Free online student and emerging professionals event – After the French Revolution: Transforming Entertainment in Public Space

Museum Talk Title:

After the French Revolution: Transforming Entertainment in Public Space

26th April, 2023, 1400-1530

The French Revolution of 1789 swept away the social structures and political institutions which had ordered life in Paris for centuries. For Parisians, the expansion of space was a common experience of the change brought about by the Revolution. Following the end of the Terror in 1794, buildings, interiors, collections, and gardens previously beyond reach for most Parisians were opened to the public.

In the 1790s, entrepreneurs transformed more than 15 Parisian hôtels particuliers and pleasure retreats, confiscated from the Ancien Régime elite during the Terror, into eclectic entertainment venues known as public pleasure gardens. The commercial pleasure gardens were amongst Paris’s most celebrated entertainment venues from the end of the Terror in 1794 to the Bourbon restoration of 1814. Housed in spectacular buildings and gardens, designed, decorated, and furnished by the greatest artists and architects of the 18th century, these formerly private residences, bared by the Revolution, afforded the public access to the once closed-off world of the Ancien Régime. The talk explores two tremendously popular public pleasure gardens of the early post-revolutionary era: The Tivoli Garden (1795-1810) and Frascati (1799-1811).

The talk focuses on the opening of Tivoli and Frascati, examining the appropriation of architecture, interiors, and landscapes that marked the venues’ transformation from private to public. In doing so, the talk explores how the expansion and appropriation of space after the Revolution altered both the physical structure of Paris and everyday Parisians’ experience of the capital.

Bio

Ane Cornelia Pade is a PhD-candidate in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD research centres on Parisian public pleasure gardens in the early post-revolutionary era of 1794-1814. In 2020 she published the article ‘Tivoli: Negotiating Directory Society in the Public Pleasure Garden 1797-1798’ in Documenta. She obtained an MPhil in History of Art and Architecture from Cambridge with distinction and first in her cohort in 2020. Ane Cornelia holds a bachelor’s degree in History of Art from the University of Copenhagen (2019). During her bachelor’s degree, she was a visiting student at Yale University (2017) and at Barnard College at Columbia University (2018).

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