Thesis title: Françoise Cachin, “La grande dame des musées”: Biografia istituzionale della prima donna direttrice dei Musées de France. Una prospettiva analitica nella longue durée.
This research explores the profound interconnection between the history of museums and the history of women, understood as practices of power and instruments for constructing cultural legitimacy. Through the figure of Françoise Cachin (1936-2011), art historian and director of both the Musée d’Orsay and the Direction des Musées de France, the study examines the dynamics of museological modernization within the French museum system during the second half of the twentieth century, highlighting women’s contribution to the redefinition of languages and forms of authority in public institutions. The methodological framework —grounded in the integration of institutional history, microhistory, and gender studies— enables the convergence of biographical inquiry and structural analysis, revealing the museum as a site of symbolic and political negotiation. Based on an extensive corpus of archival sources, the research situates Cachin’s trajectory within a long-term genealogy of women professionals in the cultural field , demonstrating how women progressively transformed the museum into a laboratory of citizenship, knowledge, and collective representation.