ABSTRACT
In 1827, when the French government proposed the conversion of part of the Louvre into a naval museum, its primary plan was to exhibit the latter category of objects: navigational equipment and model ships. Comte de La Prouses and other explorer's trophies, gifts and purchases from private collectors, expanded the museums ethnographic collection, turning it into the eclectic jumble described by its visitors. As the collection of ethnographic objects grew in the museums first half-decade, little was done to prevent the collapse of the spatial boundary between French maritime science and primitive native artefacts. In 1831, the eminent metropolitan geographer, Edm Jomard, had proposed to extract ethnographic artefacts from the Muse de la Marine to establish a separate geo-ethnographic museum in the Bibliothque nationale. Both during expeditions and then back in the museum, naval officers made comparisons between customs and objects found in multiple, different locations confronted the tenuous validity of the scientific racial theories propounded in Parisian learned society.
