over the course of his long career, covering topics such as electricity, chemistry, geology and
botany, were widely recognised. Most of the research he had conducted had been performed
under the auspices of the Teyler Foundation in Haarlem, either at the museum the Foundation
funded and of which van Marum had been the director since 1784, or at the Foundation’s
laboratory. Van Marum’s close association with the Teyler Foundation, his directorship of
Teylers Museum, and above all the Foundation’s considerable financial clout all boosted his
standing within academic circles immensely.
Another point that surely contributed to van Marum’s authority was the fact that the decades
during which he had enjoyed a reputation as one of the Netherlands’ best academics had been
turbulent, certainly in political terms. And even though the political disputes that shook all of
Europe were played out in a far less violent fashion in the Netherlands than they were in
neighbouring countries, divisions ran just as deep as everywhere else.
Even before the French Revolution the so-called Patriots had already fought for a restriction
of the stadtholder’s powers in what was still the Dutch Republic, consisting of seven largely
autonomous provinces. The function of stadtholder was the highest and most influential
political office one could hold in the Dutch Republic. Despite a long-standing tradition of decentralised
governance, the House of Orange had succeeded in securing near-monarchical
privileges half way through the 18th century, such as the right to hold the position of
stadtholder. Although the Patriots briefly made it seem as if the House of Orange was to be
toppled after a series o f long-standing protests, its power was restored in 1787 with the help of
the Prussian army.
In 1795 however, six years after the French had violently disposed of the ancien régime,
Dutch and French history became entwined when the French Revolutionary Army conquered
the Dutch Republic, welcomed by those who sympathised with the suppressed Patriots. The
stadtholder (the future King William I’s father) was forced to flee, and the Batavian Republic
was founded to replace the Dutch Republic.
But by 1806, Napoleon had crowned himself emperor of a new French Empire, and was no
longer satisfied with the Batavian Republic’s independence. He therefore opted to turn it into
a satellite state run by his brother, Lodewijk Napoleon, who was given the title “King of
Holland”. Eventually Napoleon Bonaparte felt that his sibling had become too acclimatised to
the Netherlands and was no longer acting in France’s interest. In 1809 he therefore forced him
to abdicate, and declared the Netherlands had been integrated into the French Empire. Soon,
however, the self-pronounced Emperor’s fortunes were declining, and by 1813 he was forced
to surrender the Netherlands, prompting the return of the last in line of the House of Orange
who was subsequently officially installed as King William I of the Netherlands in 1815.
Yet despite this succession of governments and repeated political upheaval, van Marum’s
reputation never seemed to suffer, he always seemed to put academia above politics, was
never forced to surrender his position or move anywhere else because of his political views,
and his position within the academic community must therefore increasingly have seemed
unassailable.
At the same time however, these political changes were strongly reflected in the changes
Dutch cultural policy underwent over the course of these decades. And this in turn did affect
van Marum and the institutions he was associated with.
What is particularly relevant within the context of this study is that the events which took
place in the aftermath of the French Revolution had a huge impact on the status and function
of collections. This was not only the case in the Netherlands, but all over Europe, particularly
within the French periphery. On a more general level, the methods and aims of the acquisition
and production of knowledge were called into question in almost all respects. With regard to
collections, these changes had an impact on issues such as the accessibility of collections, but
also the status of individual objects within a collection. Not only for instance were many
cultural artefacts tom from their original context as a result of the despoliation of churches
during the French Revolution and the confiscation of public property and sovereign’s
collections by the French Army as it gradually conquered Europe, but - crucially - these
objects were then also re-contextualised in publicly accessible museums in Paris, which
actively encouraged these objects’ public scrutiny and scholarly analysis. On the one hand
this of course served to humiliate both the defeated sovereigns and their people: it cannot have
escaped the communities deprived of their community emblems, or the sovereigns deprived of
valuable collections, how this transferral of material objects to Paris symbolically represented
the transferral of power to Paris; but on the other hand, the relocation of so many objects on
an unprecedented scale also helped bring about a new way of looking at, appreciating, and
studying such cultural artefacts, i.e. as distinct objects that needed to be contextualised
through scholarship. This in turn helped define the general role of a museum as a place where
such cultural artefacts were stored and made accessible for public scrutiny. And by the time
Napoleon had been defeated, the proliferation of national, publicly accessible museums O
which had sometimes been created in order to accommodate the collections as they were
returned to their former owners in the aftermath of Napoleon’s downfall - reflected how
deeply engrained museums’ potential as tools for the reconfiguration of a community’s (e.g. a
nation’s) material culture had become in the fabric of European society. The museum in
general has therefore also been referred to as “the cultural institution par excellence of a
period of revolution and imperial expansion”.9
To make this more palpable, Temminck’s museum itself can serve as an example of how the
Netherlands were not exempted from these developments. At the time of its establishment for
instance it was one of only three national museums in the Netherlands, the other two being the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. The former
could trace its origins to the time of the Batavian Republic, the latter had only been
established in 1819. In other words, national museums were obviously a fairly new
phenomenon in the Netherlands too. What’s more, the past peregrinations of the two
collections that were merged with Temminck’s reflected how turbulent times had been
9 Jonah Siegel, “Introduction,” in The Emergence o f the Modem Museum: An Anthology o f Nineteenth-century
Sources, ed. Jonah Siegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. On debates surrounding the re-
contextualisation o f items in museums see for instance: Daniel J. Sherman, “Quatremere/Benjamin/Marx: Art
Museums, Aura, and Commodity Fetishism,” in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel
J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis: Univ. o f Minnesota Press, 1995), 123-143.