A reputed entrepreneur under the July Monarchy, Antoine Vivenel was also renowned for having assembled one of the largest collections of antiquities in France, now in the Musée d'Art et d'Archéologie, Compiègne, the museum that he founded. In the course of drawing up the first catalogue ever to be made of teh Etruscan and Italic objects in the Musée Antoine Vivenel, archival research enabled us to reconstruct the history of this collection, from the archaeological sites where the objects were discovered to the successive collections to which the belonged, before the were dispersed. This paper proposes to illustrate the craze for antiquities that swept through Paris during the first half of the the 19th century, when wealthy collectors rubbed shoulders with scholars, scientists and art dealers of the day.