The gravity of memory is the impulse to remember, or to be remembered in particular ways. Like actual gravitation, this force becomes visible through the movements of physical materials, particularly when they collect to form monuments, museums, and archives. I focus on the Bibliothèque Impériale, known today as the Bibliothèque Nationale, during the second half of the nineteenth century when it underwent substantial changes in its architecture and institutional policies.; My first chapter considers the work of Henri Labrouste, and the ways in which his new constructions for the Bibliothèque are architectural metaphors for memory. In these spaces, structures and decorations from the distant past coincide with innovative designs and materials of the nineteenth-century. I also explore how Labrouste created, dismantled, and redistributed great masses of mnemonic material as he renovated, demolished, and constructed anew.; In the second chapter, I analyze the workings of the Bibliothèque as a memory machine in motion, examining the ways in which mnemonic materials such as books and prints massed at the library. I follow the progress of collected objects from their matriculation into the library, to their storage and circulation within the buildings. One avenue of inquiry pursues the moments of failure or forgetfulness in the mechanics of memory, as volumes are lost in the stacks, industrially-produced paper begins its process of self-destruction, and certain visitors are denied admission to the library's main reading room.; Finally, in the third chapter, I narrow the focus to one portion of the library's holdings in which there is the most intense contraction of spatial and temporal information into compact representational fields: celestial maps. This case study provides a means to see how gravity itself was visualized and remembered during the nineteenth century, and how commemorations of religious, political, and scientific figures wove through portrayals of the night sky.
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