Resumen de Mummies and Tombs: Turenne, Napoléon, and Death Ritual
This article explores the interplay among tomb design, death ritual, and collective memory in France, during and after the Revolution, through the veneration for historic mummies, incarnations of its problematic past. From the standpoint of physicality, a defining Enlightenment value, this study considers historically linked cases: the seventeenth-century marshal Turenne, exhumed at St-Denis in 1793, and Napoléon, who ordered Turenne’s apotheosis at the Invalides in 1800 and then himself became the miracle mummy of the 1840s. This cult, I propose, contributed to the reemergence of death imagery in French tombs and influenced the form of tombs for liberal martyrs.
