2025 Theses Doctoral

How Colonial Archaeology Transformed the Louvre: Antiquities, Empire, and the Encyclopedic Museum in France, 1830-1870

Glama, Barthélemy

This dissertation investigates how colonial archaeology transformed the Louvre between the 1840s and the 1870s, a short but decisive period when the museum expanded beyond its European foundations to incorporate antiquities from North Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Americas. While the Louvre has long been cast as a “universal” or “encyclopedic” museum, its actual metamorphosis was not a seamless inheritance of Enlightenment ideals but the contingent result of imperial expansion, colonial encounters, and archaeological discoveries.

The central problem addressed here is how the material practices of colonial archaeology – excavation, collection, displacement, and display – reshaped the Louvre’s identity, categories, and functions.
The study draws on a wide range of sources: unpublished archival material from travel logs, curatorial minutes, acquisition registers, and correspondence; contemporary guidebooks, illustrated journals, and travel narratives; and the antiquities themselves, examined as both objects of knowledge and instruments of politics. Methodologically, the dissertation combines institutional history with the critical tools of museum studies, archaeology history, and postcolonial theory. It treats the Louvre not as a finished monument but as a processual institution, whose growth was episodic, contested, and often reversible.

The findings show that colonial archaeology provided the objects and frameworks that enabled the Louvre’s nineteenth-century encyclopedic temptation. The Algerian Gallery (1845) inscribed conquest into a Roman genealogy of empire; the Assyrian Museum (1847) made the museum a stage for imperial rivalry and the birth of Assyriology; the Mexican Museum (1850) tested, but ultimately exposed, the limits of universality when American antiquities resisted assimilation. Together these cases reveal the Louvre’s transformation from a civic art museum into an imperial institution – an identity that proved fragile and short-lived. By the 1870s, the colonial archaeological moment had ended: the Louvre retracted into a narrower canon of Western art, leaving colonial antiquities to other institutions.

This dissertation concludes that colonial archaeology transformed the Louvre by compelling it to expand its categories, collections, and political role, but that this transformation was both selective and temporary. The creation of the Algerian, Assyrian, and Mexican Museums marks one of the great metamorphoses in the museum’s history – an encyclopedic experiment driven by empire, whose afterlives and absences continue to shape debates about universality, restitution, and the museum’s place in a postcolonial world.