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Nick Prior
of these struggles, resulting in the opening of the Louvre as the first large-scale
public national museum in Europe. But throughout Europe, by the early nineteenth
century, museums had become the cultural signposts of a middle-class struggling
to inherit, overturn or outgrow previous monarchical and aristocratic systems of
rule. 10 As a realm of high culture, in other words, the museum was a chief
institutional site through which bourgeois elites could elaborate their own
signifiers of cultural distinction, articulate a distance from other social groups, and
select appropriate categories for inclusion or exclusion.
What is indicated in much of the material on the interface between the public
and the museum from the nineteenth century is that, far from being a total or
complete translation of Enlightenment values concerning universal edification, the
museum was based on a limited conception of what “the public” consisted of. 11
The modes of behavior associated with the popular classes were emphatically
precluded from the museum in a way that marked a division between the groups
that seemed to belong to the museum and those that were alien. Hence, from
internal regulations on the prevention of vandalism, the touching of pictures, and
the carrying of babies, to proscriptions against spitting, drinking, and dirty
footwear, the museum demonstrated the type of visitors and behavior to be
discouraged. This parallelled the situation in the literary circles, debating societies,
and coffee houses of the “public sphere” generally. 12
Certainly, the museum had been set up in opposition to places of popular
assembly such as fairs and taverns. These realms of the “carnivalesque” (to borrow
Bakhtin’s phrase) were negatively coded as “vulgar,” “barbaric,” and hence as
“other.” 13 As Stallybrass and White argue, certain codes of behavior were elevated
in places like museums and debating societies as “part of an overall strategy of
expulsion which clear[ed] a space for polite cosmopolitan discourse by constructing
popular culture as the ‘low-Other,’ the dirty and crude outside to the
emergent public sphere.” 14 “Public,” in this sense, belonged to the restricted space
set aside for higher-rank modes of consumption, rather than tout le monde. The
“civilization process” had marked itself in the leisure practices of these groups,
whose standards of restraint and decorum distinguished them from the crowds at
the fair. 15
A few examples may be instructive here. Despite all the rhetorics of universal
access and popular education which underpinned the Louvre, as McLellan
observes, its internal functioning actually helped to exclude the uneducated and
privilege the initiated, particularly the “bourgeois amateur.” 16 Very little help was
given to inexperienced visitors by way of guides and there was no education
department. Similarly, Sherman notes that in late-nineteenth-century France,
provincial museums lacked descriptive labels that would instruct the public.
Instead, pictures were arranged in the cluttered Baroque style, without differentiation
or an attempt at democratic pedagogy. 17 According to Telman, limitations
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