Un Souvenir de la Famille Bourbon
This unusual book contains mementos from the Royal Bourbon Family. Within these pages, the reader will come across carefully preserved locks of hair from certain members of the Bourbon family. Often a nostalgic practice for parents to remember their children, the practice of preserving hair as a keepsake hints at the powerful link between hair and identity. Locks of human hair have long been objects of fascination. Though many of these mementos are explicitly nostalgic, there is a subtle eroticism associated with the act of preserving female hair. Capturing a lock of female hair could be considered an effort to eternally preserve and arrest the sensuality of women. In Alexander Pope’s poem “The Rape of the Lock,” the removal of the lock of hair symbolizes the possession of the woman herself. This book contains a collection of hair from the Bourbon family and represents a festishization of objects belonging to the last line of French kings. Amongst these souvenirs, there is a lock of hair from the Duchesse of Angoulême, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.
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This unusual book contains mementos from the Royal Bourbon Family. Within these pages, the reader will come across carefully preserved locks of hair from certain members of the Bourbon family. Often a nostalgic practice for parents to remember their children, the practice of preserving hair as a keepsake hints at the powerful link between hair and identity. Locks of human hair have long been objects of fascination. Though many of these mementos are explicitly nostalgic, there is a subtle eroticism associated with the act of preserving female hair. Capturing a lock of female hair could be considered an effort to eternally preserve and arrest the sensuality of women. In Alexander Pope’s poem “The Rape of the Lock,” the removal of the lock of hair symbolizes the possession of the woman herself. This book contains a collection of hair from the Bourbon family and represents a festishization of objects belonging to the last line of French kings. Amongst these souvenirs, there is a lock of hair from the Duchesse of Angoulême, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.