The Museon Arlaten, situated in the historical centre of Arles, was established in 1899 at the initiative of the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral. Planned as the museum of Provençal culture from the end of the 18th century, it is one of the earliest ethnographic museums in France.
In 1895, anxious to breathe fresh life into the Félibrige, Mistral issued a call in the Provençal periodical Aïoli to create a great Provençal institution, combining a museum of fine arts, a historical museum, a public library with a cabinet of medals and inscriptions, and a museum of ethnography “reproducing all regional types of the people of Provence”. In the event, the museum was to be wholly devoted to ethnographic collections. In 1896, Émile Marignan, a pre-historian, ethnologist, and folklorist, started collaborating with Mistral to found the museum. Marignan was also in charge of collecting the Provençal objects for the Trocadéro Museum, built to house the 1878 World’s Fair in Paris and the Paris Universal Exposition of 1899. In 1896, he published a brochure entitled Instructions pour la récolte des objets d’ethnographie du pays arlésien, a locally adapted version of Armand Landrin’s manual Les instruction relatives aux collections d’objets ethnographiques des peuples civilisés, which had inspired the Salle de France at the Trocadéro Museum in 1884. In his manual, Marignan adopted the same classification of artefacts:
- Physical anthropology
- Food, agriculture, breeding, hunting, and fishing
- Family life, housing, furniture, domestic economy tools, costumes, bijoux, games
- Cults, religious ceremonies, popular traditions, superstitions, sorcery, traces of paganism, disappeared cults
- Arts and crafts
- Trade and industry
- Social life, traditions, and popular festivities
- Texts and visual imagery.
The scientific project of the Museon Arlaten was, then, an extension of the Trocadéro programme. Even so, it stands out from the other regional museums established at this period: it was not designed to house an established, pre-existing collection, it was specifically ethnological in scope, and was instigated by a single individual. The manual instructed the Provence population how to collect artefacts representing Provence and its way of life. Priority was given to the collection of objects whose form and use had been documented since ancient times, and which therefore demonstrated the antiquity and uniqueness of Provençal culture as well as the primitive archaism of some rustic practices.
The collection, which Mistral placed in the care of the General Council of the Bouches-du-Rhône in 1899, amounts to some 35,000 objects and documents taken from everyday life and ranging from costumes, furniture, working tools, and cult artefacts to books. In the first museum, the presentation was aligned in four rooms lined by a long corridor; Mistral preferred life-size diorama reconstructions (using furniture, objects, clothes, and mannequins to reproduce fictional scenes), whose striking effects could capture the visitor’s imagination. He selected the major themes of social rituals, focusing on the veracity of every detail. He not only chose to represent life and year cycles, but also to show how these customs had been handed down from previous generations in a structured and patriarchal rural society. The museum also aimed, through these displays, to attest to the long-established existence of a venerable civilization. Printed works and literary quotations or proverbs in Provençal were selected by Mistral to bolster the presence and vitality of the Provençal language. The entire collection and exhibition was finally opened to the public in May 1899.
After obtaining the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1904, Mistral decided to donate its prize money towards the museum’s development and improvement.
