Museums, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Awareness: The Luxembourg Museum’s Reconstruction Issue in Turn-of-the-Century Paris

International audienceDeparting from the results of a doctoral research, this paper focuses on an early example of a national museum’s sense of responsibility towards community and landscape. The lost Luxembourg Museum, whose collections are now scattered in various French museums (including the Louvre, Orsay and Centre Pompidou), was established in 1818 by the will of King Louis XVIII as the world’s first museum of contemporary art. Although its main mission was to assert the superiority of French art face to that of other European nations, it was long criticized not only because it was notin line with the art market trends, but also because its exhibition spaces were unworthy of turn-of-the-century Paris’ attractiveness and cultural influence worldwide. Plans were made to move the museum from the decaying Luxembourg area towards the French capital’s business and entertainment districts on the right bank of the river Seine. Nevertheless, leading artists whose works where exhibited in the museum, influential journalists, art and patrons societies, citizens and merchant associations, as well as the museum’s curators, highlighted its usefulness for a sustainable and resilient neighbourghood. Indeed, the threat of the construction of a purpose-built museum facility with upgraded standards in the Luxembourg Palace gardens, the older and larger public park in the area, had revived a strong collective trauma that brought major environmental and public health concerns to the forefront in the context of the birth of the French urban planning theory