The same remarks apply as well to the chateau’s furnishings:
What owners appreciate are not so much the aesthetic properties, the style of the objects, furniture, or paintings, as their history, their origin: it is not so much a Louis XV chest of drawers or a Louis-Philippe armchair that is admired in a small drawing room as the commode that belonged to great-grandmother C or the armchair on which the Duchess of R from the chateau of X used to sit. The commercial value of such objects may even be unknown; the familiar objects simply sit there, their owners pretending not to notice them. Most often it is not a masterpiece by some more or less famous painter that occupies the place of honor but a portrait of the Marshal of X or the Duke of R, preferably an ancestor with whose historic exploits all family members, young and old alike, are expected to be familiar; the story of the adventures and vicissitudes of the painting itself is often better known than the artistic qualities of the painting or the history of the painter.60
One of the interesting aspects of Saint Martin’s work is that she depicts the nobility and its relation to objects at a time when its members’ efforts to maintain their status require new strategies that intersect with the formation of an enrichment economy. At this point in time, the past – history, and thus the narratives that accompany the objects in question and mark their value – is no longer valued exclusively with reference to a family lineage – that is, to a private subset of interested parties, closed off in its difference; the past has taken on an additional dimension that is at once economic and public. Seen from this perspective, the enrichment economy, and the processes of heritage creation in particular, can be viewed as extensions of the relation of the aristocracy to the world of objects, at the price of a radical transformation that shifts the referential orientation of these objects from the private toward the public, from the family toward the territory (regional or national), and at the same time connects them with the evolution of capitalism. Families whose fortunes rested on economic capital of the industrial variety and/or with the development of conversion strategies, on jobs requiring advanced university studies and benefiting from high salaries, could consider their “ancestral” homes as costs, “burdens,” or, at best, an enjoyable legacy favoring the maintenance of familial and social relations. With the transformations of capitalism, the patrimony associated with the quest for distinction has gradually been transformed into capital capable of generating a profit through commercial exchange, and also through tourism.
The practice of opening chateaux to visitors developed in France starting in the 1970s and 1980s, and it was given favorable treatment by tax legislation adopted on 23 December 1964 and 5 January 1988. The first law “allows owners to deduct from their taxable revenue the entirety of expenses incurred in restoration and maintenance if the ‘private historical monument,’ officially registered as such, is open to the public at least forty to fifty days a year.” The second allows “private historical monuments open to the public at least 80 to 100 days a year, according to the circumstances, to be transmitted from one generation to the next tax-free.” The theme of “chateaux for everyone” or “chateaux open to all” developed rapidly among owners as a manifestation of their good will “as citizens” “in the service of the public good.” “One of the new duties of descendants of the nobility [is] to preserve in their families the chateau or home they have inherited and, to this end, to be able to allow visitors access within carefully defined limits, and perhaps to serve as guides, commenting with telling anecdotes and historical information.” More and more often, spaces in chateaux can be rented for receptions and weddings, and bedrooms are transformed into “(paying) guest rooms.”61 Certain grand chateaux (such as that of the Marquis de Breteuil) have been converted into veritable businesses, embracing “visitors’ activities, seminars, professional colloquia, parties organized by company boards, concerts, weddings, restaurants, and so on.”62
The transmutation of private homes into heritage objects, essential elements for enrichment basins, has come about in France in conjunction with the development of a politics of patrimony, showcased for example with Jack Lang’s 1984 creation of “Journées portes ouvertes dans les monuments historiques” (open house days for historical monuments). Coordinated at the national level by an office in charge of heritage sites, these events were initially centered on visits to buildings usually closed to the public, especially places from which government authorities exercised power; it was later extended to properties managed by regional entities, and also to a number of private properties, especially “historic” homes whose owners have thus been recognized as “partners” in the politics of heritage creation.63 The insertion of private owners into this apparatus increased both the reputation of the goods they possessed and the value of those goods as capital. Such public–private partnerships rely on owners’ associations set up to “protect the patrimony.” The oldest of these associations, “La Demeure historique” (Historic Homes), includes almost nothing but chateaux of the aristocracy (2,000 in 1989) and “Vieilles Maisons françaises,” whose much more numerous members (18,000) do not always hold titles.64
The process of turning homes of aristocratic origin into heritage sites thus had a double and more or less contradictory character. On the one hand, the process allowed a memorial relation to objects to be extended to social classes that, although foreign to the nobility per se, had discovered their own “roots.” Their members, generally urbanized, often with university education and occupying upper managerial positions in modern companies, envisaged the objects and homes of their families of origin – often from the peasantry – as treasures worthy of being admired and preserved owing to the mere fact that they came from the past and could be invested with memorial power. The owners associated these objects – which, a few decades earlier, would have been scorned, or even abandoned – with narratives that invested them with value, initially for themselves and their children, as testimony to the family’s past. This democratization of the “chateau” effect, which can lead to showcasing the slightest little farm or even just a barn, enhanced with a narrative referring to the family’s history, is paralleled by the transformation of other goods endowed with powerful personal memories into heritage objects capable of taking on a capitalistic tenor. The process of transforming patrimony into capital is stimulated by an increased demand for residences and goods anchored in the past. This demand is spurred in turn by the spread of what could be called a patrimonial ethos, an ethos shared by large numbers of people who, although they themselves have not inherited real estate, invest their earnings from work in homes and objects apt to give them a sense of historicity. The practice of collecting is a somewhat comparable development, as is its “twin,” the search for genealogical origins (“collecting” persons rather than objects). A trend initiated chiefly by the descendants of “great” families, genealogical research has become a widespread passion in recent years.65
Local mutations in global capitalism
The concomitant and interrelated processes of deindustrialization and the development of an enrichment economy attest to a profound shift in the strategies employed by Western capitalism to retain its central position. These paired phenomena constitute two responses to the crisis that began affecting capitalism toward the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s. This crisis, whose epicenter was in the United States, was marked by a significant drop in returns on capital (more than 40 percent between 1965 and 1973). Robert Brenner attributes the crisis to surplus production capacity on the part of businesses with the highest fixed capital.66 The situation did not allow these companies to maintain either their previous