Jessica Goodman explores how the meaning of ‘hero’ shifted in France in the late eighteenth-century in this TORCH Bite-Size talk at the Ashmolean Museum LiveFriday.
In the late eighteenth century the French start rethinking what a hero is - it's not about wars and kings and soldiers any more, but people like writers and artists and scientists, who make a useful (and sometimes moral) contribution to the nation through means other than military glory. In this TORCH bite-size talk Jessica explores this shift and its influence on the creation of the Panthéon, which was a huge secular temple to house the bodies of these 'great men'.
