ABSTRACT
My topic focuses on the early years of the Louvre Museum as a ritual of national identity, and, more broadly, on the terms by which art museums and galleries may be considered as ritual sites. 1 The officials who shaped the museum in the two decades immediately following the French Revolution created a ceremonial space designed to make the new relationship between the nation and its citizenry come alive as a symbolically lived experience. It should be noted at the outset that the idea of the nation implicit in the galleries of the early Louvre Museum was the civic nation, a political concept structured in what were understood to be universal terms. In theory, the museum programme was equally uplifting to all of its visitors; in practice, it constructed the viewer as belonging to the educated and self-educating strata of French society. And while it celebrated the advantages of being a French citizen, it also asserted French pre-eminence within a community of nations that shared a common elite art culture. In all this, the Louvre's managers created a prototype for national art collections that was followed throughout Europe and beyond.
