French Museums, Where the World Meets

Chapter 14 French Museums, Where the World Meets In 2015 France counted 1,239 museums. International visitors to France flocked to them in great numbers. The year before they had totalled 83.8 million. France Diplomatie, http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/french-foreignpolicy/economic-diplomacy-foreign-trade/facts-about-france/one-figure-one-fact/article/france-the-world-s-leading-tourist. Accessed 8 July 2016. That is an impressive number for a land of 65.5 million inhabitants. What they, as well as French visitors, experienced in these museums on French soil transported them to many other worlds, and cultures. The museums of the Paris region are, of course, the most important in terms of visitor numbers. The Louvre, the Chateau of Versailles, the Pompidou, and the Orsay together welcomed more than 21 million visitors—foreign and French combined—in recent years. The visitors’ data is drawn from the annual reports of the Paris Office du Tourisme et des Congrès, ‘Enquête fréquentation des sites culturels parisien’ for various years. The pdf of the Enquêtes may be accessed by typing into a search engine: ‘Enquête fréquentation des sites culturels.’ I have chosen the 2013 numbers because that new museum in Marseilles only came into existence in that year, and thereafter the attendance shifts for external reasons. The visitors’ data shows a significant drop in cultural tourism after the terror attacks of January and November 2015 (p. 6), and thereafter, but in the long run, I believe, these numbers will begin to climb again. Paris Office du Tourisme et des Congrès. http://presse.parisinfo.com/etudes-et-chiffres/enquetes/frequentation-culturelle/enquete-culturelle-2013. Accessed 25 April 2017 We know that the Louvre alone counted a total of 9.3 million entries in 2013, with 70% of them foreign tourists. Perhaps they come to see the art about which they had heard so much. Perhaps they come because one is supposed to. Or because it is raining outside. Certainty about why people go to this or that museum can be an elusive subject for museum administrators. Even more difficult to determine is what people take away from their visit. But I think it is safe to say that foreign visitors, coming in contact with the originals of the great aesthetic treasures on show in France, and retaining memories, strengthened by photos (or better yet, selfies), of the experience, ratifies in their minds that France is the capitol of historic Western art.This last is a not small distinction for France’s store of cultural capital. Moreover, it is an important addition to the economic capital of a nation which, for example, in 2019 earned 8% of its Gross Domestic Product from tourist spending. Economists who study international trade count tourists’ visits to a land as exports from the place visited. It makes perfect sense to understand the cultural impact on these international travellers in the same way The space of the museum is fundamentally one of transnational encounter: while most French museums continue to rest firmly on French soil, visiting its museums is a major way foreigners and French people learn to appreciate the world treasures assembled and displayed in this land as well as even some world tragedies. Such appreciation is not necessarily random or unstructured. All museums, even the ones that handsomely display great art works bearing labels with little more information that the names of the artist, of the painting, and the date painted, are designed to tell a particular story, directing visitors along designated pathways of a constructed narrative. This story may be expressed, in the first instance, by both what the museum shows and what it does not show, the sens de la visite proposed, the themes used to characterize its various halls, the subjects of temporary exhibits, brochures, and, of course, the usually excellent and elaborate website. But how to tease out these sometimes-changing messages, and changing understandings, of their possible global influence without falling into the one-dimensionality of allowing the numbers of visitors to serve as the prime marker of influence? For visitor numbers have become the holy grail of museums’ evaluation. And like the search for the grail, it is a never-ending quest. The level of funding of both state and independent museums depends on the number of entries. But like other crude big data inquiries, do we learn what we want to know about effect or influence from body-count? The great museums of art and architecture, with their many millions of visitors, are France’s greatest ‘exports’ of the fine examples of the many visual cultures housed in its corpus of museum exhibits. These treasures are not only French in origin. They overwhelmingly hold the accumulated artistic genius of many peoples and nations made visible to be seen by French people and visitors alike. By paying special attention to some less frequented, and perhaps less famous, great museums, especially the newest ones, we can observe more closely qualitative avowals exhibited of what is France and what is its place in a new hyper-interconnected world? These are what in France are called the new ‘museums of society’. Civilisations on Display The opposing and changing governments of the new millennium have shared in the successive projects of building new world-class museums for the new age. Taken together, these museums, primarily about people and memory rather than art, tell a new story about societies in a world where the relationship of the global and the local have to be rethought. Of course, many new museums of art, of commemoration, and of regions, have opened as well in the same period. Their role in giving the art from all over the world global visibility is worthy of further study. By focussing on musées de société, in particular, (which all offer a more socially-specific message about lives lived in the nation and in, transnational encounters with other nations than the art museums/galleries or ones which concentrate upon single events in history) we might gain some preliminary answers to the questions of both how France, today, fits into our growing internationalized world, and of how France contributes to the framing of this new world while being itself framed by it. For contrary to the ancient regime’s image of rays of light and truth radiating in one direction from France to a grateful world, the light of the world illuminating France itself helps us better to understand a present-day society and culture just as much. And indeed, we may use the new knowledge we gain in France to light our way, we who are not from France, as we move in a globalized world. Brought together in symptomatic displays, with their carefully crafted permanent and changing temporary exhibitions, their often-rich websites, their initial department-store-like exhibition strategies, or even the recent turn of some to a kind of son et lumière (usually called immersion) museology, and their very striking architecture, the new French museums of society are not what France’s first cultural minister, André Malraux called ‘Cathedrals of our time’ but rather visions of a France in the world for the new millennium. The stories they tell both raise questions, and at the same time, offer visitors, both domestic and foreign, answers, to vital questions about both the past and the future of the nation and other nations in an immense new world. For what is displayed, or, not displayed, concern matters of national identity, the role of immigrants in a nation’s life, France and other nations’ history of slavery and the slave trade, the place of a former empire in contemporary society, a nation’s relation to its near neighbours, and not least, what was the distant past and what will be the future of humankind. Indeed, they propose answers—and yet often conflicting answers--to the vexing conundrum about what it means in today’s world to be human. Bonding Borders Writing about Latin America, Mary Louise Pratt proposed that we think of borders between quite different cultures not as barriers, but as opportunities for encounters, as contact zones. James Clifford took up this idea and applied it to the world of ethnographic museums. He argued that visitors of a dominant culture come into relationship with the people’s culture(s) on display and thereby begin varieties of encounters of conflict and of empathy, of understanding, and of mistrust. In the chapters of their books dedicated to ‘contact zones,’ both authors were concerned primarily with dualistic cultural contacts and exchanges. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Rutledge), 1991; James Clifford, Travels and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). However, neither Pratt nor Clifford had much to say about the peoples rendered invisible, those not there to be seen. Others such as Umberto Eco, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Jacques Rancière have added this act of power to make visible and to make invisible to the story of social and cultural contact. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (trans. Steven Corcoran), London: Bloomsbury, 2010; --Politics of Aesthetics (trans. Gabriel Rockhill) (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). And earlier along the same lines, Umberto Eco. Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1990). See also Nicholas Merzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), and, most recently, his How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More (New York: Basic Books, 2016) In our globalized world, a strict dichotomy between the ‘imperial eyes’ of the white man and the peoples under the gaze is hard to sustain. Certainly, there are still unequal power relations between those who observe and those who are observed. Extrapolating from these writer’s initial and valuable insights, I shall approach the question of cultural interaction in what follows in this way: yes, museums of society can be thought of as contact zones, but the relationships are more complex than a dualistic model yields. True, French visitors may learn something of cultures not their own. And foreign visitors have the double benefit of learning about aspects of the overseas societies shown in French museums as well as learning more about French society and cultures. The foreign visitors have an added benefit from their cultural around-the-world: they can also come into better contact with their own issues of society—in many cases not that different from those in France—in their reification and exhibition in the French museums. Moreover, what is not displayed, what visitors are not given to see, as Rancière puts it, paradoxically also increases the knowledge of French visitors, foreign visitors, and even members of the societies ‘on display’. The museum is a special house of mirrors but—unlike carnival fun houses—it is one in which we may see some distortions and illusions, but also have a chance to view many reflected realities. The museums’ exhibits can be legible, if, as Pierre Bourdieu has taught us, we have learnt the codes. Bourdieu P. and Darbel A. L’Amour de l’art: les musées d’art européens et leur public. (Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1966). To begin the decoding process, let me take you for a brief visit—in order of their opening date--to some of these new institutions. After that I will suggest how we might combine their contributions to the projects of nations re-inventing themselves in the new millennium. Let us explore this global hall of mirrors. The End of Empire? The first (2006) to open of the distinctive new museums of the second millennium in our instructive sample is housed in Jean Nouvel’s striking mostly-glass building on the Seine at the Quai Branly. In 2013, for example, it reported a respectable 1.3 million visitors. In 2016 to its original name was added that of the retiring President of the Republic who had wanted it built. The structure of the Musée du Quai Branly/Jacques Chirac [MQB/JC] follows the bend of the river. Its external architecture, along with the exotic garden surrounding it, hints at the themes of old-fashioned ‘primitivism’ developed inside. Beginning with the curved external appearance, and continuing inside, Nouvel used the snake as his key motif. It is pervasive, if sometimes obscured in the museum’s jungle-like darkness. Here the reader should understand the word ‘primitivism’ to be the name mid-twentieth-century art historians gave to the ways modern Western artists incorporated aboriginal artistic themes and motifs into their work Goldwater R., Primitivism in Modern Painting ( New York: Harpers, 1938). Rubin R and Vanedoe K (eds.) (1984) Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). Martin J-H (ed.), Magiciens de la Terre, exhibition catalogue. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989). The artistic gesture echoes the surrealist search for what is more deeply psychological and cultural in the art of aboriginal peoples who are supposedly better in touch with their unconscious than we, the ‘civilized’, are. Inside the museum, handsome objects from formerly colonised cultures are displayed in glass cases with all the minimalist museology and hushed reverence of the most up-to-date museum modern of art. Although there are a few contemporary works by Australian aboriginal artists tucked away in a far back corner of the main exhibition hall, yet in the permanent collection we are not shown works made by contemporary artists from nations once colonized by France. Are we here held captive, as in the Louvre, by a frozen classicism of the dead, albeit non-European presumed dead? See the insightful anthropological field-trip to the MQB/JC by Octave Debary and Mélanie Roustan, ‘A Journey to the Musée du Quai Branly; The Anthropology of a Visit’, Museum Anthropology, Vol. 40 (2017) pp. 4-17. They set out to interview ‘native informants,’ namely visitors and curators. Their article concluded that the best way to characterize the museum was as a postcolonial example of Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle. But the Musée du Quai Branly was meant to be more than an aesthetic tribute to the art of the Global South. President Chirac wanted to make it a monument to honour ‘once despised’ peoples, as he put it in his address at the opening – a marker, he felt, that France had overcome its colonial past. Chirac J (2006) Speech given at the opening of the Musée du Quai Branly. Available at: www.quaibranly.fr/ en/actualites/news/files-of-current-events/m-jacques-chirac-president-de-la-republique-a-inaugure-le musee-du-quai-branly/short-speech-of-mr-jacques-chirac.html. Accessed 12 September 12, 2016 Severe critics, mostly anthropologists, spoke of the museum as a kind of neutron bomb – the objects remain intact, but the people are gone. Despite the best efforts of the few anthropologists on the staff to make up this serious deficit by mounting short-term exhibitions which provided social and historical information and even showed some contemporary works, let me confess that I agree with the commentators who wanted to know more about the societies than what seemed to be presented as their mimeses in the main displays. Clifford J., ‘Quai Branly in process.’ October 120 (2007), pp. 2–23. Nevertheless, we are left with the haunting conundrum that, by conferring his imprimatur on the Quai Branly project, Lévi-Strauss evoked: if contemporary anthropologists no longer naively read a people’s culture from their artefacts, are we not free to show these cultural objects without a story, as it were, as things of beauty created in that society the way the Louvre would show an uncontexted Renaissance Madonna and Child or the Pompidou Museum would show a Jackson Pollack drip painting? Erlanger S., ‘100th-birthday tributes pour in for Lévi-Strauss’, New York Times, 28 November 2008.;Emmanuelle Loyer, Lévi-Strauss: A Biography, trans. Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff (Cambridge UK :Polity, 2018), 572-73. We can transcend the conundrum presented to visitors by the Musée du Quai Branly by letting go of the now old, and erroneous, canon of aesthetic modernism, the claim that a work of art is an island, sufficient unto itself. Rather it seems to me that we might profitably take up the convergent--but not aesthetically reductionist--arguments of both William Truettner and Jacques Rancière. Truettner proposes that we think of art in a new episteme of art, understood in its own particular world and, at the same time, the understanding of the world deepened by art. Jacques Rancière, also critical of the old isolationism of aesthetic modernism, speaks to the issue of how is the power to see and to not allow to see allocated, and by whom. Catching Sight of Some of the New French Just a year after the Musée du Quai Branly was inaugurated, 2007, the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (CNHI) opened its doors. This was not a museum initially mandated by a President of the Republic, but rather a project devised in good faith by mostly left-leaning intellectuals to honour a segment of the population that had been increasingly integrated into society and yet increasingly stigmatised. On the one hand, when it opened the immigration museum gave a largely optimistic, if often troubled, account of the successful integration over the last two centuries of immigrants to France. On the other, there were not many exhibits that pointed to the general acceptance of a culturally diverse France. Moreover, the newly elected President Sarkozy and members of his government boycotted its official opening; and in its first years few ordinary citizens have visited it. In 2014, for example, only 111 thousand entries were record. But the next year 140 thousand visitors came, a 26% increase in one year. The museum’s mixed message – uncertain integration into the cultural landscape and official denigration – thus mirrored the lived social situation in France, as well as in other European societies of the immigrants from the South and their European-born offspring. The Socialist government, which in the elections of 2012 won both the presidency and the legislature, replaced Sarkozy at the presidency and reduced his party to the parliamentary opposition. And when it took power, the new government immediately began lavishing attention and funds on the CNHI, starting by renaming it the Musée de l’Histoire d’Immigration (MHI), adding the important title of “Museum” to its appellation, so promoting it to full administrative equality with the other great Paris museums, increasing its budget, and naming the great historian born in Algeria, Benjamin Stora, as its first Director. He was followed 2021 by President Macron naming the scholar Pap Ndiaye as its new head. Ndiaye was planning to fill the void of omitting the histories of the countless involuntary immigrants and their descendants who came to French territory as slaves. Ndiaye being name Minister of Education in the 2022 government may delay that project, or, if he survives the post 2022-election cabinet shuffles, perhaps bring it to fruition sooner. That this museum is a cultural battlefield is well evidenced in the changing fortunes, and leadership, of the immigration museum. Of course, the first overarching tension was, and is, that the new museum dedicated to the story of immigrants to France was installed in the old headquarters building of the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exposition, with its reliefs and murals depicting the glories of France’s colonial civilizing mission. On the semiotic incoherence this can cause see Carol Ann Dixon, ‘Decolonising the Museum: Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration,’ Race and Class, Vol. 53 (2012) pp.78-86. Such dramatic shifts—admittedly the immigration museum is an extreme example--at the site of the official story of the meaning and place of immigrants in the making of today’s France appear to repeat visitors to be a kind of stage set with changing tableaux showing the immigrants in different picture stories. The first version of the immigration museum primarily pictured immigrants as foreigners who had to be moulded into Frenchness by leading them to embrace the national culture. Beginning with the new government installed in 2012, visitors were allowed to see how immigrants contributed, and continue to contribute aspects of their home culture in all ways to the making of a modern, more mosaic, France. For example, a temporary exhibit I saw in 2015 displayed examples of the haute couture designed by internationally-reknowned designers, immigrants to France, who had made Paris the fashion capital of the world. The catalogue:Alexandre Samson, Olivier Saillard, Luc Gruson, eds, Fashion Mix: Mode d’ici, Créateurs d’ailleurs (Paris: Presse du MNHI, 2014) Such shifting accounts in the French museum has mirrored very well, and surely will continue to do so, depictions of the ‘immigrant problem’ as debated in many of today’s modern nations. Promoting an Official ‘True France’ Meanwhile, President Sarkozy had a plan to upstage this place where the role of immigrants, colonialism, and of slavery, in the nation’s story was shown. When he ran for the presidency of the Republic in 2007, he announced his intention of creating a national history museum dedicated to the victories and heroes of France’s past. He wished to see displayed the ‘Greatest France’ hidden from view by an unfortunate drift into multiculturalism. He intended the creation of the Maison de l’Histoire de France as his presidential museum in the same way as the Pompidou Museum and the Quai Branly-Chirac were created by his predecessors in office. Nicolas Bancel and Herman Lebovics ‘Building the History Museum to Stop History: Nicolas Sarkozy’s New Presidential Museum of French History,’ French Cultural Studies (UK), Vol. 22, no. 4 (Nov. 2011), 271-88. Scandalized by President’s instrumentalization and distortion of the nation’s history, university historians, literary intellectuals, and even trade unionists reacted in indignation. But the elections of 2012 brought a new Socialist President with a new majority in the National Assembly to power. Nicolas Bancel and I have written a history of this museum that never came into being. For one of the first acts of the newly seated government was to cancel the project and close its website. But in history an event that did not happen can bear as powerful a message as something that did. First, early in the planning, scholars had strongly criticised this one-dimensional vision of the history of France. Then trade unionists who worked at the National Archives’ Hôtel de Soubise, the planned home of the new history museum, blockaded the site for over six months. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the national elections that removed President Sarkozy’s majority in the Assemblée nationale, the plan to put the museum at the head of an elaborate organisational network subsuming major historical museums around the nation was cancelled. And not long afterwards a brief decree issued on Christmas Eve 2012, and signed by the minister of culture Aurélie Filippetti, the minister of economy and finance, Pierre Moscovici, and the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, declared the ‘dissolution de la Maison de l’histoire de France.’ Décret (2012) Décret no. 2012-1447 du décembre 2012 portant dissolution de la Maison de l’histoire de France. Accessed 10 January 2013 Finally, when I accessed the museum’s website on 7 January and again on 5 July 2013, I read, ‘Suite à la dissolution de la Maison de l’histoire de France, son site internet n’est plus accessible au public.’ The project is now literally invisible, but it leaves many important traces. Was the dissolution of the history museum a political act, as some conservative critics claimed? The government changed and public policy priorities changed; that is how politics works, and—as recent events in other nations suggest--cultural politics as well. But beginning with his electoral campaign, when Nicolas Sarkozy announced his plan for a museum that would tell the true story of how the national identity came into being, was not the Maison de l’Histoire de France a political project? Are not all museums, especially state museums in France and elsewhere, in important ways, in the broadest sense, political projects – that is, of a nation’s self-image and what its museums of society wish visitors to see and to know of it, and to bring home with them? With leading intellectuals, workers, and – with the elections – the legislators of the nation uniting to kill an attempt to construct a tendentious picture of France as ‘the official story’ makes a strong positive statement to its non-visitors both by and about the many in France, as well as in other societies, who want to create a culturally rich, inclusive and forward-looking nation. But with the Presidential victory in May 2017 of Emmanuel Macron—who styled himself as neither left nor right, but certainly is a fiscal conservative-- it seemed unlikely that building a museum of French history will regain a high place on the list of presidential projects. An Evolutionary History of Human Development After five years of internal reconstruction, in 2015 the renewed Musée de l’Homme opened its doors to the public. Occupying the same building since the late nineteenth century, this ethnographic museum changed from a display site of colonial trophies, to, during the Popular Front of the mid-1930s, as a place of scientific anthropological display, to finally now a record of human development around the world. Its clearly pluralist message—no such thing as race; we are all different, yet the same; and increasing human-controlled evolution is both earth-threatening and human-life enriching make a a statement that moves and educates visitors. . Boëtsch Gilles and Lebovics Herman, “Biology and Culture at the Reinvented Musée de l’Homme,” French Cultural Studies 2018, Vol 29 (2), 95–119. In that same year that the remade Musée de l’Homme opened, an important new cultural statement was made at the site of a onetime sugar refinery on the harbour of Guadeloupe. Designed by local architects, a striking museum dedicated to recovering the histories of the 1.6 million African slaves transported to the French Antilles, the Memorial-Acte opened its doors. This France’s first great state-built museum erected outside of Europe. The museum’s makers wished to transcend the famous advice of Ernst Renan that, for the sake of national unity, some divisive things must be forgotten. Instead, the museum, in some sense, follows his other, and perhaps contradictory, counsel that national unity is a daily plebiscite, that the slave trade and slavery must be remembered and addressed finally, to bring social unity and peace. The new institution is at the same time a memorial and a museum dedicated to the history of slavery from the Antique past to the present day. To do this immense historical project, the giant structure is laid out as six archipelagos comprising thirty-nine islands. It is for to the living arts and has space for international meetings. So, although paid for mostly out of funds of the local government and in some ways an intensely local museum, it means to educate visitors from everywhere in the world about the key institution of an imperial past shared by all humanity long in need of rediscovery. A year after its dedication, the Memorial welcomed 110,000 visitors. About a third of them arrived on cruise ships. So, the international dimension intended has begun to be realized from the start. But continuities and changes are what this essay is about. Some museums tended to create or update an invidious picture-story of France. But others, certainly the immigration museum, the museum of peoples’ cultures in Marseilles, and the Mémorial-Acte at Pointe-à-Pitre, dedicated to telling the story of slavery and the slave trade, are forthright engagements with elided stories. The social winners may want to see cultures as places to sooth and root identity. But cultures are never free of contestation and are always and everywhere changing. Conclusion Let me highlight our larger sens de la visite by braiding the strands of the stories that the museums tell into the narrative line that has been, and will continue to be, pulled in many directions. Their sequence of openings adds an additional layer of information. Appropriately, the first to open was the museum dedicated to France’s—as well as other former imperial powers’—greatest burden of an unresolved past, the dissolved colonial empire. The government of Jacques Chirac chose to display empire in a synchronic aestheticized form. ‘La plus grande France’ disappeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With the dissolution of imperialism, and the linked collapse of the fourth attempt at Republican rule, France had to face the necessity of beginning the painful process of reinventing itself as a nation framed primarily by its ties to Europe and its near neighbours around the Mediterranean. Except for the publications of a few historians and literary scholars, ‘post-empire,’ or better to describe the persistence of colonial relations, might better be called paracolonialism, was not a theme of much public discussion in the decades before the 1990s. This useful word was coined by the Native American intellectual Gerald Vizenor to refer to the ways colonialisms persisted after official decolonization. It means colonialism beyond colonialism with the complications of neocolonialism and postcolonialism. Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). The creation of the Musée du Quai Branly in 2006 marked an important stage towards declaring a postcolonial France. Despite its many flaws, not least of which was its anti-historical posture, the building of the Quai Branly Museum nevertheless put an aspect of the era of colonialism on display. Still too sensitive for a fully historical integration into the national story, a highly-aestheticized snapshot of the colonial situation is what visitors are given to see. A year later was opened the museum dedicated to a related, if somewhat different problem of the nation—and nations--in the era of globalization. The establishment of the immigration museum in 2007 marked the institutional recognition that the modern nation, if not made by immigrants, at least could neither marginalize them nor make them disappear. To be sure, the immigration museum was originally more about how immigrants became French than how France integrated the changes the new settlers brought with them. But – as evidenced since 2012 by the ‘refounding’ of the institution at the edge of the Bois de Vincennes--the Socialist government elected in that year had attempted to make more visible the contributions of immigrants to the making of modern French society and culture. When Nicolas Sarkozy and his conservative party were elected to lead the nation in that same 2007, we witnessed the right’s immediate rejection of the new national narrative that takes account of the immigrants, qua immigrants. The episode of the aborted Sarkozy museum of French ‘identity’, the museum that never came into existence, actually took the important next move. Through the storm of intellectual revulsion its plan to tell a one-dimensional political history of France evoked, and then the complete dissolution of that desperate gambit of identity politics shipwrecked the future monument to the outgoing President. Thereby, the nation’s elite, in effect, allowed to display, if not a fully pluralist image of France, at least a multi-faceted one. The immigration museum made visible, and celebrated, the millions of the nation who were not the fabled ‘Français de souche’. The sharp rejection of a museum of history that was premised on the idea that there was, and is, only one way to be French—or a full member of any contemporary nation--further validated the idea of a more plural past, present and future. The Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, which opened in 2013 can be seen as a response to narrow nationalism and high-culture narcissism. Here are celebrated the folk and vernacular cultures of France and the peoples living around the shores of the Mediterranean as well as other European populations. It is also important to note the concrete act of pluralism in locating France’s first national museum located outside Paris in the nation’s most diverse city. The exhibitions, especially the temporary shows, such as the one dedicated to gender in the Mediterranean world, and the World Turned Up Side Down of Carnival reject a narrow vision of the nation, and of historic authority. In the new Musée de l’Homme, which had been under reconstruction over six year, and had reopened only late in 2015, visitors are shown a scientific—as formulated by the staff of the Museum of Natural History-- visualization of how biological evolution, social change, and cultural development interacted to create modern humankind, which includes, of course the French, the foreign visitors, and the generations of our species all over the world both long gone and as well as those yet unborn. Entering France’s museums of society yield important insights on how the different leaders of France have proposed to foreign visitors, as well as their own people, how to see the nation and the world. And French Museum professionals have staged displays of French society as well as those of different cultures in other worlds. In doing so, governments and museum staffs have made these museums places of contact—as print culture had been in the nineteenth century—for the members of the nation, and at the same time, between the nation and visitors from all over the world, as well as with the cultures displayed in the vitrines. The museums of society together do not have the numbers of visitors of any one of the great Paris museums of art. Accordingly, I have offered here a caution, from the point of view of methods, for getting at the deep global effects of visits to museums of society, that numbers—neither Big Numbers nor just head counts to which I alluded at the opening of this chapter will tell us important things—perhaps the most important things--we want to know about how we all fit into our new global mosaic. Most crucially, in the sense of the theme of this volume, what these museums display are good to think with about issue of concern to people all over the globe: of immigration and immigrants, of the progress of postcolonialism, of the current pandemic of identity politics, of what is monumentalized and what not, of growing regional affinities, of the histories of vernacular cultures, the workings of racialized slavery in making the world of early modern capitalism, and, finally, of the biological origins of human beings, and our possible posthuman evolution. Because more than any other nation, in France visual culture has political meaning and politics inevitably can be seen to have cultural impact, these visions of order and change are heavily contested in revelatory and nuanced ways. But there are also some convergences. We must pay attention to the many and changing museum stories; they offer visitors a valuable index of the relative strength of differing descriptions of what a society is or what it should be. Although they are built on strong architectural foundations, it is remarkable how much and how far French museums move.