The conclusion reviews the principle arguments of the book as part of a coda which reflects on how and why the post-revolutionary culture of collecting was redefined in the final decade of the nineteenth century. A combination of new intellectual paradigms, changes in museum funding and the growing weight of the transatlantic market undercut private collectors’ claims to be stewards of French heritage. Yet amidst these changes the conclusion stresses continuities in how the amateur was conceived in tension with the bureaucratic state, and a study of major donations at the close of the nineteenth century- such as that of Eugène Piot- underlines the persistence of aristocratic forms of distinction within the support given to republican institutions. Challenging conventional narratives about the birth of a uniform national heritage, the book concludes by arguing for the resilience of private patrimony outside of state control.

This chapter is centred on what was widely seen as the sale of the nineteenth century- the 1893 dispersal of the Spitzer collections. Austrian-born Frédéric Spitzer in many ways was the inheritor of the salvage crusade begun in earlier generations, building up a brilliant array of medieval and Renaissance artefacts (including some faked and composite pieces created on his commission). This chapter explores the visibility of Spitzer in French print culture in order to interrogate the claims for private collectors as patriots, and the attempt by the Third Republic to make collectors into auxiliaries of national policy. The scandal surrounding his sale exposes the anxieties about the interplay of private interest and public institutions, the sensitivity about curators like Émile Molinier when they operated in the market, as well as the virulence of anti-Semitic hostility to Jewish dealers. Most pervasive was the wider fear that French heritage was increasingly snapped up and repatriated by foreign buyers, so that the 1893 sale could be alternately depicted as a triumph, a swindle or a defeat for French culture.