The exhibition is organized by the Collège de France with the support of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée Bartholdi in Colmar, the Musée Champollion in Vif and several private collections.
It benefits from the exceptional patronage of BRED.
Exhibition opening times
Free admission:
- 10 am to 6 pm, during the European Heritage Days, September 17 and 18, 2022.
- 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., from September 19 to October 25, 2022 on working days (closed on Saturdays and Sundays).
- Exceptional opening from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, October 15, as part of the Fête de la science at the Collège de France.
Presentation
"I've got the case! is how Jean-François Champollion is said to have announced to his brother in his study on September 14, 1822, that he had just found the key to the hieroglyphs, before fainting. Recovering his senses, he set about writing a memoir known as Lettre à M. Dacier, which he completed on September 22 and presented to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres five days later. He had just begun to lift the veil that shrouded the writing of the ancient Egyptians in a thick halo of mystery, and he would not cease, in the ten years remaining to him, to perfect his discovery. The thousand-year-old monuments of pharaonic Egypt "have just spoken again in their desert", exclaimed Chateaubriand.
Two hundred years after this stroke of genius, the Collège de France is hosting an exhibition paying tribute to the founder of Egyptology, whom it welcomed as a professor in 1831. The venue is all the more appropriate given that it was within these walls that Champollion first taught the discipline he had just created - the starting point of a long line of professors who contributed to making the Collège de France, with its rich library, an internationally renowned center for Egyptology. The historically inseparable links between Champollion and this institution give this exhibition its own special character, and visitors will be moved to see the memory of the decipherer evoked in the very places where he gave the first lectures on Egyptology, and thanks to numerous documents in Champollion's own hand, rare works, works of art and other Egyptian monuments from the collections of the Collège de France, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée Bartholdi in Colmar and several private collections.
Entering the first space, organized around an axis starting from the Concorde obelisk and ending at the Rosetta Stone, visitors will be plunged into the world of Egyptian writing through steles, papyri and other statues exhibited for the first time. This plunge into Pharaonic civilization gives way to a second section recounting how, for a millennium and a half, this civilization remained mute and inaccessible to the scholars who, from the end of Antiquity and especially during the Renaissance, sought to make it speak. By placing Champollion's discovery in the perspective of a long and laborious conquest of the mind, it will give even greater prominence to the brilliant discovery of 1822. This will be the subject of the third section, through works and manuscripts by Champollion. A final section will recount the shared history of Champollion and the Collège de France, which welcomed him as a professor in 1831 and where, after his death, Egyptology sought to establish itself as an academic discipline. Nothing better expresses Champollion's close ties with the Collège de France than his statue in the main courtyard. The genesis of this work by Auguste Bartholdi, creator of the Statue of Liberty in New York, will be retraced through the artist's preparatory drawings and plaster casts. After the story of Champollion, it's with his mythology that visitors will take their leave.
A catalog will complete the visit, as will a series of lectures and guided tours. An exceptional evening will be devoted to a reading, by actor Nicolas Bouchaud, of Champollion's opening lecture.
