On the 10th of August 1793, the Museum of the Arts was inaugurated in the former royal residence of the Louvre. This symbolic space, called upon to renew the nation’s unity on the basis of the collections seized in the upheaval of the Revolution, inaugurated a new principle: that of patrimony and the preservation of works. A space for memory and meditation, the Louvre was also supposed to be a study space for artists and visitors: “no gallery has ever had such a complete and magnificent library as ours.” And yet, from the Consulate through to the Empire, the museum’s library was to grow slowly, without real classification and cataloguing, and stayed dependent on the imperial and then royal library, as much as that of the Louvre; this constituted a dilemma in a place supposed to symbolise knowledge in the eyes of Europe.