Revolutionary ruins

The Revolution of 1789, and the destruction of the Bastille prison in Paris, left a debris field that generated a new touristic market of revolutionary relics in France, Great Britain and the United States in the decades following these events. ¹ Myriad pieces of ruins, such as fragments of walls, stones, doors and keys of the fortress, were extracted from the rubble to circulate widely as material testaments to the liberating force of the Revolution. The dissemination of these remains was facilitated by one entrepreneur, Pierre-François Palloy, who arranged the demolition of the building and orchestrated touristic practices on the worksite. Not only did he employ tour guides to direct visitors through muddy dungeons, and help them detach stones from scathed towers, but he also launched a trade in Bastille-themed souvenirs. These ephemera included polished wall stones to adorn jewellery sets, medals and miniature models of the bastion carved in materials taken from the building itself. ² These artefacts were meant to further the ‘experiential dimension’ of the Revolution through iconoclastic and reconstructive rituals, which, as the recent studies of Keith Bresnahan and Richard Taws have shown, were part of a patriotic agenda of myth-making. ³ This symbolic performance aimed to elongate a provisional reversal of power, by maintaining the visual memory of a tyrannical site that was bound to disappear, and therefore endanger the remembrance of a revolutionary momentum. Other historians, such as Lynn Hunt, have emphasised the affective power of this commerce of ruins in ‘consolidat[ing] the new Nation that revolutionary rhetoric posited in the first place’. ⁴