“Institutionalizing Revolution: The Official Mural Art Campaign of the Third Republic” analyzes the little-studied public mural art campaign of the French Third Republic, carried out in Parisian arrondissement townhalls between 1873 and 1914. Largely ignored by scholars and the public, the murals were also marginalized by the modernist art historical narrative as “academic art” despite their stylistic diversity. I argue the contrary and reveal the overlooked symbolic significance of the murals in promoting republican rhetoric. Combining field work with cultural studies methodology, I cast light on the townhall decorative campaign as a hinge-moment for a genre previously confined to religious institutions and palaces and later associated with populism and revolution. I illustrate not only how these murals served as tools to forge a modern republican identity, but also how, as artworks, they went beyond the restricted visual vocabulary of Renaissance and Baroque décor to develop a democratizing decorative idiom. As such, my dissertation showcases Third Republic murals as a deliberately emblematic vehicle that helped promote a new relationship between citizen and state; state and national history; and art and the public. It has been supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Phi Beta Kappa.