James McAuley on His Book The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

During the French Third Republic, which emerged in 1870 and ended in 1940, French Jews, according to James McAuley, “enjoyed a greater level of civic engagement and public visibility … than at any other point in modern French history.” They saw their Frenchness and Jewishness as symbiotic, not contradictory. Those most affluent invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, built museums, and sacrificed their sons to the country’s army. But their commitment to France was rejected, their collections ultimately plundered, and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps.

In his talk and in his book The House of Fragile Things, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust —the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d’Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: They were often accused of “invading” France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were a response to tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.

James McAuley is the Paris correspondent for the Washington Post and a contributor to the New York Review of Books. He recently received his doctorate in French history at Oxford.