| Summary: | Emerging in the 1870s, in Sweden first of all, ethnographic dioramas soon entered the earliest museums dedicated to French folklore and remain today a key attraction for an audience looking for picturesqueness. Often discredited by heritage professionals, because of the simplicity of their ways of interpreting reality, they can nonetheless constitute coherent heritage ensembles, associating collections, decoration and often life-sized mannequins, in complex visual narratives of rich significance. While most of the dioramas installed towards the end of the nineteenth century have now been removed, the ones that the poet Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914) designed with Émile Marignan in 1897 at the Museon Arlaten Provencal ethnographic museum still survive. In the context of plans for the museum’s renovation, three of these staged dioramas, which have been impressing the public’s imagination for more than a century now and which represent a major landmark in the history of ethnographic museums, were subject to a new critical assessment. This was able to justify their legitimacy as heritage, between nineteenth-century ethnographic discourse and resolutely regionalist ‘felibrean’ ambitions. These dioramas translate an ethnographical approach which favours archaisms and glorifies the past but also reveals a didactic method marked by the personal itineraries and designs of their creators. Consequently, these ensembles have been integrated into the displays of the future Museon Arlaten as a sequence which will question and interpret the ways ethnography has been exhibited in museums since the nineteenth century. This choice led to an experimental approach in the field of preventive conservation and restoration, in order to restore the dioramas to their original condition and appearance, between 1899 and 1909. Finally, digital tools were designed to accompany the dioramas and help explain the seduction of the scenes and their intended use as a tool serving didactic methods focused on regionalist roots, and also to explain the choices made in the restoration programme.
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