The establishment of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris

The establishment of the Paris Museum of Arts and Crafts has a double significance in the novel: it is a historical institution installed in the former abbey of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, and, in the Plan devised by Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi, a supposed bridge joining Francis Bacon, a Templar center, and the pendulum at the museum. The distinction matters. The museum’s founding and location supply concrete historical details; the secret continuity attributed to them is assembled by the characters from suggestive connections rather than demonstrated as fact.

Revolutionary Project and Baconian Model

The historical outline that Casaubon gathers places the museum’s proposed creation in the French Revolution. In 1794, Deputy Gregoire presented a project for a Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers; in 1799, the Council of Five Hundred installed it at Saint-Martin-des-Champs. The site therefore links a new institution devoted to arts and trades with the buildings of a former abbey. In the novel’s later conspiracy-making, that change of use becomes more than a matter of institutional history: the building’s successive identities are treated as evidence that it has remained a center of hidden activity.

Casaubon’s reconstruction gives the institution a second connection, this time to Bacon. He says that the Convention authorized the printing of Bacon’s complete works and, separately, provided for a house of arts and trades modeled on the House of Solomon in Bacon’s New Atlantis—a place intended to gather human inventions. The overlap between the Baconian ideal of collected knowledge and the museum’s stated purpose offers the trio a persuasive analogy. It does not by itself establish a secret organization, but it gives their Plan a historical-looking route from political decisions to a supposed esoteric inheritance.

The Abbey as a Link in the Plan

The decisive interpretive step comes when Casaubon connects the prior of Saint Albans with Saint-Martin-des-Champs. In his account, this prior was also abbot of the abbey where the museum would later be installed. Belbo recognizes the connection’s usefulness, and the former abbey becomes, within their theory, a Templar center. The building’s later use as a museum can then be folded into the same story: what appears to be a sequence of religious, political, and educational institutions becomes a chain of custodianship.

The chain is extended through Bacon. Casaubon proposes that Bacon’s property connected him to the Druid followers associated with Saint Albans, while the prior’s abbacy joined that name to Saint-Martin-des-Champs. He then adds Guillaume Postel to the sequence, describing the French scholar’s studies of Hebrew and Arabic, his engagement with Kabbalistic works, and his plans for universal peace as parallels to the itinerary attributed to Christian Rosencreutz. The Plan gains momentum by placing these distinct historical figures beside one another, then treating resemblance and proximity as signs of transmission. The museum’s establishment is thus recast as one stage in a proposed continuity, not merely as a late eighteenth-century reform project.

From the Conservatoire to the Pendulum

The physical presence of Foucault’s Pendulum at the Conservatoire gives the historical chain its apparent endpoint. Casaubon’s account emphasizes that the pendulum was installed at Saint-Martin-des-Champs after Foucault’s experiments. In the trio’s reasoning, its location is not incidental: it is made to confirm that the former abbey had been selected as a Templar refuge and that the institution preserved a secret tied to the site.

The characters also give the pendulum a role in their imagined mechanism. Casaubon notes that its cycle varies with location: it completes its circle in thirty-six hours at certain places, takes twenty-four hours at the North Pole, and does not vary with the season at the Equator. From this geographical dependence, the conspiratorial explanation claims that a discovery made at Saint-Martin would apply specifically to Paris, not to Palestine. The argument turns an instrument’s real dependence on location into support for a hypothetical Templar system. The museum matters to the Plan because it houses the pendulum at the very site the trio has already designated as a refuge.

Historical Evidence and Invented Continuity

Casaubon’s research begins with the recognition that his sources are difficult to sort: historical fact sits beside Hermetic gossip, and reliable information beside speculation. His resulting chronology records the Conservatoire’s proposal and installation alongside the rise and suppression of secret societies and other episodes that might be made to appear connected. The list’s accumulation is part of the method. By setting many dates and institutions next to one another, it supplies material from which the trio can fashion a continuous history, even where the evidence establishes only separate events.

Within the Plan, the establishment of the museum therefore operates as both a real institutional transition and a hinge in a fabricated explanatory structure. The former abbey links the prior of Saint Albans to a supposed Templar refuge; Bacon’s House of Solomon gives the museum a parallel ideal of gathered knowledge; the pendulum’s presence furnishes a later object around which the theory can organize its claims. The museum’s significance lies in this tension between what its documented history supports and what the three conspirators make it signify: a place where ordinary cultural and scientific history is recruited into a story of secret preservation and eventual world conquest.