 7 April 2021:17 “the national treasures system, already leaky for the oldest pieces of art, is a veritable sieve for all Art Deco.” He is also outraged at the “dramatic and regular stream of art works outside of France” (26 February 2021)18 and has cautioned against the idea of a symbolic continuity between the objects from the former monarchy and the Republic’s public collections. He offers a principle: “by definition a bronze of the Crown [in response to three bronzes commissioned by Louis XIV being sold at Sotheby’s Paris in 2019] is a national treasure.”19 On the other side of the coin, Rykner denounces the abuses of power, notably the claims made on the objects of art in circulation by supposing that they belong by right to the public sphere and should never appear on the market. He points to the stained glass of Saint-Denis in 2021, a fragment of the jube from the Chartres, and a manuscript from Mont Saint-Michel: he (26 January 2021)20 believes this notion of belonging to the transferable public domain is not proven. The objects disseminated during the Revolution cannot, in this sense, be claimed by the Republic. Rykner appears extremely well-informed.21 He accesses the actual texts from the CCTN and has accused the Ministry of Culture of “enormous lies” (16 February 2019),22 incompetence, and even corruption. For him, the national treasures system is “running out of steam” (11 May 2016).23 Other newspapers are outraged at revelations of inauthenticity for some objects, such as furniture from Versailles classified in 2021 but suspected to be fake.
- 24 Valérie Duponchelle, “Un trésor national beau comme l’antique,” Le Figaro, 8 October 2004.
- 25 Mohammed Aïssaoui, “À la recherche des trésors de papier,” Le Figaro, 10 December 2020.
- 26 Marc Pennec, art. cité.
- 27 Keren Lentschner, “Les millions du “Poussinthon,” Le Figaro, 7 November 2007.
39None of these controversies appear in the mainstream national or regional press. In contrast, Le Figaro on 8 October 2004,24 on the subject of the sale of a sculpted horse head dating from Archaic Greece, ruled against the auctioneer who spoke of the “French scandal” and was pleased with the “legal enthronement” that the national treasure classification represents, and how it had come to “crown Paris.” The journalist Valérie Duponchelle concludes: “The rediscovery and emotion that this work elicited proves that this grandeur touches us all.” The classification accompanies the French people’s natural interest in visual or textual treasures, according, once again, to Le Figaro (10 December 2020).25 Finally, the works that the classification prevents from leaving French soil awaken a sort of naïve nationalism. The Debord archives had been promised to the library at Yale University in United States, but Ouest-France (12 April 2013)26 was delighted that they were “being kept with us.” The press stresses the urgent nature of the process: in the case of a Poussin painting exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Le Figaro (7 November 2007)27 described a sigh of relief: “France almost lost this gem coveted by collectors from across the world”. The formulation, like the vocabulary used, contributes to allocating attention in public opinion by creating value for a painting that, in any other way, would not have provoked the spontaneous admiration of the public (Coavoux 2016).
40Third, the press qualifies national treasures by their market value (20.8% of the segments classified), utilizing the semantic field associated with this word to varying degrees. However, it should be noted that the press only mentions national treasures when they are acquired, and not (or rarely) when they are classified. Purchasing a treasure is very expensive: 12.5 million Euros for the Teschen table decorated with 128 semi-precious stones that was used for the signing of a European peace treaty in the eighteenth century; 17 million for the Poussin painting; 8.5 million for the Turgot archives in 2015; 2.4 million for La Description des Douze Césars, a manuscript commissioned by Francis I in the sixteenth century; 7 million for a handwritten manuscript by Casanova; 3 million for the bust of Colbert by Coysevox; 2.7 million for the Debord archives; one million for a royal dresser at Fontainebleau; and 4 million for the painting The Three Graces by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The prices may raise some eyebrows, but they do not cause controversy.
- 28 Claire Bommelaer, “Le Louvre lance un appel aux dons pour acquérir un Apollon du 1er siècle,” Le Fi (...)
41Moreover, the sums paid by the State and patrons serve the common interest since the financial effort always has the purpose of bringing the treasures into public collections, representing a rare moment where public and private interests converge. In the cultural sector, the national treasure classification has also led to the emerging practice of popular patronage, mentioned in almost a third of articles. Crowdfunding cannot exist without the press since it relies on seducing a group of anonymous people through mass communication to elicit donations. Using crowdfunding for culture has been pointed out as a sign of the State disengaging from financing culture and a means of disguising budget cuts (Bettio & Collot 2018; Guesmi et al. 2016). In reality, fundraising does not aim to finance culture in general, but specifically the acquisition or restauration of cultural goods. From this perspective, the practice engenders a redistribution of roles. The State decrees what falls within heritage or not; the cultural services then seek funding from the State, the individual budgets of holding institutions, (sometimes) regional collectives, companies, and individuals asked to show their attachment to heritage goods. This funding process seems an intentional way of involving the public in the management of heritage by soliciting the “participation of citizens,” a way of making them responsible for cultural “commons.” Bringing the public into the economy of cultural goods is a symbolic way of removing these items from a strictly market system where the State would only be a client of book dealers and auctioneers. At the Louvre, the participative fundraiser for the acquisition of Apollo Citharoedus (classified in 2017, acquired in 2020), a bronze statue from Antiquity found in Pompei, attracted 6,600 donors. It raised the remaining 800,000 Euros after contributions from the museum and the Société des Amis du Louvre, and sponsorship from businesses. The statue was acquired for 6.7 million Euros (Le Figaro, 5 November 2019).28
42The press, which often relays dispatches from Agence France-Presse and elements of languages provided by the Ministry of Culture, thus undertakes a selection, even an interpretation of what the national treasures are, for a diverse readership on a national and regional scale. It transforms the national treasure into a news story, a police investigation, a race for the funding to collectively “save” a work in which each must see a fragment of common culture, and finally the irrefutable proof that the State looks after the objects that recount the national novel and maintain its sovereignty over culture. In doing so, it makes the work of art “readable” and favours its recognition as a treasure in the public sphere. These three levels of discourse, which are generally interwoven, significantly contribute to fetishizing cultural goods and provoking a veritable sacralization (Lahire 2019 [2015]) within public institutions which thereafter find renewed legitimacy.
43The apparatus of the “national treasure” classification, a veritable “decision of assigning national residence to certain goods” (Cornu 2006: 76) allows for a material link to be made between nation, territory, and artefacts of artistic creation under the watchful eye of the State which presents itself as the guarantor of cohesion. The discourses analysed here, expert assessments from the CCTN and media reporting, converge towards the idea that national treasures are political constructions made from objects that are certainly prestigious due to their origin but are also capable of speaking to public opinion through their provenance, the reasons they offer, the artists who created them, and their market value. If the notion of treasure is a construction, it is also a necessity, if not for the protection of the works themselves through being assigned to the public domain, but also for society for which it is a site of remembrance, cohesion, and collective confidence. Certain words open the door to gathering support: for example, Pompei, Michelangelo, Leonardo (ultimately not acquired), Versailles, medieval miniature, Napoleon. The public, the patrons, the experts, and the ministerial services likely uphold competing definitions of what a national treasure is, but it does not matter: for the majority of classified items, the classification awakens a visible consensus, even if, to cite Nathalie Heinich’s evaluation (2017), being classified by the CCTN relates to the “measure” through a distinctive election of the item, whilst the discourse of the press instead falls under “judgement,” even “attachment.” Yet the entanglement of one part of the lexicon used by the two institutions to justify this value shows that these modalities of attribution are not mutually exclusive: the CCTN also employs the lexical field of masterpiece and numerous superlatives to explain its classification criteria. The classification refers to “markers,” milestones in the chronology devoted to the national novel and, in return, fuels it with strong images and consolidates its outline.
