The royal yearning of the Bourgeoisie

The Cocgnacq-Jay Museum opens up a view of the major connections between birth, money, taste and the urge to be recognized. Mademoiselle Lili came out wiser.

It's been a few years since I discovered this beautiful house in the middle of the Marais. After all, everyone only wants to go to the Louvre, the Center Pompidou or the Palais de Tokyo and then has to wait in endless queues. The city has so many small, interesting museums in which the big world is explained in a nutshell.

It was the fashion designer Christian Lacroix who gave the Musée Cocgnacq-Jay, a sleeping beauty of the Parisian museum landscape, a kiss of awakening and rearranged the paintings, objects and furniture for an exhibition and at the same time spiced up the interior. He designed the colorful collage in the entrance area, the colourful, motif-rich carpets and the pretty velvet stools for the guards, which can still be seen today. Lacroix is a self-confessed lover of the 18th century because it is such an exemplary way of explaining the present.

The mansion houses the art collection of couple Ernest Cognacq and Marie-Louise Jay, founders of the La Samaritaine department store, now owned by the LVMH group.

Another point of the story, says Lacroix: Today Bernard Arnault, who with LVMH has risen to become the world's largest luxury tycoon in less than 30 years, because globalization has produced a new money aristocracy, for which not only the Sun King, but everything French in general - from architecture to From fashion to wine and champagne, it is the reference for style and good taste and cannot be expensive enough.

At that time, it was the Cognacq-Jay couple who, with the industrialization of 1869, went from small boutique owners to very wealthy entrepreneurs and pioneers in art mediation. Long before the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the Fondazione Prada or the Pinault Collection, as early as 1925 they dedicated an entire floor of the La Samaritaine department store to art and proudly showed themselves to be patrons, a role previously reserved for the nobility and the church. From 1900 they began to acquire art and art objects from the 18th century on a large scale, including famous works by François Boucher, Fragonard, Canaletto and Tiepolo. Anything pre-revolutionary was considered chic. "First the commoners cut off the heads of the nobles and got the power they wanted. Then they developed phantom pain. They put the feathers of the old days on their hats to give themselves a kind of noblesse that they weren't born with,” Lacroix interprets the enthusiasm of the young bourgeoisie for the 18th century. "That probably also applies a little bit to the quite honorable founders of this collection."

What the bourgeois moneyed aristocracy still lacks today is the desire to think, the critical wit, the unstinted esprit that wafted through the palaces and castles in the days of the Enlightenment. Today money has become God, the only spirit you want to see grow. And there is something else that Lacroix misses when looking at the paintings: “Look at these dressed-up men with their wigs and colorful frock coats. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, role stereotypes were cemented and the man also lost his fashionable sense of humour.”