Thread by @karolcummins

A Parisian Family Decimated by the Holocaust

All that remains is the Musée Nissim de Camondo and its priceless priceless collection testify to the unspeakable
atrocities at the hands RW fascists before & during WWII.

⚠️Make no mistake history is repeating.

The Musée Nissim de Camondo, home to one of the world's most exquisite collections of 18th century objets d'art is located on the south edge of Parc Monceau, on 63 rue de Monceau Paris, France.
madparis.fr/en/museums/mus…

Nissim de Camondo died at age 25 fighting for France in the First World War.

His father Moïse donated the family's exquisite collection to the nation in honor of his fallen son.
*NMP
townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

“In 1944, Béatrice de Camondo, the founder's daughter, was deported to Auschwitz, where she, her husband Léon Reinach, and their two children, Fanny and Bertrand, were all murdered.”

Beatrice & Nissam de Camondo
townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

“Today the Camondo dynasty no longer exists, its memory reduced to the silence of objects and things.”
townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

“To visit the Musée Nissim de Camondo is to confront the haunting juxtaposition of arresting beauty and the incomprehensible ‘rupture of the Shoah’” (Holocaust).

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The home “is a temple of gilded abundance, a labyrinth of rooms showcasing the finest craftsmanship of France's "ancien régime"—Louis XVI chaises, ormolu clocks, & fanciful canvases by the likes of Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun & François-Hubert Drouais.”

townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

“But in equal measure it has become a somber meditation on the overwhelming absence of a family— and a world—that was brutally and systematically destroyed.”
townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

‼️Europe rebuilt itself after WWII, but Europe's reconstruction has proven far from indestructible.

⚠️The steady rise of RW fascists/Autocrats/Nationalists/TOC world wide are challenging the peaceful World Order of Western Liberal Democracy post WII

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1130123789235179520?s=21

⚠️European history has seemingly vanished from memory & it no longer seems cray to wonder in its absence, if atrocities will occur again if Western Liberal Democracy fails to defeat the rise of the RW fascists/Autocrats/Nationalists/TOC.

“This is the power of the Musée Nissim de Camondo.

It is a site of memory, a place that preserves with devastating intimacy the eternal darkness & [tragedy] of the 20th century.”
townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

Musée Nissim de Camondo, now a branch of Les Arts Décoratifs (Musée Les Arts Décoratifs is housed w/in a wing of the Louvre)

madparis.fr/en/museums/mus…

“Moïse de Camondo left all his worldly goods to France, the country he loved: the country his son died defending and the country that later sentenced his daughter to death.”
townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

“In ways that he would never understand, his collection evokes a striking fragility entirely unrelated to his delicate porcelain figurines or the Ming vases in the stairwell.”
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“In the end, the objects in the collection survived even though the family did not, proving far more durable than the world the Camondos thought they knew.”
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“& if we insist that the Camondos were victims of their own blindness, that they failed to understand the danger signs of their times, we have to ask ourselves whether we understand our own.”

We are at war folks, Western Liberal Democracy is under attack
townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

“Before the Camondo family moved to France, their principal home was Constantinople, where, in the early 19th century, they became the most prominent Jewish banking family in the Levant, the socalled "Rothschilds of the East."

townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

“In France the Dreyfus Affair, a 12-year social drama that elicited an unprecedented current of anti-Semitism, the Camondos—publicly prominent, exceedingly wealthy, & foreign-born—were eventually decried for their Jewishness as much as for their opulence.”
townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

“The anti-Semites of the age often attacked elite Jewish families like the Camondos for somehow "invading" France's cultural heritage, for buying houses and objects with aristocratic pedigrees that they, as foreigners, had no business owning.”

townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

“In his last will and testament, Moïse de Camondo wrote that his collection was meant to extol "the glories of France" in the "period I love above all others." That the 18th century was his chosen period should come as no surprise:”
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“The critics of his day proclaimed the decadent era before 1789 the pinnacle of French aesthetic grandeur, and most of the serious collectors of Moïse's generation pined for objects that, in their eyes, represented the last moment when France was really France.”

“He built one of the finest collections of ancien régime decorative arts.

“In life, his project was to build a fortress that would shield him from the immeasurable pain of private life. This, above all else, was the meaning of his magic circle.”
townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a…

“Moïse de Camondo choose a bride 12 years his junior, Irène Cahen d'Anvers.

Immortalized in an 1880 portrait by Renoir, Irène was the eldest daughter of one of Paris's wealthiest Jewish financiers, Louis Cahen d'Anvers, an early principal of the bank that later became Paribas.”

“After giving birth to two children—Nissim in 1892 and Béatrice in 1894—Irène left her husband for the man who ran the Camondos' stables.”

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“Amid the devastating chaos of real life, the house provided Moïse with a project whose every detail he could control when he had little control over anything else.”
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“In the France of the Dreyfus Affair, the anti-Semites hated Jews for their race, but progressives often hated the Jewish religion for what they perceived to be its antiquated affront to secular modernity.”
britannica.com/event/Dreyfus-…

“As much as Moïse sought to demonstrate his fidelity to France and its heritage, it was always imperative, in his eyes, that he live in a decidedly Jewish world, a constellation of intermarried families for whom solidarity was survival.”
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“For a man who had lost his wife, his son, and his world, the objects were the only permanent presence, the only things in Moïse's life that never abandoned him. They were his solace, his strength.”

“In 1942, Béatrice de Camondo—the sole overseer of one of the most significant collections of 18th-century masterpieces ever amassed—was arrested in her Paris apartment.”

“At the beginning of the German occupation the consummate socialite had somehow managed to avoid the fate of so many other French Jews, & went about her life for more than a year while the local authorities deported thousands upon thousands French Jews to their deaths.”

There were even reports that she was going horseback riding in the Bois de Boulogne well into 1942 accompanied by a German officer, an emissary of the same regime that would ultimately demand the liquidation of her vast fortune.

But catastrophe found her in the end:

She was executed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz on January 4, 1945, just two weeks before Soviet forces liberated the camp.

“The mansion on the Rue de Monceau and the collection survived, but the world of the Camondos did not.”

“In the formulation of the historian Tony Judt, the Europe that before the Second World War was "an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities, and nations" was "smashed into the dust" by 1945.”

May this tragic story illustrate what could happen today as the powerful RW TOC Authoritarians rise to destroy Western Liberal Democracy & establish a brutal new world order.

This is the fight we are in today not DEM v GOP as the media foolishly paints it.

10 House Museums to Check Out While Visiting Paris
townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a….

@threadreaderapp unroll please and thank you.

#MuseeNissamCamondo