DÉCRET DE LA CONVENTION NATIONALE, DU 18e. JOUR DE PLUVIÔSE, AN SECOND DE LA RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE, UNE & INDIVISIBLE. QUI NOMME LES MEMBRES DE LA COMMISSION TEMPORAIRE DES ARTS, & DESIGNE LES INVENTAIRES DONT ILS SERONT RESPECTIVEMENT CHARGÉS

Orléans, France: L. P. Couret, 1794. Small quarto. Bifolium, 4 pp. 3/4-inch of loss at upper corner (with no loss to text). Soft early horizontal fold. Very minor foxing. Very good.

The 1794 French Revolutionary decree transferring the former royal collections of scientific, technological, and artistic objects to newly designated state inventories, naming the commissioners of each to form the new commission temporaire des Arts. Forty-three commissioners and twelve categories of objects are named, offering an informative view of cultural authority and material taxonomy at the height of the Revolution. Almost immediately upon the overthrow of (truncated) the French monarchy in 1792, members of the National Convention embarked upon the urgent and staggering task of protecting the massive royal collections and reorganizing them according to Republican and Enlightenment ideals. Within months, the famous Jardin du Roi and Cabinet dHistoire Naturelle were newly established as the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle, and on August 10, 1793, the anniversary of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinettes imprisonment, the Louvre palace opened for the first time as a public museum.

The following February (Pluviôse II), the National Convention decreed in this document that a temporary commission of arts be established to inventory and reunite in suitable depositories the books, instruments, machines and other objects of science and arts proper to the public instruction and assigned forty-three leading scientists, engineers, artists, and craftsmen to the task. Among the commissioners inventorying the collections of natural history, botany, zoology, and mineralogy are the great naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the veteran gardener of the Jardin du Roi, André Thouin. Other particularly notable names listed include the anatomist Honoré Fragonard, the famous watchmaker Antide Janvier (assigned to instruments of physics, astronomy, and others), the important Parisian printer Barrois, and the painter and landscape architect Hubert Robert (here, simply Hubert), who had narrowly escaped the guillotine a few months earlier. Additional categories of objects to be inventoried include maps, paintings, and sculptures, machines of war, antiquities and medals, maps, chemical laboratories, musical instruments ancient, foreign, or the most rare in their perfection among the known and modern, and various others.

The present copy of the decree is a departmental printing, containing a printed acknowledgment of the decree by the authorities of the department of Loiret in its capital, Orléans, signed 25 days after the decree was issued, on 13 Ventôse of the second year of the Republic (March 3, 1794).

OCLC lists three copies. Scarce. (Inventory #: 754)