Musée des Souverains
French royal history museum
The Musée des Souverains (French pronunciation: [myze de suvʁɛ̃], Museum of Sovereigns) was a history-themed museum of objects associated with former French monarchs. It was created by the future Napoleon III as a separate section within the Louvre Palace, with the aim to glorify all previous sovereign rulers of France and to buttress his own legitimacy. The museum was formed from collections previously held in the National Library, the National Furniture Depository, the Artillery Museum, and the Louvre Museum itself, as well as gifts. After the fall of the Second Empire, the museum was closed and its collections mostly returned to their previous owners.
History
The museum was created by decree of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte on 15 February 1852, shortly after his successful coup d'état. The project was steered by Émilien de Nieuwerkerke, a staunch bonapartist who had become Director-General of the French museums administration in late 1849. Nieuwerkerke's cousin Horace de Viel-Castel became the museum's curator on 1 December 1852, the day before the establishment of the Second Empire.
Henry Barbet de Jouy replaced Viel-Castel as curator in 1863 and re-organized the exhibits in chronological order. The museum came to an end following the fall of the Second Empire on 4 September 1871, and was closed by decree on 8 May 1872.
Location and collections
The museum was located in five rooms of the Colonnade wing of the Louvre, on the first floor at the top of the wing's south staircase (escalier du midi), created under Napoleon by Pierre Fontaine to serve a projected suite of apartments and throne room that was never completed.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Musée des Souverains” is french royal history museum. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Musée, Souverains and French, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Musée des Souverains” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.