From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology 9780812201307

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter One: Neoclassical Pompeii
Chapter Two: The Antiquarian Comes of Age
Chapter Three: The Archaeological Turn
Chapter Four: The Specular Past
Chapter Five: Body Politics
Chapter Six: Lost Worlds and the Archive
Chapter Seven: The Uses of Archaeology
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

From Paris to Pompeii

................. 17036$

$$FM

09-26-08 11:03:20

PS

PAGE i

................. 17036$

$$FM

09-26-08 11:03:20

PS

PAGE ii

From Paris to Pompeii French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology

Go¨ran Blix

university of pennsylvania press philadelphia

................. 17036$

$$FM

09-26-08 11:03:21

PS

PAGE iii

Copyright 䉷 2009 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blix, Go¨ran. From Paris to Pompeii : French romanticism and the cultural politics of archaeology / Go¨ran Blix. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4136-5 (alk. paper) 1. Archaeology—France—History—19th century. 2. Archaeology—History—19th century. 3. Archaeology—Philosophy. 4. Archaeology and history. 5. France—Intellectual life—19th century. 6. Romanticism—France—History—19th century. 7. Secularism—France—History—19th century. I. Title. CC101.F8B55 2008 930.10944—dc22 2008025519

................. 17036$

$$FM

09-26-08 11:03:21

PS

PAGE iv

contents

list of illustrations introduction

vii

1

chapter one Neoclassical Pompeii 9 chapter two The Antiquarian Comes of Age

28

chapter three The Archaeological Turn 48 chapter four The Specular Past 89 chapter five Body Politics 116 chapter six Lost Worlds and the Archive 155 chapter seven The Uses of Archaeology 200

n o t e s 237 b i b l i o g r a p h y 277 i n d e x 299 acknowledgments

309

................. 17036$

CNTS

09-26-08 11:03:23

PS

PAGE v

................. 17036$

CNTS

09-26-08 11:03:24

PS

PAGE vi

illustrations

Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6. Figure 7. Figure 8. Figure 9. Figure 10. Figure 11. Figure 12. Figure 13. Figure 14. Figure 15. Figure 16.

Amable-Paul Coutan, View of Pompeii 25 Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, Eruption of Vesuvius, Aug. 24 of the Year 79 (1813) 26 Paul Hippolyte Rene´ Roussel, Nonia, Dancer of Pompeii (1909) 75 Charles Amable Lenoir, Dancer of Pompeii (1913) 76 Paul Alfred de Curzon, A Dream in the Ruins of Pompeii (1866) 79 Carl Weichardt, The Temple of Augustus (1897) 80 Jules-Fre´de´ric Bouchet, Ancient Scene in a Palace at Pompeii 82 Despre´s, View of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii in Its Current State (1779) 87 Despre´s, The Temple of Isis at Pompeii as It Must Have Been in the Year 79 88 Karl Pavlovitch Briullov, The Last Day of Pompeii (1833) 156 Fre´de´ric Henri Schopin, The Last Days of Pompeii 156 The´odore Chasse´riau, The Tepidarium (1853) 207 Edouard A. Sain, Excavation at Pompeii (1865) 209 Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg, Interior of the Library of the Pompeian Palace (1866) 211 J. Laplanche, View of the Pompeian Palace of Prince Napoleon: The Atrium (1863) 212 Gustave Boulanger, Rehearsal of ‘‘The Flute Player’’ and ‘‘The Wife of Diomedes’’ in the Atrium of Prince Napoleon’s Pompeian House in Paris (1860) 214

................. 17036$

ILLU

11-13-08 14:23:11

PS

PAGE vii

................. 17036$

ILLU

09-26-08 11:03:27

PS

PAGE viii

Introduction

When the´ ophile gautier ridiculed the claims of progress in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835–36), he could imagine no better insult than to forecast the future exhumation of Paris by disappointed archaeologists. What if ‘‘tomorrow a volcano opened its jaws at Montmartre,’’ he mused, ‘‘and buried Paris under a shroud of ashes and a tomb of lava, just as Vesuvius did earlier at Stabia, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and in a few thousand years the antiquarians . . . exhumed the cadaver of the dead city, what monument would remain to testify to [our] splendor?’’1 None, he suggests, only helmets, lighters, and ugly coins, and these archaeologists would be tempted to conclude that ‘‘Paris was nothing but a barbarian encampment’’ (50). Beyond Gautier’s sarcastic reminder here that art trumps utility as a measure of civilization, the device that he uses—evaluating his own culture from a future perspective—points to a radically new experience of time that arose in the nineteenth century. The age of archaeology had begun: writers and artists were embarking on a massive enterprise of retrieval which involved resurrecting extinct animals, lost languages, buried civilizations, and human prehistory. The past was becoming a new frontier as the age of exploration drew to a close and as an exotic aura of novelty came to color the past. Like the Ancien Re´gime, the entire past seemed an endangered species in a time of rapid change that underscored the fragile and mortal character of civilizations; the Revolution, and later capitalism, had opened a palpable gap between past and future that broke the chain of tradition and undid the predictive, stabilizing power of historical examples. In this context of turbulent change, much nineteenth-century writing exhibited a tangible anxiety of loss and gave free rein to an urgent archival impulse that reflected the period’s sense of its own mortality much more than the nostalgic desire to emulate golden ages characteristic of revivals. The mortality of cultures was a key experience of modernity: if history

................. 17036$

INTR

09-26-08 11:03:54

PS

PAGE 1

2 introduction

had come to resemble a drawn-out apocalypse more and more, this was in large part due to the rapid and relentless transformations that were changing the face of France. Every day, Balzac complained, something vanished from Paris—a type, a building, a practice—provoking a sense of homelessness that Haussmann’s midcentury urban reforms would only aggravate. In response to this ceaseless internal exile, romantic writers embarked on a vast salvage operation that made them record their own culture compulsively, ostensibly to convey an exact image of it to future readers: fashions, customs, speech habits, social types, private life. The more ephemeral a thing was, the more urgent it was to embalm it in writing. Balzac of course cast his literary project in such terms, presenting the Come´die humaine as ‘‘that book which we all regret that Rome, . . . Persia, and India have unfortunately not left us on their civilizations.’’2 Balzac’s comparison reveals the close link between retrieving the past and the modern fear surrounding the fugitive character of the present. The period’s fascination with lost worlds, such as Pompeii, and its urge to resurrect them in words and images can be seen as the flip side of the vast journalistic project of recording the modern world, and both endeavors were symptomatic of a culture that had grown hyperconscious of its own mortality. Gautier’s analogy of Paris and Pompeii was no random juxtaposition, then, but an image that associated past and present destruction. Pompeii would indeed often serve as a cipher for Parisian fears throughout the century, as if Paris were also destined to vanish in a catastrophic upheaval or expire slowly as history moved on; the disaster could take many shapes: revolution, transformation, or decline, but in the big picture they all blended into the same somber archaeological allegory. The specter Gautier evoked was moreover a commonplace of nineteenth-century literature: take Joseph Me´ry’s burlesque story, for instance, ‘‘The Ruins of Paris’’ (1856), in which two archaeologists from the Atlas Phalanstery in North Africa tour the muddy remains of Paris and Marseille in 3844 and confuse France with ancient Rome. The satirical thrust of such fictions would seem to suggest that Paris was not worth grieving, but their critical edge in fact always masked a deeper anxiety of impermanence. Indeed, Gautier would live to witness the realization of his own prophecy during the violent suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, in the aftermath of which he penned a visionary reportage on the ruined city: ‘‘it seems as if two thousand years have passed in a night,’’ he wrote, and as if Paris were ‘‘a dead city’’ reduced to ‘‘some scattered debris on the banks of the deserted Seine.’’3 Pompeii and Paris had here become

................. 17036$

INTR

09-26-08 11:03:54

PS

PAGE 2

introduction 3

twin cities: the burnt papers of the ministry of finance floated in the air like ‘‘the lapilli of this Vesuvius opened in the heart of the city’’ (622). Gautier’s archaeological imagery was in fact a vital component in the nineteenth-century vision of history and of itself. Both past and present carried the imprint of an entropic time that condemned all things to an ephemeral existence marked by ceaseless becoming rather than by any enduring identity. This elegiac view is no novelty, of course, but it grew into an allencompassing outlook that included not just men but also cities, species, cultures, languages, and nations. At the same time, the transcendent horizon that had formerly guaranteed the soul’s immortality began to erode, as human life gravitated increasingly around a purely earthly existence. A central argument here will be that as the religious faith in the afterlife declined, inclusion in collective secular identities, such as race, nation, or humanity, emerged as a weak form of compensation: though death was becoming more final, individuals also survived, to a greater degree, in the group. In a telling meditation on oblivion, Ernest Renan confessed to being haunted in a village cemetery in Bretagne by the ‘‘millions and millions of beings that are born and die . . . without leaving a trace,’’ but he also expressed the reassuring conviction that ‘‘these obscure children of the hamlet . . . are not dead’’ since ‘‘Bretagne still lives, and they have contributed to making Bretagne.’’4 And ‘‘when Bretagne is no longer, France will [still] be; and when France is no longer, humanity will still be.’’ The reckoning with mortality thus provokes a long chain of secular assimilations whose function is to guarantee that ‘‘not a single word that has served the divine work of progress will be lost’’ (262). All the silent and seemingly futile sacrifices of the nameless masses thus help pave the collective path to the future, so that nothing, and no one, is truly lost, and every life becomes absorbed into an ideal, perfectible humanity. This compensation is of course radically diminished not only by the loss of self but also by the mortal nature of entities like Bretagne and France; in principle it led to an infinite regression, which could only dissolve, in the end, in the empty abstraction of the universe. This is where archaeology comes into the picture: it was widely regarded as a magic science capable of undoing the work of erosion and of rescuing even the most traceless beings from amnesia, and in that capacity it offered an imaginary guarantee that nothing was truly lost and that every life left some kind of legible trace. Archaeology thus underwrote the myth of an earthly memorial survival that could plausibly take the place of immortality. The promise of assimilation into larger collective beings, such as France, and the strength of one’s com-

................. 17036$

INTR

09-26-08 11:03:55

PS

PAGE 3

4 introduction

mitment to them were partly a function of their power to absorb and perpetuate the group’s memories. This postreligious memorial burden of the collectivity helps explain the urgency with which many Romantics turned to archaeology. This thesis is not offered as a totalizing explanation; religion clearly remained a vital force throughout the century and indeed regained some lost ground at the outset with Napoleon’s Concordat. But by and large faith was becoming a private matter that no longer framed public life, while the modern secular nation was taking its place as the horizon of collective life. It is at the level of this global trend, rather than of individual beliefs, that archaeology performs its role as a guarantor of memories; indeed, its promise in no way challenged religion with an overtly rival discourse, and Catholics often adopted its rhetoric of memory to defend an enduring Christian identity. The decisive shift does not take place at the level of individual beliefs but turns on the loss of a public form of transcendence that transforms the earthly community into the site of a secular immortality. Archaeology emerged in this context as a modern myth that secured memorial survival on three overlapping levels: the persistence of personal traces, the individual’s assimilation into the collectivity, and the relative longevity of the group’s identity. This seems to charge archaeology with a rather heavy symbolic burden, at least when measured against its marginal role before it was professionalized in the second half of the century. Up until then it was marked by amateur efforts, provincial antiquarian societies, and sporadic public subventions, but the claim here is also not that this nascent field carried this burden alone or directly. This book is not about the rise of archaeology as a professional discipline,5 but about its broader mythical impact on romantic culture. Indeed, as an idea, it quickly shaped the consciousness of the period, left a large cultural footprint, and gained a symbolic prestige that far outweighed its real impact. Naturalists, geologists, historians, philologists, and writers all adopted its rhetoric of excavation, its interpretation of material remains, its vision of stratification, and its promise of resurrection to reinforce their own efforts to reconstruct the past. Thus the naturalist Cuvier saw himself an ‘‘antiquary of a new species’’ while the philologist Renan promoted a linguistic archaeology that would retrieve ‘‘the primitive world’’ from beneath the ‘‘numerous strata of people and idioms.’’6 Michelet consistently presented his history as a national archaeology, while writers revived lost worlds from Carthage and Pompeii to medieval Paris and the Ancien Re´gime. Wherever the past had to be reconstructed, archaeology proved to be a

................. 17036$

INTR

09-26-08 11:03:55

PS

PAGE 4

introduction

5

useful and elastic model that was easy to exploit. With the rise of historical consciousness and the modern perception of things as changing entities without stable essences, the archaeological image of a ceaseless stratification of the past became a useful master metaphor: texts, languages, nations, landscapes, and minds also changed constantly and deposited their pasts in invisible strata that might be excavated, reconstructed, and revived. The entire past was taking the shape of a vast archival accumulation in which heterogeneous records (words, fossils, monuments, relics, psychic traces) came together in a single great imaginary deposit.7 Thus when E´lise´e Reclus evoked the prehistoric Swiss lake dwellers discovered in the 1850s, his rhetoric blurred the frontiers between geology, philology, and archaeology: ‘‘wherever historical monuments and written testimony [are] lacking, there begins the role of the geologist. He explores the strata deposited by the water, sand grain by sand grain; he exhumes the gnawed bones, the pottery, the debris of every sort already gathered in the stratified archive, and the study of these objects allows him to conjure [these] vanished people from oblivion.’’8 This symbolic confusion would be an obstacle for a narrowly conceived history of the discipline, but this fluidity, conversely, provides the basis for my claim that a diffuse archaeological gaze marked much of romantic culture. The field’s undisciplined and amateur character even reinforced its global impact by making it available for appropriations and imaginary uses. Balzac’s use of the term in Le Cousin Pons gives a good illustration of this extreme flexibility; there Pons, an impoverished art lover, claims it as the master science that informs his strategy of collection: ‘‘archeology comprises architecture, sculpture, painting, jewelry, ceramics, cabinet-making, a very modern art, lace, tapestry, in fact all the creations of human labor.’’9 Archaeology also formed the core of Balzac’s own practice of observation, which sought above all to expose the secret histories of the characters, buildings, and objects that peopled his novels: ‘‘archeology is to social nature,’’ he wrote, ‘‘what comparative anatomy is to organized nature.’’10 Such broad and flexible uses were to some degree authorized by the vague nature of the field itself; both as a term and practice, archaeology was replacing an older antiquarian culture that had declined steadily during the eighteenth century, but not without inheriting some of its imprecision: did it study words or material remains, artistic works or every trace of human culture? Was it an aesthetic or historical discipline? Could it look beyond classical antiquity to the national past, or further back, to prehistory? The courses on archaeology in the early nineteenth century were mainly art-

................. 17036$

INTR

09-26-08 11:03:55

PS

PAGE 5

6

introduction

historical and focused on the development, dating, and quality of artistic forms, but at the same time the modern idea of a strictly material science of past civilizations was gaining ground.11 By the time Napoleon III ordered excavations at Ale´sia to unearth material for his History of Julius Caesar (1865– 66), archaeology had successfully carved out its own niche beside philology, art history, and history, not least because the midcentury recognition of man’s prehistoric existence had made the need for a science of nonverbal and nonartistic traces obvious. While the field’s loose boundaries no doubt facilitated its broad appropriation, its central concern with past civilizations had emerged quite early,12 and it was chiefly this meaning that nourished its mythical appeal as a science of memory. No discovery played a greater role in the establishment of this myth than Pompeii; the theme of countless poems, novels, paintings, plays, operas, and travelogues in the nineteenth century, most notably BulwerLytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), this city embodied a contradiction that lay at the heart of archaeology’s power of enchantment: it had been abruptly annihilated and just as suddenly resurrected, and this stark contrast of violence and redemption provided an irresistible melodramatic script for the comprehension of history; while conceding that history was a violent process that littered the past with vibrant cultures, it also dissociated ruin and amnesia and suggested that lost worlds might leave imperishable traces. Loss and memory were cemented into a single felicitous narrative at Pompeii, which had of course both perished and survived thanks to the 79 c.e. eruption, as if its death had been the vehicle of its preservation. This fantasy—a leitmotif of Pompeian writing—accounts for the city’s great popularity with Romantics as well as for archaeology’s symbolic appeal. Accordingly, I here take Pompeii as a thread to study the global impact of archaeology on romantic culture. It is not a book about Pompeii and does not purport to relate the city’s discovery or reception systematically, but it is the central example to which I return again and again, just as it was the example that inevitably came to mind when Egypt, Assyria, or prehistoric sites were excavated. In La Le´gende des sie`cles, Hugo marveled at the enormity of oblivion by wondering how ‘‘many Herculaneums and Pompeiis / Lie buried in the thick ashes of history!’’13 Much of the corpus studied here thus deals directly with Pompeii and, in the interests of breadth, draws on a wide range of genres, such as travel narratives, erudite reports, fictional resurrections, and visual reconstitutions. Beyond this central example, I also make selective use of archaeological texts

................. 17036$

INTR

09-26-08 11:03:55

PS

PAGE 6

introduction

7

on Egypt, Assyria, France, and prehistory; the works of Chateaubriand, Mme de Stae¨l, Gautier, Hugo, Renan, and, to a lesser degree, Scott and Carlyle lie at the center of my corpus. In addition, I also often turn to the works of the major romantic historians, Augustin Thierry, Prosper de Barante, and Jules Michelet. The inclusion of historiography can be justified on two grounds: on the one hand, romantic history drew abundantly on archaeological rhetoric; on the other hand, my reading of archaeology identifies it as the central trope that structures modern historical consciousness. There are of course a number of major studies of romantic historicism (notably by Stephen Bann, Linda Orr, Ann Rigney, Claudie Bernard, and Maurice Samuels), to which I owe a great debt but which do not grant archaeology a central place. By foregrounding the archaeological rhetoric of romantic historicism, my aim is to deepen our understanding of it as a modern secular theology and partly to take issue with its dismissal as a picturesque, spectacular, or naı¨vely ideological enterprise. While history certainly helped forge national identities, heal the breach of the Revolution, and legitimize new regimes, my focus on archaeology subordinates these functions to a deeper existential concern with the being of the past—to a specifically modern preoccupation with the imperishability of memories. Archaeology, or rather its myth, affirmed that nothing perishes, that earthly existence itself embodies a form of immortality, and that the tragic historicity of modern life carries with it a secular ontology that neutralizes its fragile and fugitive character. The book is divided into three parts and moves progressively from a concrete study of the archaeological gaze to its broader theoretical implications. Part one examines the birth of a modern archaeological outlook in the early nineteenth century and begins by looking at the early reception of Pompeii, which was marked by a narrow focus on artworks and a slightly brutal effort to extract them. Chapter 2 then turns to the romantic revival of the antiquarian as a modern heroic archaeologist, no longer a bespectacled savant, and shows how the gap between erudition and imagination narrowed in Romanticism. In Chapter 3, I return to Pompeii to show how interest shifted from art to the intimate image it furnished of a civilization known chiefly from its textual accounts and to argue that this new archaeological gaze turned artifacts into documents whose meaning both illuminated and depended on their setting. At this point, I turn briefly to the debate about the museum sparked by the French Revolution and use the Pompeian example to argue that both opponents and adherents of the museum shared a similar

................. 17036$

INTR

09-26-08 11:03:56

PS

PAGE 7

8 introduction

contextual outlook but ironically disagreed, as it were, in the name of their archaeological understanding of monuments. Part two then turns to the poetics of resurrection in history and literature to show how writers mobilized the archaeological gaze to make the past present once more. Two metaphors are central here: vision and the body. Chapter 4 analyzes the use of visual tropes to produce presence and interrogates the implicit ontological stakes of this operation. In Chapter 5, I look at presence in physical rather than optical terms and explore the desire, at once religious and erotic, to reanimate, touch, and commune with the ‘‘body of the past.’’ Lastly, in part three, I address the broader cultural, philosophical, and political implications of archaeological thought. Chapter 6 examines the romantic myth of the lost world along with the catastrophic view of history it encodes, before reading these as a meditation on the existence of an indestructible archive that safeguards memories. Finally, in Chapter 7, I turn to the pragmatic uses of archaeological rhetoric and show how its secular theology of memory fueled a broad range of ambitions to renew modern society; by securing the past, archaeology had also established a reservoir of energy to nourish the future, and this mythical idea galvanized dreams of artistic, social, and political rejuvenation. By way of conclusion, I consider the exhaustion of the archaeological myth at the end of the century, when it finally lost its power to neutralize the experience of rupture, violence, and oblivion. All the foreign texts cited here are my own translation, unless the reference is to an English edition. For the sake of brevity, full references occur only in the bibliography.

................. 17036$

INTR

09-26-08 11:03:56

PS

PAGE 8

one Neoclassical Pompeii

Our modern conception of archaeology as a science that unearths even the humblest vestiges of the human past with extreme care and sophistication emerged only gradually over the last two centuries. Archaeology itself, it is true, is as old as history, and evidence pushes the human preoccupation with its own monuments far back into the remote past. The Renaissance is clearly a cultural ‘‘rebirth’’ that is fueled by the archaeological rediscovery of antiquity. Nonetheless, the meaning of the term ‘‘archaeology’’ will here be restricted to a radically new type of relation to the past and to its remnants which emerged roughly at the turn of the eighteenth century, during the shift from neoclassicism to Romanticism. Interest in the fragmentary remains of past cultures underwent a major transformation at that point which completely redefined and reconfigured the archaeological object—from its status and meaning to the way culture related to it. Overall, this shift in perception can be characterized as the transition from a purely aesthetic gaze to a historicizing gaze: the excavated fragment—be it a ruin, a statue, an inscription, a coin, or a vase—was formerly viewed chiefly as an art object, to be appreciated for its aesthetic merit, and either to be held up as a model of beauty or to be found shortcoming with respect to the ideal. In the nineteenth century, the fragment began to be viewed increasingly as a monument, document, or clue, in short, as a memorial device which furnished historical evidence about the past. Dating the vestige became of paramount importance, and the fragment was now endowed with a new type of value, no longer just aesthetic but primarily historical and hermeneutic: insofar as the unearthed object was the witness and survivor of a vanished past, it enabled the viewer to recon-

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:19

PS

PAGE 9

10 c h a p t e r 1

struct and reimagine the world to which it had belonged. From possessing an intrinsic value (beauty), it receded into a network of associations, became absorbed in a historical context, spoke not of itself but of the world in which it was embedded. It is this major shift in attitudes to historical objects that I call the ‘‘birth of archaeology,’’ which I investigate in this part.

The Past as Buried Treasure The rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum offers an exemplary illustration of the birth of a modern archaeological gaze. Buried during the August 24, 79 c.e., eruption of Vesuvius witnessed by Pliny the Younger,1 and only truly unearthed in the mid-eighteenth century (Herculaneum in 1738, Pompeii in 1748), the two Campanian cities stand out as the most spectacular archaeological find of the Enlightenment. Two and a half centuries later, the sites have not yet been fully exhumed, and about a third of Pompeii’s surface remains unexcavated. No other modern discovery has had an equal impact on the popular romance of archaeology or on the decorative arts. An instant sensation, the cities attracted travelers on the Grand Tour, influenced neoclassical painting, and set off a long-term trend in decoration, inspiring, for example, the Pompeian ornamental scheme of Napoleon’s castle at Malmaison and the pottery of Josiah Wedgwood.2 In the nineteenth century, this ornamental inspiration gave way to the intense romantic drama of the doomed cities, reproduced endlessly in poetry, painting, and theater, most famously in Bulwer-Lytton’s historical disaster novel, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). The twentieth century kept this mythical event alive by transferring it to film, and directors of toga movies from Luigi Maggi (1908–9) to Sergio Leone (1959) kept turning to Bulwer’s classic melodramatic script. The extraordinary fame and mythical fascination of the buried cities make them an ideal seismograph to test changes in the popular perception of archaeology and its cultural role. The major shift I want to map here is the one from an image of Pompeii as a curious site of artistic treasures, prevalent in the eighteenth century, to the romantic myth of the city as a lost world magically restored by the powers of archaeology. Between 1750 and 1830, Pompeii is transformed from a grave to be robbed into the image of a lost civilization; in the process, a sweeping change has occurred—in the nature of the object exhumed, in the value attached to the artifacts, and in the gaze of the beholder.

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:19

PS

PAGE 10

Neoclassical Pompeii 11

The first contact with Herculaneum, before real excavations began, occurred as early as 1711, when a well was dug for the Prince d’Elbeuf ’s new country house at Portici. Several costly marbles, including a statue of Hercules, were exhumed from the pit to the prince’s delight. It turned out that his well had been sunk right into the richly adorned proscenium of Herculaneum’s theater, but the significance of this find largely escaped him. In dire need of money, he had the pieces smuggled to Rome for restoration, then on to Vienna, as a ‘‘gift’’ to his cousin, the Prince Eugene of Savoy. This mercenary extraction and illicit private transaction set the tone for much to come at Pompeii and Herculaneum. The cities would in fact be treated largely as underground treasuries, mines brimming with artworks, graves to be robbed for the king’s collection of antiques. Excavations undertaken in 1738 by Charles de Bourbon, King of Naples, were pursued to enlarge his private collection: tight security around the digs limited access, and restrictions on the right to draw the antiques ensured the king’s monopoly on the prestigious finds. It was fortunate, one traveler noted in the 1770s, that Elbeuf had struck upon ‘‘the most beautiful statues’’ at the outset, because ‘‘their discovery sparked a much greater curiosity, one which might not have been sustained, unless, at the outset, such interesting finds had been made.’’3 The search was on for artistic masterpieces; the cost of the digs was to be suffered for the value and prestige they would bring to their royal patron. It was this high expectation that propelled the digs. Charles III, like all princely collectors, derived cultural prestige from the artifacts he hoarded at the Museo Borbonico in Portici. This musuem drew curious visitors from afar, attracted dignitaries, and quickly built an international reputation; it also helped put Naples on the map of the Grand Tour as an indispensable stop. Goethe called the museum the ‘‘A and ⍀ of all antique collections’’ in 1787.4 Since access to the excavations was restricted and the right to draw the objects rarely granted, curiosity in Europe far outpaced the supply of information, and illicit sketches, reports, even artifacts, stolen by underpaid workers and sold to wealthy visitors, began to circulate abroad. An Observations sur les antiquite´s de la ville d’Herculanum, replete with inaccurate sketches drawn from memory, was published by Cochin fils and Bellicard, after their visit in 1750. The great neoclassical art historian Johann Winckelmann penned a Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen in 1762, another unauthorized report responding to the Europe-wide demand for news, and was highly critical of the poor conduct of the excavations and the way cultural politics clashed with the interests of

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:20

PS

PAGE 11

12 c h a p t e r 1

science. Charles III deflected criticism while courting interest in the finds by appointing a fifteen-member Accademia Ercolanese to study and publish the artifacts (1755). Between 1757 and 1792, this academy issued a multivolume work with accurate plates entitled Le Antichita` di Ercolano, not for commercial sale but to be bestowed, as Jean Seznec writes, on the ‘‘happy few’’— ‘‘even Winckelmann had to make a plea to get the first volume.’’5 Much was no doubt lost due to the king’s jealous secrecy and use of slave labor at the excavations. When Lord Hamilton, the longtime British ambassador in Naples, guided foreign visitors to Vesuvius and Pompeii, he also often showed off his private cache of memorabilia. Goethe passed through in 1787 and reports that Hamilton led him ‘‘into his secret den of art and junk,’’ where he spotted two ‘‘lovely bronze candelabras,’’ strangely resembling those in Portici: ‘‘they might,’’ he suggests, ‘‘have slid sideways from the Pompeian shafts and lost their way into this place.’’6 Stressing the private and treasure-like nature of Hamilton’s illegal collection, Goethe notes that, as ‘‘knight of these hidden treasures,’’ he can exhibit them only ‘‘to his most trusted friends’’ (426). His commerce in antiques of course only mirrors the period’s broader view of them (in which the king participates) as priceless treasures to be mined, extracted, and stashed away. Indeed, Goethe regrets this pillage-style excavation, which leads to such abuses, and wishes it were undertaken ‘‘systematically by true German mountain-men’’ (276). Laments of this sort touching the poor quality of the excavations and assessments by travelers and savants of the finds as ‘‘artistic treasures,’’ as unique aesthetic objects to be bought, sold, hoarded, and copied, reveal a great deal about the eighteenth-century attitude to the material past. In what follows, that relation will be explored under two main headings: as grave robbery without method and as a purely aesthetic assessment. The two are not unrelated: it is because only artistic values are perceived beneath the ground that valuables can be excavated with violent disregard for the site’s archaeological integrity. The motif of the ‘‘buried treasure’’ in archaeology is no neutral metaphor in this setting but points to a mindset favorable to pillaging. Pompeii and Herculaneum are of course priceless treasures, but the reiterated use of this figure by eighteenth-century visitors reveals the narrow framework in which it was possible to grasp these fragments of antiquity. The man often judged to be the father of archaeology, Winckelmann, himself appeals in his Sendschreiben to the hope of finding ‘‘treasure’’ (Scha¨tze) in calling for more aggressive digs at Herculaneum. ‘‘Given the certainty,’’ he writes, ‘‘of finding treasures of which our forefathers had no idea, the work is advancing in a

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:20

PS

PAGE 12

Neoclassical Pompeii 13

rather sleepy fashion.’’ No more than ‘‘fifty laborers, counting the slaves from Algiers and Tunis, are there altogether’’ (79). The use of slaves or prisoners also jeopardized the very booty to be mined at such low cost.7 If science partook in the excavations, it did so without thwarting the primary purpose of enrichment and without instituting methods to protect the myriad objects and ruins of lesser interest. The antiquarians Cochin and Bellicard remark bluntly that ‘‘the temples which have been discovered near the Forum and the plunder [de´pouilles] from many private houses have enriched the cabinet of the King of the Two Sicilies.’’8 They note also that ‘‘everything of value has been removed from the surface of the walls and transported into [his] cabinet’’ (53). The square cutouts left in the walls from the detached frescoes struck many visitors but without inspiring much indignant comment. The abbe´ de Saint-Non makes only the technical comment in his Voyage pittoresque (1777) that ‘‘it had been necessary to use great precautions to succeed in removing them from the depths of Herculaneum without breaking or damaging them.’’9 This cultural strip-mining of the buried ruins testifies to the predominantly aesthetic gaze that the period brought to bear on antiques: the artifacts existed as discrete objects, independent of their frame and easy to detach from their material and cultural context; what mattered was their artistic merit and cultural prestige—everything else could be neglected. This grave-robbing mentality would not be seriously questioned until the turn of the century. The poet Giacomo Leopardi’s complaint that ‘‘extinct Pompeii returns to daylight . . . [but] by worldly greed’’ reveals how the Romantics would evaluate this neoclassical retrieval of antiquity and points to the argument that artworks possessed their full meaning only in their original settings.10 This was the polemical position that Quatreme`re de Quincy, the late classic, and Chateaubriand, the early Romantic, would famously adopt against the museum. The vision of the buried past as artistic treasure translated directly at Herculaneum into roughshod means of excavation. The goal of finding and extracting what was valuable at low cost promoted the hiring of cheap labor, unmethodical digs, poor treatment of artifacts, neglect of records, and overall abuse of the site under investigation.11 Tunnels were dug quite at random or merely to secure the quickest access to the artworks, according to the Pre´sident de Brosses, who, in 1739, was among the first visitors at Herculaneum: ‘‘excavating blindly . . . they have only dug a few low and narrow tunnels at random.’’12 When they could not find an entrance ‘‘and were frustrated at this failure,’’ Cochin reports, the workers ‘‘pierced through the wall facing

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:21

PS

PAGE 13

14 c h a p t e r 1

them and penetrated into the room.’’13 Space constraints made it impossible to expose entire sections of the city to view, and once rooms had been plundered they were refilled with dirt to clear the passageways. Once a room ‘‘has been dug out on all sides and thoroughly searched,’’ Winckelmann says, ‘‘another room of equal size is excavated across from it, and the new dirt removed to the facing room.’’14 Cochin corroborates this observation.15 No coherent image of the city could take shape given this profit-oriented method of tunneling: ‘‘they clear spaces, refill them, and the underground presents a new face every six months’’ (50). In this way, goods were extracted and the city reburied as the excavations progressed to more impressive finds. Visitors often had harsh words for the conduct and management of the excavations. Goethe’s desire to see German Bergleute run the operation foreshadows the critical and often nationalistic remarks that foreign tourists would offer. The Spaniard Alcubierre was the man Charles III first appointed to direct the excavation: ‘‘he was as unacquainted with antiques as the moon with crabs,’’ Winckelmann wrote, and ‘‘made himself guilty through his inexperience of gross damage and the loss of many beautiful things’’ (79). But his ‘‘incompetence’’ largely reflects the groping state of archaeology and its profit-oriented outlook in the eighteenth century.16 Winckelmann indignantly relates how a ‘‘large public inscription’’ was found, its metallic letters detached and thrust into a basket, before a copy had been made of the text. The paramount concern, he insists, was to find out ‘‘what these letters meant,’’ and that ‘‘nobody can now say.’’17 He also caustically relates the fate of some bronze horses, deformed by the lava, which were loaded up on a carriage and thrust into a pile in the castle courtyard at Naples, whereupon they were melted down and recast as busts of the king and queen, an ‘‘irresponsible’’ usage (81–82). In 1785, the Pre´sident Dupaty blamed the slow progress on the ‘‘bad management’’ and ‘‘indifference of the employers,’’18 and seventeen years later Creuze´ de Lesser updates this critique by calling for scientific excavations which neither proceed too fast nor falter whenever more profitable terrain beckons. ‘‘It was not until 1813, under the French occupation, that a real work-site was established,’’ the count Ke´ratry would later boast19 —with some justification, however, since the ‘‘intermittent French tenure of the region [1798–1815]’’ was ‘‘an active period in the history of Pompeian excavations,’’ during which ‘‘the first real attempts at actual reconstruction of certain areas to a pre-eruption state took place.’’20 As Philippa Levine has shown, it was only slowly, in the course of the nineteenth century, that archaeology emerged from antiquarianism as a sci-

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:21

PS

PAGE 14

Neoclassical Pompeii 15

ence with a genuine method.21 The distance traveled from 1800 to 1850 can be measured in part by Ernest Renan’s 1865 review of Mariette’s work in Egypt, which he calls ‘‘the greatest scientific enterprise of our century’’ and situates at the antipodes of ‘‘bric-a-brac archeology,’’ praising its refusal ‘‘of the frivolity of the elites, the stupidity of the public, and that vain quest for museum objects which reduces science to a pale amusement.’’22 Mariette announces the end of archaeology as grave robbery: he neither seeks ‘‘those spectacular objects that impress the idle viewer [le badaud ]’’ nor attempts to ‘‘enrich his museum at the expense of the monuments,’’ as the Germans had done in Berlin, acquiring their ‘‘Egyptian collection’’ by plunging ‘‘saw and axe into precious monuments’’ (369). Not that such practices did not continue, especially in colonial territories, or were virtuously eschewed by the French: let us recall that Andre´ Malraux, father of the muse´e imaginaire, set out in search of Khmer sculptures in the Burmese rainforest in the 1920s, slashing his way to overgrown temples and carving out their stone panels—in the hope of selling them on the Parisian art market.23

From Neoclassical Antiquity to Archaeology How did timeless artifacts become historical vestiges, charged with vital cultural information? To map this shift it will be necessary to show how the gaze that brought these relics into focus was transformed. This gaze is fairly coherent at any given time, and while savants and tourists evidently differ, they share many period prejudices that authorize us to speak broadly of a neoclassical gaze. Two properties of this gaze are relevant here: first, it judges artifacts chiefly in aesthetic terms; and second, it dehistoricizes and aestheticizes the world itself. Thus the frescoes displayed at Portici were judged strictly as paintings and evaluated unhistorically by the enlightened canons of eighteenth-century taste. And the cities, more broadly, became visible only insofar as they conjured up an idyllic image of classical antiquity; the radical alterity of Pompeii, the way it differed both from modernity and from literary antiquity, was curiously invisible. One qualification should be made: what I here call the neoclassical gaze does not include the antiquarians, a specialist subculture that valued a much broader range of vestiges, such as coins, inscriptions, and charters, but was harshly rejected by the mainstream Enlightenment as petty and myopic. ‘‘All the paintings from Herculaneum prove that those who made them

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:22

PS

PAGE 15

16

chapter 1

were not great painters.’’ This summary claim from the abbe´ Barthe´lemy, the future author of the bestselling novel about Greek antiquity, Voyage of the Young Anacharsis in Greece (1788), sums up the main strain in the initial reception of Pompeian art: 24 it was inferior, poorly executed, and disappointing. Cochin finds the ‘‘mosaics rather sloppy.’’25 The painting was generally criticized: ‘‘the style of drawing is dry,’’ writes Barthe´lemy, and ‘‘the composition is generally stiff ’’ (611). Saint-Non spots only two large paintings ‘‘that merit description’’ but notes that the animals in one ‘‘are poorly painted,’’ a child ‘‘badly drawn,’’ and the whole subject, taken from Zeuxis, ‘‘very badly executed.’’26 The remark about Zeuxis is telling: Saint-Non cannot refrain from comparing the fresco to Pliny’s description of Zeuxis’s earlier depiction of Hercules, a lost Greek original he alleges to be the Roman artist’s source.27 An idealized image of Greek painting, in the absence of surviving works, has been distilled from classical texts and filtered through neoclassical taste, only to collide, head-on, with real Roman wall paintings dug out of Herculaneum. It is a strange confrontation between an abstract literary culture and an archaeological find. The paintings come out largely diminished from this comparison for failing to confirm the fictive ideal. It is a tale of lost illusions and of the resilience of the neoclassical ideal. The paintings recovered ‘‘should have enlightened us,’’ Cochin writes, ‘‘as to the degree of perfection to which the Ancients allegedly brought [this art],’’ and yet there is not one work ‘‘which might justify the praise that has been lavished on the great masters they had in this domain.’’28 Composition, drawing, perspective, execution, verisimilitude, taste—all are grossly violated by contemporary standards. ‘‘The perspective is false’’ (73), Cochin notes, and he states elsewhere that ‘‘the authors of this composition ignored its rules’’ (77). Some centaurs on a black background appear to Saint-Non to be hovering (‘‘the isolated figures seem absolutely airborne’’), an error that reduces them to mere ‘‘arabesques’’ and an utter ‘‘lack of verisimilitude.’’29 The lifesize paintings are ‘‘weak in color and design; there is little genius in their composition, and all the elements of art there are equally mediocre.’’ In terms of ‘‘rendering light,’’ the Romans are far behind and possess ‘‘no knowledge of chiaroscuro.’’30 The disappointment is palpable, and yet, if antiquity was thus partly demystified, the neoclassical ideal grounded in its fictive authority survived—was invoked, indeed, to criticize Pompeii.31 The modern standard of taste had an absolute validity, and Pompeian art was relentlessly viewed through the lens of modern genres and motifs: travelers rediscovered the ‘‘favorite subjects of the Academy’’ in ‘‘Perseus and Andromeda, Icarus and

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:22

PS

PAGE 16

Neoclassical Pompeii

17

Daedalus, Europe and the bull.’’32 Even recent trends were reflected in the tarnished mirror of the past: ‘‘was not Egyptianism the Orientalism of the ancient Romans?’’ (87). The possession of a universal touchstone inevitably led visitors to denounce the bad taste of the Pompeians; referring to some fanciful architectural paintings, Cochin found them to ‘‘resemble the taste of bad Gothic artists: most of the arabesques mingled with architecture are as ridiculous as Chinese drawings’’ (76).33 Even Shelley, writing in 1819, finds Pompeian paintings to be ‘‘the work of very inferior artists.’’34 The fuss over Pompeii was unmerited and due largely, many suggested, to the scarcity of survivals from antiquity: a ‘‘mediocre city,’’ for Latapie, which had usurped Rome’s place, Pezant found it ‘‘more remarkable now than it had been before it was buried.’’35 There is a flip side of this negative reception: the assimilation of the Pompeian model into neoclassicism itself. The excavated frescoes and artifacts often served, when not dismissed, as an inspiration to neoclassical artists emerging from the rosy excesses of the rococo. Joseph-Marie Vien’s Marchande d’Amours (1763), which directly translates the theme of a fresco from Herculaneum into the neoclassical idiom, is the most famous example. Even as late as 1834, David’s student Ingres employed a Pompeian backdrop for his Antiochus and Stratonice. In the meantime, the Revolution and the Empire had, each in their own way, given their sanction to antiquity in order to favor classic republicanism or Napoleon’s political project.36 The hovering dancers from Pompeii had been deemed tasteful enough to adorn Jose´phine’s dining room at Malmaison (1800), and Nicolas Gosse and Auguste Vinchon had painted a series of gray-scale Scenes from Ancient Life for the Louvre (Room G). The source for such works was generally the plates of the Antichita` di Ercolano, which also had a large impact on the decorative arts. These influences can create the erroneous idea that Pompeii and Herculaneum triggered the turn to classical purity; but, as Mario Praz notes, these cities ‘‘did not actually cause the advent of neoclassicism,’’ the roots of which go back in time beyond Winckelmann to ‘‘Poussin and the French critics’’ who held sway at the Academy in the seventeenth century.37 The lively creative reception of Pompeii in the eighteenth century—by painters, architects, decorators, and furniture makers—only confirms the period’s universalizing conception of taste. It was insofar as Pompeian art conformed to its own preestablished fictive ideal, vague enough, it is true, to accommodate a wide range of rediscovered artifacts, that it could serve as a paradigmatic model. The anachronistic neoclassical gaze permitted a two-way reflection and could

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:23

PS

PAGE 17

18 c h a p t e r 1

as easily favor the imitation of ancient works as debunk them in the name of a timeless norm. The critical reception of Pompeii was part and parcel of a gaze that engaged the past aesthetically. There was a tacit assumption that beauty was the proper sphere in which ancient vestiges carried meaning. Antiquity is still, for most eighteenth-century visitors, a literary ideal, a utopian and timeless image wrought by classicism. The distinction between antiquity and antiquities is crucial in this regard: one was a text-based normative construct, the other comprised menial objects of interest only to eccentric pedants. The philosophes honored one, but despised the other, and saw the antiquarians’ obsession with trifles as myopic and unsound. True antiquity was a purely textual domain, and only a ‘‘maniac’’ and ‘‘pedant’’ could be attached to actual material vestiges.38 Diderot wrote a caustic review of Fougeroux’s Recherches sur les ruines d’Herculanum where he took the author to task for his dull catalog of ridiculous household utensils and quipped that this ‘‘fellow is amazed that the ancients had basins, spoons, forks; in a word, that having the same needs, they had invented the same utensils to meet those needs.’’39 Given this classical ideal of antiquity, it is no surprise that the philosophes, despite the great interest they took in modern crafts, techniques, and trades in the Encyclope´die, were unable to envisage ancient Rome using a similar cultural grid. Goethe’s visit to Pompeii illustrates this distinction: he preferred the idealizing museum to the town’s narrow streets and cramped dwellings, which gave the impression of ‘‘a doll’s house’’ and of a ‘‘mummified town.’’ The museum, on the contrary, abstracted the artifacts and carved out an ideal abyss between them and the viewer.40 The domestic trinkets he did not appreciate in the oppressive dwellings became, through their museal displacement, proof of an aesthetic mode of life: ‘‘those tiny houses and rooms in Pompeii now seemed . . . more spacious, because precisely those objects [which cramped the rooms] are not just mere necessities, but in fact, decorated and embellished as they are in the most sublime and spiritual fashion through plastic art, cheer and broaden the mind, in ways which no amount of domestic space could do’’ (276–77). Detaching household utensils from their everyday context enabled Goethe to recognize their ornamental value, but this inclusive gesture only proves the rule: tools and utensils were not true antiquity; sculpture, paintings, and temples were; what valorized vestiges was their artistic merit. Beauty alone justified attention, but this, in circular fashion, was measured by the aesthetic ideal of antiquity itself.

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:24

PS

PAGE 18

Neoclassical Pompeii

19

But another category was available, outside of beauty, which allowed vestiges to emerge into visibility in the Ancien Re´gime: the curiosity. The curiosity offered a halfway category between the artwork and the worthless remnant. Princes had for a long time collected rare, strange, and exotic objects for display in their private cabinets, the Kunst und Wunderkammer of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which then morphed into specialized art museums and natural history collections.41 The curiosite´, indeed, did not have to be beautiful, merely curious and rare, and testifies to the existence of a hybrid value in European culture, in which the categories of age, rarity, exoticism, exemplarity, and historical evidence had not yet been properly disentangled. As such, it was an archaic and impure category in the eighteenth century, when Kant ‘‘liberated’’ the beautiful from the true and the good, and the scientific spirit had disciplined the omnivorous curiosity of the polyhistors and Renaissance collectors.42 A dated and residual category, it arguably provided a marginal space where what science and aesthetics excluded could still be seen, making its rearguard action strangely forward looking. ‘‘Curious’’ and ‘‘interesting’’ are the words used by the most openminded visitors at Pompeii to describe its odd appeal, especially the fascination of ancient tools, utensils, and remnants of food and wine. Cochin mentions the ‘‘very well-preserved wheat’’ and ‘‘the bread that is not viewed as one of the least curiosities’’ in Herculaneum (56–57), and Goethe, at Pompeii, confesses that he ‘‘cannot think of anything more interesting’’ (267). The skeletons in the ‘‘suburban villa’’ present ‘‘an interesting tableau’’ to Bergeret de Grancourt,43 while the abbe´ Richard finds the amphitheater in Herculaneum ‘‘truly worthy of curiosity, even in its current degraded state.’’ Terms like curiosity, interest, tableau, and spectacle offer an escape from the tyranny of the beautiful. Latapie makes this explicit: ‘‘the interest all these monuments inspire is due less to their beauty than to the rare spectacle they offer the amateur of antiquity.’’44 Even Franc¸ois Mazois, whose early nineteenth-century study did so much to fashion Pompeii’s image as a city, resorts to this jargon to turn the private dwellings into worthwhile curiosities; they, no less than public monuments, ‘‘offer the curious tableau of the private life of simple citizens.’’45 Stendhal in turn remarks in 1817 that ‘‘the most curious thing I’ve seen on my voyage is Pompeii.’’46 The category of curiosity thus justifies an interest that exceeds the classical aesthetic: as a curiosity, an artifact may legitimately claim our attention, regardless of its artistic flaws. Yet the curiosity, on the margins of the beautiful, grants the vestige only a very impoverished visibility. Its nebulous grasp of the remnant’s place in

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:24

PS

PAGE 19

20

chapter 1

history often produces an anachronistic fusion of horizons—the reduction of its uncanny singularity to the historically universal. For Bergeret de Grancourt, the humble private house of the Pompeians does merit our interest but as a ‘‘comfortable dwelling’’ that he unhistorically labels ‘‘bourgeois.’’ Latapie, similarly, spots ‘‘a cafe´’’ downtown,47 while Dupaty compares the posthumous inscription to a consul to a modern French one: it is ‘‘exactly our inscription, To Louis XIV, after his death.’’48 He also strolls through Pompeii like an enlightened citizen through Paris, making critical observations on human folly. The Pompeians were ‘‘imprudent men,’’ who built unwisely ‘‘at the foot of Vesuvius’’ and failed to keep their streets in good repair: ‘‘this pavement will soon want mending. These ruts, worn by the wagons, in rolling over these huge masses of lava, will overturn the carriages’’ (382). Dupaty inserts himself imaginatively into the city fabric but only as a critical modern town planner. In the temple of Isis, the critic of superstition and organized religion speaks up; behind the goddess’s sanctuary, he sees two gates and comments that ‘‘it was by them the impostors glided, between the altar and the wall, to make the divinity speak.’’ Pompeii becomes the script for a timeless social law unmasked by the Enlightenment: ‘‘you have then been ever imposed on, credulous people!’’ (384). Curiosity, then, is open-minded but anachronistic and assembles dissimilar objects, confusing periods and classes; it casts a wide net for the singular but drowns out singularity in a cacophony of gratuitous resemblances, analogies, and echoes. A gaze that assimilates a town buried for seventeen centuries to contemporary uses overlooks the deep historicity of cultural forms. The romantic historians would harshly criticize this homogenization of the past, most notably Augustin Thierry, whose Lettres sur l’histoire de France (1820) have gone down as a manifesto against Ancien Re´gime historiography. Thierry chastised Bre´quigny, for example, for exaggerating the power of the early monarchy: ‘‘instead of being struck by what most differs from his time in what he observes, his main concern is to identify the things that belong both to the past and the present.’’49 Trapped between singularity and sameness, then, the curious past struggles to emerge; a new category comes into play here to help differentiate cultures historically: the survival. Ancient customs, habits, and laws resembling our own were not timeless norms but survivals—residual forms that had persisted.50 Thus Goethe remarks that the humble houses in Naples derive from a Pompeian model: ‘‘closer to the city, the small houses struck me once more, standing there as complete imitations of the Pompeian ones.’’51 Michelet also notes the ‘‘perpetuity of the Italian spirit,’’ and finds

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:24

PS

PAGE 20

Neoclassical Pompeii

21

that the modern popular ‘‘costume is almost the same’’ as in ancient times: ‘‘everywhere I see the venetus cucullus, the steel needle in women’s hair, the necklaces, the rings, just like at Pompeii.’’52 The survival is a milestone in the recognition of historical alterity: if it equates past and present, it does so, henceforth, within an evolutionary scheme that rejects timeless norms. If Pompeii resembled Naples, it was because Rome had left an indelible cultural imprint, not because the laws that govern society are eternal and unchanging. Apparent sameness masked a long history; worse, it eclipsed what truly differed; the survival, in revealing continuities, freed the gaze to capture what was historically singular. The curiosity and the survival both contributed to the emergence of an archaeological gaze that took in, on the one hand, what beauty excluded, and, on the other, what timeless norms assimilated; extra-aesthetic and nonnormative, archaeology freed vestiges from instant value judgments and exposed them to the hermeneutic labor of comprehension. This passage from one sphere to another is palpable in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s 1793 article ‘‘On the Study of Antiquity,’’ where he discusses the usefulness of studying the ‘‘the remnants of antiquity’’ (which still only comprise literature and artworks for him) and distinguishes two main approaches. The first is the a¨sthetische, and consists in an intrinsic study of the works; the second approach sets the works in their period, and investigates the people that produced them (die Urheber). This method gives rise for Humboldt to ‘‘knowledge of the ancients themselves, or of humanity in antiquity,’’ and still appears idiosyncratic: ‘‘the aesthetic approach has been long considered the only one, and therein lies the source of many misconceptions about the ancients.’’53 In a pioneering move, Humboldt proposes to historicize ancient art and to view it archaeologically as evidence in the study of past civilizations. Winckelmann had already written a history of classical art, but not a history of civilization using artistic vestiges. This rupture within art is accompanied by a new willingness to examine material culture; antiquarians had consulted coins and inscriptions since the Renaissance, but the curiosities of material life that now attract attention far exceed such documents. Creuze´ de Lesser is among the first travelers at Pompeii (1801–2) who openly celebrates its odd and trivial objects, preferring ‘‘the instruments of all the mechanical arts’’ to the statues: ‘‘the observer cannot get enough of seeing [them].’’ He also marvels at ‘‘the preservation . . . of a grain of wheat, of the shell of an egg.’’54 In 1800, the civilization of the ancients is replacing their art as the true attraction at Pompeii.55

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:25

PS

PAGE 21

22 c h a p t e r 1

The term ‘‘archaeology,’’ however, can be misleading, for it often signifies less the rupture between art and history than their continued conflation in the new type of art history initiated by Winckelmann. The shifts in the definition of the term in the early nineteenth century demonstrate this difficult separation. The one that Aubin-Louis Millin, professor of archaeology at the Bibliothe`que nationale in 1794, proposes in his Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts (1808) echoes the nascent split and ongoing confusion to which Humboldt’s text bore witness: ‘‘ARCHEOLOGY: this word . . . denotes the science of the manners and practices of the ancients. The science of ancient monuments is an essential part of it. These can be considered in the strictest sense of the word, that is insofar as they serve to preserve the memory of events and people; or as works of art, in terms of the pleasure produced by their form. The science of antiquity can thus be approached from two standpoints.’’56 The notion of a ‘‘science of manners and practices’’ would suggest a cultural interpretation of vestiges, not a measurement of ‘‘the pleasure produced by their form,’’ but Millin thereafter goes on to identify artistic appreciation as the proper business of the ‘‘archeologist,’’ whose highest claim is to be a ‘‘connoisseur of the art of antiquity.’’ It is only the despised ‘‘antiquary’’ who dabbles in ‘‘antiquities’’ to gain insight into ‘‘the manners, practices, political constitution, theology, religious ceremonies, laws, police, private life, etc. of the ancients’’ (1:51). Genuine archaeology is also restricted to Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman monuments, since only these ancient nations are ‘‘distinguished in art,’’ while the remnants left by others ‘‘hardly merit study from the perspective of art’’ (1:51). The notion of a new branch of the science of culture, based strictly on material vestiges, visibly stumbles here, as Millin reproduces the philosophes’ dismissal of antiquarianism to offer a purely artistic archaeology free from the nasty business of material culture. When Raoul-Rochette, to cite a later example, taught a Cours d’arche´ologie at Paris in 1828, he announced at the outset that the course would cover ‘‘the history of the art of the ancients’’ and then even bracketed the historical aspect of his topic, preferring to focus on ‘‘the genius of art itself,’’ rather than on ‘‘the chronology of ancient artists,’’ thereby relapsing into classicism.57 Indeed, Raoul-Rochette instantly proposes a normative rule for all art, a yardstick by which works from all times and places can be measured— imitation: ‘‘art only truly begins at the point where imitation begins’’ (6)— and so forecloses any hope of a nonevaluative science of monumenta. The course in fact moves to a crescendo and triumphant finale with a discussion of Phidias’s statuary and the Parthenon sculptures. He also lambasts the mis-

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:26

PS

PAGE 22

Neoclassical Pompeii 23

guided idolaters who venerate works for their ‘‘age’’ rather than beauty, especially religious icons, quipping that ‘‘the more shapeless the work is, and the more it carries the stamp of age, the greater the respect it inspires’’ (46). While this sarcasm seems justified from a purely aesthetic standpoint, it reveals just how hostile a self-proclaimed archaeologist could still be to age value, wherever the timeless rules of art were still in effect. A survey of medieval architecture in terms of styles and periods is also what Arcisse de Caumont offered his students at Caen, in his Cours d’antiquite´s (1800–1833), a project he refers to as an ‘‘archeology.’’58 The British archaeologist Charles Newton, who actually dug in Greece, likewise privileges what he terms ‘‘the Archaeology of Art’’ over the ‘‘two’’ other existing branches (those of oral and written remains).59 Evaluative criteria are immediately marshaled so as to frame any possible inquiry within the well-worn confines of aesthetic merit. ‘‘It is those works of Imitative Art which embody thought, which have the first claim on the attention of the Archaeologist, and, above all, those which express religious ideas’’ (20). This curious series of partialities—first to art, then to imitation, then to thought, and finally to religious ideas—seems utterly at odds with our own scientific view of archaeology. But it illustrates how hard it was even to see the majority of objects lying in the dirt, much less infer diets from tooth wear or the structure of private life from a bed stand. Only in a text by Ludovic Vitet, Me´rime´e’s precursor as Inspecteur de monuments historiques, and a major figure in the restoration movement, do we see a conception of archaeology as a field distinct from art history truly emerge in France. For Vitet, dilapidated Gothic buildings, apart from any controversial claim to beauty, deserved public admiration and state maintenance as monuments linked to the nation’s history; their mnemonic and historical value as milestones in the growth of a national identity transformed them into a sacred patrimoine (inheritance, legacy, heritage), a new form of value immunized against aesthetic criticism. It was in this context that Vitet’s vision of an archaeology which studied past cultures through their monuments could take shape. Addressing the Socie´te´ des antiquaires de Normandie in 1847 (a group that had spearheaded the revaluation of Gothic and helped trigger the restoration movement), Vitet praises his assembly of antiquaries for going beyond the mere promotion of ‘‘beauties hitherto unrecognized’’ and treating French monuments instead as ‘‘witnesses’’ of the past: ‘‘they asked them, as certain and faithful witnesses, to provide new insights into our history.’’60 Sounding these monuments for ‘‘the secret of their origin,’’ they laid the groundwork for ‘‘a new science’’ (406), what Vitet then calls ‘‘a

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:27

PS

PAGE 23

24 c h a p t e r 1

new archaeology,’’ whose fragile disciplinary identity requires that it observe ‘‘its true limits’’ and ‘‘not go astray . . . by a vulgar usurpation . . . [into] the domain of art’’ (407). The tortuous birth of an archaeological gaze was in part due to the necessity of foregoing pleasure in visual contemplation—at least the ‘‘disinterested’’ pleasure that Kant identifies as the hallmark of pure judgments of taste. The gaze itself had to learn to burrow into the artifact’s interior, penetrate beneath its surface texture, and excavate its cultural origins; remnants had to be grasped, not as meaningless arabesques, but as concrete fragments taken from an invisible cultural architecture. An example taken from geology can help illustrate this tough transition, and the ‘‘sacrilegious’’ nature of the assault on pure contemplation. Landscapes had slowly emerged into view since the Renaissance as spectacles for the disinterested gaze and had crystallized by the eighteenth century in the cult of the sublime and the picturesque. These two categories prestructured the Enlightenment’s experience of nature and continued to pattern aesthetic contemplation well into the nineteenth century, as is evidenced by Amable-Paul Coutan’s picturesque and PierreHenri de Valencienne’s sublime rendition of Pompeii (figs. 1 and 2). To peel away this sensibility in order to scrutinize nature’s inner mechanics and origins implied a certain iconoclasm. Cuvier strategically evokes the picturesque gaze in his famous Discours pre´liminaire before turning a more scientific gaze on natural beauty and delving through the landscape into the harsh geological substrate.61 This process of demystification is perhaps best illustrated by Rodolphe To¨pffer in a satirical story that narrates the journey of a team of geologists insensible to the beauty of the Alps from Chamonix to Martigny: ‘‘geologists form a charming company, but mainly for geologists. They have a habit of stopping at every rock, and of making pronouncements at every layer of earth. They break the rocks to take samples along; and they scratch the layers to work out a system every time.’’62 They violate nature, and their gaze systematically inverts the sublime into the scientific: ‘‘Show them a superb summit: it’s been produced by pressure; a ravine filled with ice: they see the action of fire there; a forest: it’s no longer their business’’ (431). But what is most striking in To¨pffer’s ‘‘satire’’ of geological pedantry is in fact how quickly it yields to its target— lets itself be seduced by the romance which the archaeological vision of nature conjures up. This shift begins with a concession: ‘‘they don’t lack imagination,’’ only to displace this acknowledged gift from the visible kingdom of nature into the earth itself: ‘‘but this imagination only reigns beneath the

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:28

PS

PAGE 24

Figure 1. Amable-Paul Coutan (1792–1837), View of Pompeii. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:04:56

PS

PAGE 25

26 c h a p t e r 1

Figure 2. Pierre Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819), Eruption of Vesuvius, Aug. 24 of the Year 79 (1813). Toulouse, Muse´e des Augustins. Photo: Daniel Martin.

seas, and in the bowels of the earth; it dies out as soon as it reaches the surface’’ (431). A strange offshoot of the ‘‘queen of the faculties’’ now appears to operate within the very gaze that disrupted the imaginative reception of landscape (as a picturesque or sublime spectacle). Geology has merely displaced the sensible interaction with nature beneath the crust of the earth, wrested it from visibility, and dislocated it in time. ‘‘I always like geology,’’ the narrator confesses, identifying in it a new type of romance: ‘‘I like this science . . . [because] it is infinite, vague, like all poetry. Like all poetry, it sounds out mysteries, and draws its lifeblood from them’’ (432). The once dry-as-dust geological imagination, which formerly disenchanted the breathtaking Alps, now opens up on an exciting reverie of antediluvian times and beasts, brought alive suddenly by the fossil remains of Cuvier’s Me´galosaurus: ‘‘imagine for yourself this royal beast strolling through the ancient world, and feeding its little family elephants instead of flies!’’ Coming full circle, a rehabilitated geology can then be identified with the very picturesque gaze it once disrupted: ‘‘Long live painters of the picturesque!’’ exclaims To¨pffer, lauding them for first drawing our attention to

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:05:11

PS

PAGE 26

Neoclassical Pompeii 27

broken cliffs and rocky landscapes and to the imposing vistas from which geology would then learn: ‘‘they spread and popularize science!’’ (431). Geology, in 1850, is a new picturesque: the cult of beauty has yielded to the poetry of science.63 Just so, and in the same time span, the status of archaeology has shifted from antiquarian pedantry to scientific romance: the remnants of the human past now permit the imagination to recreate lost worlds that have faded from visibility. The pleasure of aesthetic contemplation detaches itself from tangible surfaces to be reinvested in the mind’s own reconstructed worlds.

................. 17036$

$CH1

09-26-08 11:05:12

PS

PAGE 27

two The Antiquarian Comes of Age

The Antiquarian The radical turn from a picturesque gaze to seeing in depth, however, also required overcoming a major mental hurdle: the deep-seated aversion to the triviality of antiquarian studies that polite culture and enlightened reason had imposed in the eighteenth century. The study of antiquities that the Italian humanists had championed and that had fueled the Renaissance began to suffer a decline after the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, when natural science emerged as the new model of knowledge, and the work of antiquaries, erudite men of letters, and polymaths came to be dismissed as a sterile accumulation of facts. Whereas modern science, after Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, sought to establish laws and regularities and professed to order the world, antiquarians were allegedly still bewitched by rare and singular artifacts invested with the authority of age; they were resolutely antiintellectual, narrow-minded, and superficial and became bogged down in dusty minutiae only to miss the bigger picture. That, at least, was how they appeared to many Enlightenment philosophers, who decisively devalued erudite scholarship in France. How did the trivia they rejected (coins, inscriptions, charters, monuments, and artifacts) make a comeback? How did the discourse of history, so long an exercise in rhetoric, lessons, and ideas, become critical and absorb the erudite culture of proof ? And how did the antiquarian fare in the course of this radical attack? The story of the antiquarian is as tangled as his own field of study and has only too often been written from the viewpoint of his detractors. Did

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:21

PS

PAGE 28

The Antiquarian 29

this figure actually vanish after 1750? Did the modern scientific paradigm truly replace humanist erudition? Was mainstream history really so impermeable to the standards of proof worked out by antiquarian historians? There is no doubt that antiquarians became stock figures of ridicule early on, by the end of the sixteenth century in England, and that satirical portraits, mostly dull repetitions, would abound well into the nineteenth century.1 In France, La Bruye`re had ridiculed the fashion for collecting curiosities as a deviant antisocial mania in Les Caracte`res (1688), where fans of tulips, fruits, medals, prints, books, birds, insects, and oriental languages all rub shoulders in their common neglect of true wisdom and social responsibilities. Montesquieu would rewrite La Bruye`re’s sketch in Les Lettres persanes (1721), where he depicts a savant blithely dispersing his heritage in a mad rush to acquire useless trinkets, and Marmontel would soon center an entire conte moral around a would-be connoisseur pretending to dictate good taste but who is outmaneuvered by a young provincial poet who rescues his niece from marriage with M. de Lexergue, ‘‘a first-rate savant . . . full of contempt for all that is modern’’ and fancying ‘‘a girl with an antique look.’’2 This simple scenario would prove hugely popular, and the antiquarian soon came to feature regularly in comedies and vaudevilles as a bloated authority blocking the young hero’s access to the girl.3 Life and grace, in other words, trumped morbid authority. Battered and bruised, the antiquarian entered the nineteenth century as an ill-kempt eccentric, now cast in the mold of the furious monomaniac, pathologically driven to acquire the final missing piece before immolating himself in his collection. Nodier’s ‘‘Bibliomaniac’’ dies clutching two rare editions, whereupon an epitaph relegates him into a bookish coffin: ‘‘here lies, in his wooden binding, an in-folio copy of the best edition of man.’’4 Viel-Castel imposed a similar fate on one of the ‘‘Collectors’’ he portrayed for the large publishing venture The French Painted by Themselves: a man who has grown too intimate with his gallery of mummies finds out by chance that his beloved Egyptian princess is actually a man, expires in shock, and winds up buried in an exquisite mummy case.5 These popular depictions of antiquarians voice a fairly stable moral critique of the obsession with relics: these detract from the business of living. The antiquarian forgets to eat, sleep, laugh, and socialize; he squanders his fortune, impoverishes his family, withdraws into solitude, and abdicates his membership in society. At last, he merges with his all-consuming object—the florist stands ‘‘rooted’’ in his acre, and the ornithologist dreams he is a bird.6 Behind these caricatures, however, we also glimpse a more serious critique of

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:21

PS

PAGE 29

30

chapter 2

the antiquarian’s claim to knowledge. His science is a false science: La Bruye`re’s book lover does not read—any more than do Flaubert’s or Nodier’s modern bibliomaniacs.7 What they do is possess their books, substituting the collector’s passion of ownership for intellectual engagement. The French Academy’s first dictionary in 1694 already hinted at this perversion of ‘‘curiosity,’’ which it defined as the ‘‘passion, desire, urge to see, to learn, to possess rare, singular, and new things,’’ a breathless definition that itself mimics the collector’s mobile embrace. Indeed, whether they collect things or intangible facts, antiquarians are accused of overreaching and of succumbing to a superficial desire for totality; unable to ‘‘renounce any sort of knowledge, they embrace everything and possess nothing.’’8 Their indiscriminate thirst for the rare and the curious gave birth to the chaotic agglomerations of the Kunst- und Wunderkammer that spread across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and aspired to assemble the totality of the world into a microcosm.9 The same vast ambition animated the compilations of the polyhistors, who sought to condense universal knowledge into encyclopedic works.10 ‘‘These men read all the histories and ignore history; they peruse all the books and profit from none . . . their memory is weighed down, but their mind is empty.’’11 Yet the retreat from such ambitions could also easily lead the student into the contrary error of overspecialization. La Bruye`re’s fruit lover tolerates nothing but one species of plum, just as Viel-Castel’s porcelain amateur is interested exclusively in the ‘‘paˆte tendre’’ of Se`vres. Antiquarians proper are rarely so specialized, but their infatuation with things can mire them so deeply in details that they miss the bigger picture and fail to privilege the finest objects. When Chamfort attacked the academies during the Revolution, he mocked the savants of the Acade´mie des inscriptions et belleslettres for teaching us ‘‘the names of all the utensils that made up the kitchen battery of Marc Anthony.’’12 In the Encyclope´die’s article on ‘‘Erudition,’’ d’Alembert noted how an absence of ‘‘philosophical spirit’’ led the savant to overvalue mere facts, ‘‘the only form of knowledge he seeks and appreciates,’’ and stressed that ‘‘erudition, to be truly meritorious, needs to be informed by the philosophical spirit.’’13 The hostility of the philosophes to antiquarian studies therefore hinged essentially on their fetishistic attachment to facts, which gave rise to a twofold error: a greedy accumulation of unprocessed knowledge and a perverse celebration of useless details; totality and particularity joined hands in an unenlightened reification of knowledge. Hence the hierarchy established by the ‘‘Preliminary Discourse’’ of the Encyclope´die, which orders the Republic of Letters into philosophers, beaux-esprits, and

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:22

PS

PAGE 30

The Antiquarian 31

savants, figures guided by reason, imagination, and memory, respectively. The discourse also posits a historical progression starting in the Renaissance from philology to literature to science. Historical studies, demoted to an empty exercise in memory, fall prey to the poet’s and philosopher’s contempt: ‘‘both regard the Savant as a sort of miser who thinks only of amassing without using, and indiscriminately piles up the most precious metals with the most worthless ones.’’14 But this critique of history needs to be qualified: an important distinction existed between historical narrative proper and the erudite study of sources, which was rarely questioned in early modern Europe. History, since antiquity, had been a rhetorical art, a form of public narrative, centered on great figures, events, and examples and was expected to present the lessons of the past in a pleasing form. Proof was secondary, and excess details weighed down the narrative, broke the reader’s interest, and detracted from the genre’s public appeal. Erudition, as a result, was confined to specialists, who often compiled data on the margins of established narratives and shied away from challenging the authority of ancient historians. This sharp divide would not seriously break down until the professionalization of history in the nineteenth century.15 It is true that the Enlightenment turned away from traditional dynastic and political history, and, in the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Ferguson, pioneered a philosophical approach centered on the progress of civilization (the history of laws, manners, trade, beliefs, customs) which often overlapped with antiquarian concerns. But two obstacles stood in the way of any serious convergence with the antiquarian enterprise: first, philosophical history, which traced the large sweep of civilization, had little use for details and seemed invulnerable to small inaccuracies; second, historical skepticism, the fallout from the religious controversies of the seventeenth century, had deeply undermined faith in the reliability of the historical record.16 The very success of erudition in devising rigorous methods to authenticate sources (embodied in Mabillon’s seminal treatise, De re diplomatica [1681]), only paved the way for sharper attacks, such as Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire critique et historique (1697), which so delighted in suspicion that it threatened to undo the very ground of historical science.17 Why bother with minutiae, then, which only cost effort, without buying certainty? History remained a rhetorical discipline, and the laws of the genre that Fe´nelon had spelled out in his Lettre a` l’Acade´mie (1713) would continue to police its boundaries throughout the century: ‘‘the good historian,’’ he wrote, ‘‘cuts out every discussion where the erudition of a savant is on display,’’ favors

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:22

PS

PAGE 31

32 c h a p t e r 2

‘‘lively narration’’ over ‘‘vague facts’’ and ‘‘sterile dates,’’ and works carefully on the ‘‘order’’ and ‘‘arrangement’’ of his discourse.18 In this context, the Encyclope´die’s devaluation of ‘‘memory,’’ however sweeping, no doubt targets erudite research in particular and spares both belletristic history and the future-oriented story of civilization. Erudition also came under attack on aesthetic grounds. The exemplary value of classical models had taken a hit during the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, but antiquarians seemed not to have taken notice. For them, we hear, everything old remained venerable, age blinded them to beauty, and they even purported to instruct artists in the canons of good taste. ‘‘Curiosity,’’ La Bruye`re said, ‘‘is not a taste for what is good or what is beautiful, but for what is rare and unique.’’ And old, Mercier would add, when satirizing the savants of the Acade´mie des inscriptions for refusing all commerce with the present and preferring ruined temples to the Louvre, Hebrew to French, and Aristotle to Descartes.19 Diderot, in the meantime, ridiculed collectors for their single-minded pursuit of antique artifacts: ‘‘they dish out enormous sums’’ for mediocre pieces ‘‘whose only merit is to have remained buried for two thousand years.’’20 In a fragment entitled ‘‘L’anticomanie,’’ he added: ‘‘ancient or not, from yesterday or from three thousand years ago . . . who cares, so long as it’s beautiful?’’21 The blindness of wealthy amateurs, unable to discern true merit, had become a commonplace in the eighteenth century, but what was more disturbing was their claim to dictate artistic standards, as the comte de Caylus sought to do in his commentaries on antiques and in the handbooks of pictorial subjects he proposed to artists. Caylus, indeed, defended antiquarianism against the charge of sterility on the very ground of its utility to artists: conceding the dangers of ‘‘useless erudition,’’ he stressed the novelty of his own approach, which privileged the form and style of antiques over their historical content and gave ‘‘artists some notions of beautiful forms.’’22 Hence Marmontel’s attack on the connoisseur, an inept and uninspired playwright who acquires the baseless ‘‘conviction that he is competent in everything, that he is a judge of arts and letters, and the guide, the audience, the arbiter of talents’’ (226). But as the ideal of genius and imagination slowly broke down the rule-bound aesthetics of classicism, the claim to discipline invention through the great models of the past came to seem outmoded.23 It was the advent of an antinormative outlook that led Diderot, in the Salon de 1767, to cut down a Saint-Louis ‘‘viewed through the narrow lenses of l’anticomanie.’’24 On every front, then, morally, intellectually, and artistically, antiquarian-

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:23

PS

PAGE 32

The Antiquarian 33

ism suffered a setback in the eighteenth century. The satire resounds across all three registers with the finality of a blanket condemnation; the age of the antiquarian (1500–1800) ended in a steep decline. This is not to say, however, that the figure vanished, as is often claimed, or that his pursuits met a dead end. Anthony Grafton has demonstrated the subterranean continuity between humanist scholarship and the German philological revolution of the late eighteenth century, while others have stressed the ongoing vitality of erudition in the eighteenth century and the partial permeability of rhetorical history to more erudite branches of writing.25 Demotion was not extinction. Moreover, the umbrella term ‘‘antiquarian’’ conflates a variety of pursuits that fared very differently: editing manuscripts, numismatics, epigraphy, chronology, diplomatics, art collection, iconography, and so on. The term fails to distinguish between texts and objects, collecting and publishing, assembling and interpreting, curiosity and erudition, history and aesthetics. These distinctions counted, all the more so, perhaps, in view of the critical climate that dismissed these pursuits in one sweeping gesture. A collector was not necessarily a savant, nor was an expert on coins an art lover, or a philologist concerned with artifacts. Their objects differed (texts, coins, inscriptions, charters, artifacts), as did their relation to them (possession, publication, study), their methods (collection, comparison, classification, interpretation), and the nature of their gaze (curious, scientific, aesthetic). It is safe to say that collecting went on continuously into the nineteenth century, indeed spread and trickled down into the middle classes, where it often dissolved into an ornamental art—antiques were often dispersed as decorations in bourgeois homes. But the collector’s curiosity was also disciplined over the long haul, as his omnivorous interests gave way to more specialized objects (coins, books, statues, shells), distinct historical periods (ancient, pre-Roman, medieval) and particular ethnic domains (Celtic, Etruscan, Saxon). The scientific study of antiques also never really vanished; thanks to the Acade´mie des inscriptions, founded in 1663, then revamped in 1701, there existed a stable institutional framework for erudite history until the Convention abolished the academies in 1793; under Louis XVIII, in 1816, this academy resurfaced again after surviving the Directory and Empire under the umbrella of the Institut. The relative decline of antiquarian studies in the eighteenth century is thus partly a question of image, and partly a question of shifting emphasis; while scientific curiosity moved broadly from history to nature, or from medals to shells, as Krzysztof Pomian has shown, there was also a noticeable internal redistribution from classical antiquity to national

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:23

PS

PAGE 33

34 c h a p t e r 2

history, which, despite its ‘‘barbaric’’ reputation, began to attract increased attention during the Enlightenment. At that point, some of the Moderns, fed up with classical models, began to turn cautiously to the Middle Ages for inspiration.26 If this rehabilitation remained largely congruent with a celebration of the monarchy—and the case of Montfaucon’s great work, Les Monuments de la Monarchie franc¸aise (1729–32), shows that it was—and the feudal character of French history initially only provoked its wholesale rejection during the Revolution,27 the modern bourgeois regimes of the nineteenth century would quickly rehabilitate the national past as a source of pride, identity, and ideological unification. By the 1820s, local archaeological societies, eager to protect their regional heritage, had begun to multiply and promote a popular pride in the Middle Ages. Associations of local savants, such as the Socie´te´ des antiquaires de Normandie, cofounded by Arcisse de Caumont in 1824, who later created the nationwide Socie´te´ franc¸aise d’arche´ologie (1833), reinvented the antiquarian tradition in the modern climate of heritage politics.28 The useless antiquarians of the Ancien Re´gime had now morphed into patriots celebrating the nation’s history. Survival, however, implied transformation, and if the Renaissance antiquarian was not killed by the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, it was because he managed to reemerge in the modern dress of the archaeologist. A decisive makeover had occurred: while the antiquarian had been an unsociable and myopic eccentric, the archaeologist, by contrast, came to adopt a heroic bearing, a national calling, and an almost mythical aura. This successful reinvention could be traced step by step through the literature of the nineteenth century; a critical milestone in this respect is Walter Scott’s novel The Antiquary (1816), where Scott pays ambivalent homage, at once satirical and tender, in his portrait of Oldbuck. While Oldbuck recycles the comical stereotype, he simultaneously points to Scott’s own passion for medieval artifacts and chronicles, and echoes the thirst for national history that fueled his novels. If the figure, as Stephen Bann has argued, remains an eighteenth-century type,29 it is because his obsession with Roman Britain is so quixotic that it eclipses the present and turns history into the ‘‘abusive’’ pursuit that Nietzsche would argue hinders the realization of life’s highest aims.30 In his blind enthusiasm, Oldbuck mistakes a barren acre for the site of the ‘‘final conflict between Agricola and the Caledonians,’’ and misreads the ditches in the landscape as proof of the presence of ‘‘an ancient camp.’’31 His desire to own and dig this land leads him ‘‘to give acre for acre of my good corn-land for this barren spot’’ (29) and to turn himself into Nietzsche’s

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:24

PS

PAGE 34

The Antiquarian 35

gravedigger of the present. But however deviant this passion appears, it is also ennobled here by a tint of romantic earnestness, which makes Oldbuck a cousin of the melancholy Oswald in Mme de Stae¨l’s Corinne, a world-weary wanderer who ‘‘could not have endured life’’ except in the lofty environments ‘‘where the monuments of history take the place of present existence’’ (302). Chateaubriand’s Rene´, similarly, flees the world and himself by stumbling forlornly through the landscape of European history. The morbid immersion that the philosophes had ridiculed and that Nietzsche would condemn actually becomes, in this period, a life-preserving attitude of social disaffection. Scott’s gentle satire of Oldbuck’s historical obsession testifies to a gradual transformation of the antiquary, especially since Scott of course did so much himself to rehabilitate for literary use the antiquarian trivia that historians had dismissed. In the ‘‘General Preface’’ (1829) to his works, he calls himself a ‘‘glutton of books,’’ who went from devouring fiction to ‘‘seek[ing] in histories, memoirs, voyages and travels’’ a more authentic source of marvelous tales.32 But his poetic appropriation of antiquarianism still seems rather cautious: not all trivia could be usefully salvaged, and Scott still feared imposing on the polite reader. His satirical preface to Ivanhoe (1817), allegedly written by the antiquary Laurence Templeton to his colleague Dr. Jonas Dryasdust, walks a thin line between justifying and rejecting the use of erudition. Templeton defends the novel on two fronts, first to the ‘‘severer antiquary’’ against the charge of ‘‘polluting the well of history,’’ and second to reader’s generic expectations: ‘‘it is necessary, for exciting interest of any kind, that the subject assumed should be, as it were, translated into the manners, as well as the language, of the age we live in’’ to spare the ‘‘modern reader . . . the repulsive dryness of mere antiquity.’’33 Templeton recalls the modern reader’s horror at first facing the real Chaucer, whose ‘‘obsolete spelling . . . and antiquated appearance’’ prompt him ‘‘to lay down the work in despair, as encrusted too deep with the rust of antiquity’’ (527). Erudite details annoyed the polite reader. A judicious sprinkling would suffice to give the romance of time travel the proper dose of illusion.34 Carlyle echoed this view: inspired by the publication of Jocelyn of Brakelond’s Latin chronicle in 1840 by the Camden Society,35 he tried, in Past and Present (1843), to reimagine life in a twelfthcentury monastery. ‘‘Alas,’’ he wrote, ‘‘what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous Pedantry dig up from the Past Time, and name it History, and Philosophy of History; till, as we say, the human soul sinks wearied and bewildered; till the Past Time seems all one infinite incredi-

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:24

PS

PAGE 35

36 c h a p t e r 2

ble grey void.’’36 Despite this caveat, his overt aim was precisely to ‘‘dig up . . . Past Time’’ to promote social regeneration through the worship of medieval virtues. In Baudelaire’s Pompeian story, ‘‘Le jeune enchanteur,’’ we witness the same uneasy turn to antiquarianism: taking its cue from a large fresco unearthed in 1815, the story resurrects pagan antiquity, but not without first taking a stab at the local savants and their baroque efforts to ‘‘discover the explanation and history of this incomparable piece.’’37 Alexandre Dumas, whom Garibaldi would put in charge of the excavations at Pompeii in 1860, had already torpedoed his erudite rivals in the Corricolo of 1843: one poor Italian savant had spent four volumes proving that ‘‘the ancients could not fabricate glass,’’ just as, Dumas tells us, ‘‘four panes of glass were rediscovered.’’38 Nothing but rivalry and ambition drove this absurd ‘‘race’’ of squabblers, which had to date produced no less than ‘‘nine systems on the iron mask, and ten on the great mosaic’’ (192). These reservations make sense in view of this prolific novelist’s distaste for laborious reconstruction, but also in view of the secret proximity that links ponderous erudition and quickening poetry: did not the spell cast by historical novels derive in the end from the judicious use of archaeological details? Dumas seems to admit as much when he apologizes to the reader for the pedantic tangents of his travelogue: ‘‘since I live in Italy, I, too, have become erudite’’ (178). What these examples all show is a simultaneous fascination with dusty antiques and fear of contamination: their incorporation into literature takes the form of a dialectical process in which erudition is at once assimilated and exorcised. This partial rehabilitation of antiquarianism in fiction runs parallel with the makeover of the savant into a heroic figure. Despite frequent satirical stabs, intellectuals in the nineteenth century cast a much more sympathetic gaze on savants, especially if they took to the road and endured hardships for their learning. In his 1796 manual on numismatics, A.-L. Millin had already stressed that many coin collectors ‘‘undertook difficult and perilous journeys to bring new ones home,’’39 and Sainte-Beuve, in a causerie devoted to the abbe´ Barthe´lemy, a savant who spent no less than thirty years laboring on his monumental bestselling novel of ancient Greece (now entirely forgotten), the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis (1798), recalls that the abbe´ was first and foremost a passionate antiquarian in whom coins had sparked the ‘‘sacred flame.’’ The portrait is benevolent, and the abbe´ comes across as a wily hero employing the clever ‘‘tricks of Odysseus’’ to outfox jealous art dealers.40 In the Goncourt brothers’ homage to Caylus, the great antiquarian whom Diderot had loved to hate and had punished with a stinging epitaph,41 the aristocratic

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:24

PS

PAGE 36

The Antiquarian

37

savant radiates all the energy of a modern romantic hero: ‘‘hardships, fatigue, even the plague, nothing affects his cheerfulness, his health . . . Ephesus is closed off from his curiosity by the feared Caracayali and his gang,’’ but dressed in a mere sailcloth, Caylus ‘‘has himself conducted to the bandit’’ just to jot down some notes.42 Such is the risk-filled life on the archaeological frontier. There is a clear retrospective desire to glorify the forerunners of the modern archaeologist, a tendency that reaches its pinnacle in George Eliot’s Renaissance novel, Romola (1862–63), in which a Florentine humanist is portrayed as a fearless Columbus-like figure. The hero’s father had been ‘‘willing to risk his life in his zeal for the discovery of inscriptions and other traces of ancient civilisation’’ and had set off on risky journeys to find antiques that might shed light on ‘‘the memory of the West.’’43 Indeed, Tito’s father, like Odysseus, suffers untold hardships during his Eastern travels, including capture and enslavement, and ironically ends up losing his own memory from the traumas he suffers in the process of rescuing Europe’s cultural memory. The stock figure pilloried by Montesquieu, Marmontel, and La Bruye`re was at last receiving a hero’s welcome. But he was, it appeared, much more useful to society than anyone had realized. As history, in the nineteenth century, came to define the nation, and the nation to ground the state, social stability was in part becoming a question of managing the collective past. Guizot’s politics of heritage during the July Monarchy testified to this renewed vitality of history, as would Renan’s pleas later on for an ‘‘intellectual reform’’ after the Franco-Prussian War, a disaster that had raised the specter of German intellectual superiority.44 Scientific culture was emerging as the precondition for preeminence in the age of nationalism, and the mastery of the past often seemed just as vital as the mastery of nature. Viollet-le-Duc drove this point home in his eloquent plea in defense of archaeologists: ‘‘these investigators of the past, these archeologists, patiently exhuming the smallest debris’’ are neither ruining traditions nor distracting the public from more pressing problems.45 Marshaling an argument that resonated throughout the age of revolutions, he depicted the study of the past as an engine of continuing progress. Did not every great period owe its progress to a renewed scrutiny of the past? The twelfth century, for example, in the West, and the renaissance of the sixteenth century, had both been inspired ‘‘at least in part by a study of the past.’’ Modern-day archaeologists were engaged in the same useful quest to renew their own culture but fortunately had little reason to fear rejection since their ‘‘labors are appreciated by a public eager to penetrate into the heart of earlier ages with them.’’

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:25

PS

PAGE 37

38 c h a p t e r 2

By midcentury, imperial expansion and rivalries had opened up new stomping grounds for patriotic excavators. The champions of national history that had proliferated during the July Monarchy, such as Arcisse de Caumont, were now being upstaged by archaeologists hunting treasures on foreign soil. The excavations in Egypt, Palestine, and the Middle East gave the field an aura of exotic adventure that was missing from Europe. The discovery of Assyrian palaces by Botta and Layard in the 1840s had furnished ‘‘the great collections of Paris and London’’ with Assyrian artworks which shifted the focus of European archaeology abroad: ‘‘the day is perhaps not far off,’’ Renan wrote, ‘‘when Greece will be crushed in our museums by the Orient.’’46 The ancient Mediterranean civilizations exuded a power and mystery that seduced and flattered the public of modern industrial nations, proud to ‘‘own’’ this heritage and reflect their own success in past empires. The age of explorations was over, there was no more terra incognita, and scholars were as eager to invest new domains as markets were to expand abroad. In the context of the Franco-British struggle to secure control of the Middle East, the pre-Roman and biblical past, at once alien and familiar, was an ideal landscape for expansion. The archaeologist, in this context, became an imperial agent and grew into a heroic figure of the oriental frontier. The savants on Napoleon’s 1798 expedition to Egypt who assembled the monumental Description de l’E´gypte would set a lasting precedent for archaeology as imperial adventure, a pattern which Rider Haggard, in his racist African adventure novels, would finally bring to its low point of perfection at the end of the century in works such as King Solomon’s Mines (1885), She (1886), and Allan Quatermain (1887). Stuffed with biblical treasures, lost civilizations, and remote, enigmatic races, these novels romanced colonial plunder as voyages of ethnographic and archaeological discovery. The final salvo of this genre may well be Andre´ Malraux’s novelized tale of his archaeological tour in Indochina, La Voie royale (1930), which rewrites his mission to pillage Khmer temples for the Western art market as a new Heart of Darkness. But the midcentury discovery of Assyria was the point at which imperial archaeology first truly became glamorous. When Paul E´mile Botta, the French consul in Mosul, struck upon the ruins of the palace of King Sargon II in Khorsabad in 1843, and began shipping its great bas-reliefs down the Tigris river on rafts, he sparked a Franco-British competition to appropriate the spoils of the Assyrian empire.47 Austen Henry Layard, affiliated, at the time, with the British embassy at Constantinople, quickly countered the

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:26

PS

PAGE 38

The Antiquarian

39

French move by carrying out secret excavations at a nearby mound in 1845, an enterprise that soon led to the sensational discovery of Nineveh.48 These exploits were widely publicized, and exhibitions in both London and Paris, at the British Museum and the Louvre, bestowed upon both men their fair share of patriotic glory. Layard’s account of his findings would even yield the first archaeological bestseller, Nineveh and Its Remains (1851), part field journal, part travelogue, part adventure story, a seductive cocktail that caught the Victorian mood and crafted an early prototype of Indiana Jones. As Renan testified in his article on the Assyrian adventure, Layard impressed the European public as a ‘‘young and daring traveler . . . in search of Nineveh,’’ driven by ‘‘an invincible faith in the hidden treasures of Koyounjik,’’ and amply rewarded when ‘‘a third Nineveh emerged from the earth.’’49 The modern archaeologist, then, unlike the smug connoisseur, was above all a field worker: he courted danger, explored high-risk zones, and broke new scientific ground. Science was turning into a high-voltage adventure that benefited humanity, and the crusty old numismatist was morphing into a modern-day Columbus of the underground. Literature quickly mythologized the type, most memorably, perhaps, in Hugo’s epic description of the Paris sewers in Les Mise´rables (1862). It is not Jean Valjean, but the well-named Bruneseau, whose exploits Hugo sings in accents worthy of a new Columbus. In a typical digression, Hugo recounts Bruneseau’s heroic expedition through the sewers, which seem about as forbidding to him as a foreign planet. ‘‘The sewer was bottomless,’’ and so hideous that ‘‘the idea of exploring these leprous regions did not even occur to the police.’’50 But the nastiness here signals the frontier of an inner terra incognita, a sort of uncanny domestic realm that no one has so far ventured to explore. ‘‘To tread this unknown, to sound out this shady realm, to set out for discoveries in this abyss, who would’ve dared?’’ And yet, in 1805, ‘‘someone stepped forth . . . the sewer found its Christopher Columbus’’ (325). Hugo informs us that Bruneseau was presented to Napoleon as ‘‘the most fearless man in your empire,’’ and that his trek though the sewers was portrayed as a risk-filled ‘‘voyage of discovery’’ whose veterans are ‘‘survivors’’ (326). The epic overtones of this scatological tour, in which sewage replaces soil as the medium of discovery, turns the city’s underbelly into a new frontier, a site where garbage and decay reveal their unsuspected cultural value. The heroic logic that Hugo outlines here will soon reach a new summit in Jules Verne’s scientific romance, Voyage to the Center of the Earth (1864), which consecrates the subterranean voyage as a popular myth and successfully transforms a learned exposition of geology

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:27

PS

PAGE 39

40 c h a p t e r 2

into a fast-paced volcanic narrative. The reckless professor leading the expedition, Lidenbrock, may remain a quirky figure, but he is also a quixotic force unleashed from the lab and propelled by the courage of his scientific convictions. When his companions begin to feel the heat, he proudly invokes his seafaring precursor to energize them: ‘‘when Columbus asked his crew for three more days to sight the new lands, his crew, though sick and horrified, nonetheless granted his request.’’51 Sewer workers, geologists, even botanists, it seems, can now lay claim to the heroic mantle, or so Edgar Quinet suggests in an inspired tribute to the naturalist who reconstructs past climates from fossilized plants: ‘‘with what cool nerves he leaps into the abyss! Look at him, he challenges the unknown. He plunges to the bottom of former oceans peopled by monsters, as if he were surrounded by a diver’s bell . . . he touches, he reads the floor of seas that no longer exist except in his thoughts.’’52

Art and Erudition The rebirth of the antiquary as a fearless explorer runs parallel with an intellectual revolution in which the two hostile spheres, erudition and belles lettres, at last come together to enrich each other. Literature becomes permeable to science, on the one hand, just as history begins to welcome material culture on the other. The disdain for erudite details among Enlightenment historians and the poetic ban on excess learning in polite letters broke down in the romantic period, which essentially carried out a revolution against the old regime of letters by cross-breeding distinct genres into new and hybrid poetic cocktails.53 The assimilation of learning in history and literature, blending high and low, abstract and concrete, rhetoric and reality, was one way of realizing this romantic subversion of genres. As writers in the nineteenth century became frantic collectors and stuffed their interiors with eclectic antiques bought at bargain prices, they also learned to extract the hidden poetry from this bric-a-brac, and to romance the junk heap—one thinks of Hugo’s sewer or barricade in Les Mise´rables and of Balzac’s magic antique shop in La Peau de chagrin.54 At the same time, romantic historians, turning away from abstract panoramas, plunged into the thickets of chronicles and archives and aspired to render the past vividly present by carefully reproducing its grain and atmosphere. It was literature, however, that took the lead: historians such as Macaulay, Thierry, and Michelet would all follow Scott’s pioneering efforts to use overlooked materials to resurrect history.

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:27

PS

PAGE 40

The Antiquarian 41

Novelists at times viewed this development as stooping to science (for example, Scott excusing his erudition), while historians, inversely, stated apologetically that they were learning from novelists (emulating Scott’s new paradigm). This can easily produce some terminological confusion and give the false impression that artists and scientists were somehow raiding each others’ arsenals, when both were in fact overcoming the same neoclassical purism and reclaiming potsherds from the antiquarians. The poets merely called it science, and the historians, following their lead, called it art. The upshot of this double encounter was in any case to blur, not just high and low, eloquence and evidence, but also art (fiction) and science (nonfiction)—the two branches of literary culture which hesitantly absorbed antiquarianism.55 The writer’s newfound inspiration in antiques was at first very timid and rarely went without a nervous disavowal. One of Wordsworth’s sonnets on ‘‘Roman antiquities’’ illustrates this resistance by contrasting the reactions of two figures, the Antiquarian and the Bard, to some newly unearthed Roman remains: While poring Antiquarians search the ground Upturned with curious pains, the Bard, a Seer, Takes fire:—The men that have been reappear.56 An imaginative encounter with the vestige enables the poet to extract its true meaning and to conjure up an animated image of the past. The antique is thus snatched from the hands of the dull-witted antiquarian, unable to strike sparks off it. Mme de Stae¨l is perhaps the author who best registers the slippage that occurs in the old clash between erudition and imagination in the period. She strives, in Corinne (1807), to attain a living communion with history and admits that ‘‘antiquity inspires an insatiable curiosity’’ but regrets that ‘‘the savants who merely strive to obtain a collection of names which they call history are surely deprived of all imagination.’’57 Despite the vogue for the picturesque, ruins do not actually speak anyone’s native tongue, and she shows one frustrated tourist in Rome complaining that these ‘‘bas-reliefs blackened by time’’ can be appreciated only ‘‘through erudite commentary’’ (146). In a discussion of the most proper subjects for painters, Corinne also rejects Greco-Roman motifs as too remote and alien to impress modern sensibilities: ‘‘how could genius,’’ she asks, ‘‘find inspiration in a labor where memory and erudition are so necessary?’’ (223). Nonetheless, Corinne, as

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:28

PS

PAGE 41

42 c h a p t e r 2

Oswald’s cicerone in Rome, softens this divide by insisting on ‘‘the pleasure, both erudite and poetic, to be derived from exploring [Rome],’’ which speaks ‘‘at once to the imagination and the intelligence’’ (122). These two poles, hostile but allied, lie in an uneasy intimacy here that Mme de Stae¨l cannot quiet theorize, but which she appears to resolve, like Wordsworth, by calling upon the imagination to snatch antiques from the dull clutches of scholars. To truly relive the past and ‘‘picture how the earth, in its infancy, appeared to the gaze of men’’ require ‘‘a continuous effort of the imagination’’ beyond their myopic capabilities (302). But this is not Mme de Stae¨l’s final word: in her influential report on Germany, De l’Allemagne (1813), a sort of romantic bomb dropped on the fortress of French classicism, she overcomes the residual classicism of Corinne and decisively reformulates this tension. German was, at this point, almost a synonym for erudite, and to promote German culture was at least implicitly to challenge the French allergy to erudition. It is appropriately in the passage on Winckelmann that she first radically revises the antinomy: ‘‘The imagination and erudition both equally lent their respective insights to Winckelmann; before him, it had been thought that they were mutually exclusive, but he showed that one was as necessary as the other to divine the Ancients . . . To enliven the stories and fictions that take place in bygone ages, it is even necessary that erudition should assist the imagination and make it, if possible, witness to what it should paint and contemporary with what it recounts.’’58 The pages devoted to German-language historians go on to develop this new alliance more fully. The shining portrait of the Swiss historian, Johannes von Mu¨ller (1752–1809), in particular, suggests that the modern interpenetration of poetry and learning has replaced their hostility. Mu¨ller is at once a ‘‘most savant historian’’ and ‘‘a true poet in his manner of depicting men and events’’ (2:59). Mme de Stae¨l admits to finding his learning a bit burdensome and instinctively tries to distinguish ‘‘the savant and the writer’’ but ends up acknowledging that it is precisely Mu¨ller’s stunning learning that makes his work so vivid: ‘‘his limitless erudition, far from harming his natural vivacity, was as it were the ground that launched his imagination, and the living truth of his tableaux rested on their scrupulous fidelity’’ (2:60). The very poison that had numbed the fancy now turns out to be its secret fountain: learning proves most vital, indeed, when Mu¨ller wishes to paint ‘‘event[s] truly worthy to be animated by the imagination . . . as if they had occurred yesterday’’ (2:61). This decisive shift is coextensive with Romanticism and leaves a profound mark on the writers of the period: the modern poetic sensibility finds

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:28

PS

PAGE 42

The Antiquarian

43

the things prized by antiquarians to be endlessly fascinating. When Hugo set out to map the landscape of the Rhine in 1838–39, the self-image he projected closely fused the figure of the poet and the antiquary: he hoped to harvest meditations that ‘‘appealed [both] to his antiquarian instinct and to his dreamy disposition.’’59 A ‘‘poet by vocation, an archeologist by sympathy’’ (6), his identity was double; in Notre-Dame de Paris, he would serve latemedieval Paris up as an imaginary fossil of equal interest ‘‘to the artist, the antiquarian, and the historian.’’60 Chateaubriand had already claimed that convents merited the double attention of ‘‘the antiquarian and the poet,’’61 and Sainte-Beuve had directly associated poetry with archaeology by unearthing the forgotten poets of the Renaissance: ‘‘if the memory of these other poems has been lost,’’ he wrote, ‘‘it would be a worthy task for the antiquarian to exhume them and expose them to the daylight.’’62 Like the rusty poets Sainte-Beuve dug up in his Tableau, and Gautier in his Grotesques, old things were acquiring an intrinsic poetic spark, a sort of age capital trapped beneath the mold, which poets were free to exploit if they dared to flout the conventional distaste for petty and trivial things.63 Antiques had begun to generate discourse, chronicles to spawn modern narratives, and useless details to produce reality effects. Was not Notre-Dame de Paris just one long dramatic gloss on a cryptic inscription, the word ananke, carved on the cathedral’s wall? But perhaps it is Aloysius Bertrand (whom Baudelaire would honor as the father of the prose poem) who best embodies the closure of the gap between the poet and the antiquarian: in the prose poems of Gaspard de la nuit, which set out to resurrect medieval Dijon, Bertrand saw himself in this figure: ‘‘I was erring amid these ruins like an antiquarian looking for Roman medals in the furrows of a castrum.’’64 The comic deviance of the antiquary seems to have resurfaced here as the tragic exceptionality of the poet. As the century progressed, learning would, in various ways, only become more integrated into the arts—in Jean-Louis Ge´roˆme’s archaeological paintings, in Flaubert’s antique novels, and in Leconte de Lisle’s archaizing erudite poetry—as the bar was set ever higher for credible recreations of the past. The discourse of history witnessed a parallel attempt at animation through the incorporation of marginal materials.65 Under pressure to rival the success of Scott’s novels, historians, such as Macaulay, tried to renew historiography by redefining it as ‘‘a compound of poetry and philosophy’’— two ‘‘elements’’ he called ‘‘hostile’’ and ‘‘professedly separated.’’ Concrete details were needed to enliven the sweep of Enlightenment history and to elevate the past from an abstract illustration into a spectacle of lived experi-

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:29

PS

PAGE 43

44 c h a p t e r 2

ence. Prosper de Barante agreed; the author famous for his pseudonaive modern chronicle, the History of the Dukes of Burgundy, argued in the important programmatic preface that the contemporary reader wished to commune directly with the past and to acquire ‘‘that intimate knowledge one has of things one has seen and heard in real life.’’66 Only the recreation of lived experience could ‘‘remain in our memory’’ and leave behind ‘‘those animated impressions that . . . the fictive heroes of epic, drama, and novel stamp on our minds’’ (14). Attacking the cold speculative histories of the Enlightenment, Barante wrote that ‘‘abstraction has robbed them of their living circumstances; they are deductions, and no longer narrations.’’ The true historian ‘‘favors painting over analysis,’’ since the analyst only ‘‘replaces the jovial and picturesque aspect of a country by the exact lines of a geographical map’’ (11–14).67 The poets had here preceded the historians, who had so far neglected, in Macaulay’s words, ‘‘to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb’’ and refused ‘‘to rummage their oldfashioned wardrobes.’’ These tasks ‘‘properly belong[] to the historian’’ but ‘‘have been appropriated by the historical novelist.’’68 Barante’s poetics of history are based on the same grievance of literary dispossession and ambition to ‘‘restore to history itself the appeal that the historical novel has borrowed from it.’’69 He praises the modern novel for its ‘‘fascination with historical matters’’ and for exposing not just ‘‘the private life of a people’’ but also the ‘‘secret memoirs of its public life’’ (34). If the goal of history was to impart a ‘‘vivid impression’’ through ‘‘the spectacle of the facts [les faits]’’ then it was clear by the 1820s that ‘‘the framework of a novel could support more truth than the historical genre’’ (24). The novel, by mediating between learning and belles lettres, had successfully enacted a fusion of levels, so that Hugo could praise Scott for ‘‘blending the minute exactitude of the chronicles, the majestic grandeur of history and the pressing interest of the novel.’’70 The historian, to follow suit, would have to bridge the gap between ‘‘philosophy’’ and ‘‘poetry,’’ Macaulay felt, and ‘‘invest with the reality of human flesh and blood’’ 71 its allegorical cardboard figures.72 Scott’s prestige and emulation by both novelists and historians was such that a hybrid genre of sorts was born—not just the historical novel, but also the novelized history. Both pointed asymptotically to a hypothetical hybrid type that would annul their differences.73 Fact and fiction, science and rhetoric, jointly formed the basis of the new romantic history: ‘‘every historical composition,’’ Thierry wrote, ‘‘is a work of art as much as of erudition: the

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:29

PS

PAGE 44

The Antiquarian 45

attention to form and style is no less necessary there than the critique of facts.’’74 Macaulay’s point was identical.75 Nor was he alone among the historians to acknowledge Scott’s role as a catalyst for their own projects. Even Guizot, who stayed aloof of romantic resurrection, cites Quentin Durward (1825) if only to contest Scott’s depiction of French history—a gesture that shows just how powerful Scott’s nonfiction effects were.76 Augustin Thierry cannot praise Scott enough for restoring the concrete truth of experience to history. His first historical masterpiece, L’Histoire de la conqueˆte de l’Angleterre par les Normands (1825), in which he first deploys the two-race thesis of the origin of social classes (Normans oppressing Saxons) which will structure his model of French history (Franks dominating Celts), can be viewed as a lengthy nonfictional rewrite of Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). Scott, after all, saw history dualistically as a continuous tension between progressive and reactionary forces, and the novel in question pits the gruff but victorious Normans against a residual Saxon resistance.77 Thierry’s epic narrative of the Norman Conquest adopts Scott’s schema of racial struggle. He even reviewed Scott’s bestseller in the Censeur Europe´en in 1820 while he was working on the Histore de la conqueˆte.78 Judging Scott to be a ‘‘man of genius,’’ he praises Ivanhoe for reclaiming a distorted past and presenting ‘‘a true image of events disfigured by modern phraseology.’’79 And this breakthrough occurs in a work of fiction: ‘‘strange to say . . . it’s in a novel that he sought to shed light on this great historical question.’’ Hugo, in his 1823 review, echoed this tribute and the motif of ‘‘the novel truer than history,’’ arguing that ‘‘few historians are as faithful as this novelist.’’ Thierry deems Scott’s fiction to be superior to the history of the philosophes because it ‘‘presents living and naked this Norman Conquest that the philosophical narrators of the previous century, more false than the uneducated chroniclers of the middle ages, had similarly buried under the banal formulas of succession, government, and state measures’’ (121).80 Like Macaulay, Thierry finds that Scott’s use of antiquarian trivia (such as dress, customs, dwellings) allows him to depict more truly and to surpass a bloodless universalism. Thierry’s own decision to use archaic orthography is probably what classical readers found most jarring in his prose. In the preface to his important manifesto for a new history, the Lettres sur l’histoire de France (1820), he justifies spelling ‘‘Frankish names in the Teutonic manner’’ as a way to ‘‘grant the names of the men who fill the early periods of our history their true physiognomy.’’81 The well-known names of French royal history become unfamiliar and alien: Clovis becomes Chlodowig, and Clotaire is Chlother. This

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:30

PS

PAGE 45

46 c h a p t e r 2

odd spelling stressed the ‘‘barbarian’’ origin of the early Frankish kings, an idea Thierry developed further in his gory rewrite of Gregory of Tours, the Re´cits des temps me´rovingiens (1833–37),82 where the original spelling exposed ‘‘the true signification of Frankish names,’’ particularly the word ‘‘Frank’’ itself, which ‘‘modern writers have agreed to give . . . the meaning of free men.’’83 But this gloss was just an idealized self-image that the more polished medieval nobles had projected onto their ancestors; its twelfth-century sense of wealth, power, and political importance distorted its ‘‘primitive meaning . . . proud, fearless, ferocious’’ (64). Thierry’s historiographical ‘‘revolution’’ marks the reconciliation between the speculative and antiquarian strands of history; he consciously set out to overcome ‘‘the divorce between the work of collecting original documents and the faculty of understanding and expressing their profound meaning.’’84 Like Scott, his model, he sought to bring the past alive by including marginal materials, but as a nonfiction writer he could push his rejection of moral and poetic codes further and portray his Franks as much more spinechillingly evil than Scott’s Normans. Scott saw his implicit reader seated snugly at the fireside and unable to imagine ‘‘that his own ancestors led a very different life from himself ’’ and might ‘‘have hung him up at his own door without any form of trial.’’85 Scott wanted to ‘‘familiarize’’ this strange world, and opted against ‘‘writing the dialogue of the piece in Anglo-Saxon or in Norman-French.’’86 He toned down the cruelty since it was ‘‘grievous’’ to see the barons whose ‘‘stand against the crown’’ had founded ‘‘the liberties of England’’ acting like ‘‘dreadful oppressors’’ (242). For Thierry, however, the shock of alterity was precisely the point: his mission was to restore the foreignness of the past and to flesh out the bloodless phantoms under which past historians hidden the brutal Frankish conquest. The feudal chroniclers had ‘‘mixed up the brutal reign and violent state of the conquest with the more stable regime and settled customs of the feudal establishment.’’87 But these medieval retouches paled beside the glaring anachronisms of the ‘‘monarchical historians,’’ who had modeled ‘‘the royalty of the first conquerors . . . on the vast and powerful kingships of the seventeenth century’’ (ix). The freshness of Thierry’s approach can be gauged by Guizot’s appreciative reaction: ‘‘There is only one work, which, in my opionion, contains the characteristic of barbarism, stamped in all its energy: The History of the Conquest of England by the Normans, of M. Thierry, the only book wherein the motives, tendencies, and impulses which actuate men in a social condition bordering on barbarism are felt and reproduced with a really Homeric faith-

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:30

PS

PAGE 46

The Antiquarian 47

fulness.’’88 Taking his cue from Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs,89 Thierry excelled in depicting the Franks as a brutish and disorderly hoard: ‘‘the elite batallions were composed of the least civilized and Christian peoples among the Franks . . . the bulk of the troops was a hoard of barbarians in the full sense of the word.’’ He painted the warriors in graphic detail—their ‘‘drooping moustaches,’’ their ‘‘hair raised in a plume on their heads,’’ how they ‘‘thrust their axe in the face of the enemy.’’90 Thierry’s achievement, fusing art and erudition, fact and fiction, ideas and the picturesque, brilliantly executes the romantic program of subverting genres and announces the coming of Michelet’s total history. His most radical innovation was no doubt to foreground the deep alterity of the past and to demolish the fiction that a universal human nature might make the past transparent. It was in confronting the archive (verbal, documentary, material) that he learned to explode the hazy anachronisms of rhetorical history and expose the past’s difference. Nothing illustrates this epistemological break better than his moral portrait of the early Franks, especially his depiction of Fredegonde, the evil Frankish queen whose thirst for power and revenge unifies the six Merovingian tales. The work ends with an appropriately bloody anecdote meant to leave a lasting impression of horror: Fredegonde orders an upstart servant, a ‘‘parvenu of the sixth century,’’ to be tortured and killed, but after a botched attempt the compliant king ‘‘resolved to heal him to make him capable of enduring the torments of a prolonged agony until the end.’’ When gangrene threatens, the queen rapidly invents a ‘‘bizarre torture’’ to satisfy her cruelty ‘‘while there is still some life left to squeeze out of him’’ (355–56). This final note of horror of course serves the book’s liberal program well, but more crucially it stresses the Franks’ deep alterity, the opacity and horror of a ‘‘Merovingian night’’ that only an archaeological effort can restore. Thierry’s own restitution seems dated, it is true, by modern standards (it is stylized, simplistic, and very thinly documented), but his use of horror provides a brilliant rhetorical shortcut for revealing a forgotten past; horror is archaeology minus the work: its shock immediately rends the tissue of time and brings us face-to-face with pure difference. Brushing past Scott’s fears of a ‘‘dryasdust’’ past and Carlyle’s ‘‘grey void,’’ Thierry vindicates archaeological writing as a voyage into the nation’s darkness.

................. 17036$

$CH2

09-26-08 11:04:30

PS

PAGE 47

three The Archaeological Turn

After seventeen centuries beneath its blanket of ashes, Pompeii seemed to offer an ideal occasion to behold the past in its irreducible alterity, as it really was, unchanged by supervening layers of settlement and interpretation. But the gaze that first confronted Pompeii was of course far from neutral: it filtered what it saw through an idealized image of antiquity conveyed by literary culture. Bulwer-Lytton had noted the special problem that went with transposing Walter Scott’s historical novel to antiquity, stating that depicting the Middle Ages was ‘‘easy in comparison with the attempt to portray a far earlier and more unfamiliar period’’ since antiquity was at once more remote and deceptively familiar from the classroom.1 To depict Pompeii implied a double challenge: fleshing out an ill-known alien culture and undoing a deep-set literary myth. Archaeology, with its shift in focus from textual to material vestiges, is what made this defamiliarization possible. If the neoclassical gaze had blocked out what was alien to its aesthetic ideal and extracted what conformed to it, the archaeological gaze now proceeded inversely by replacing artifacts in their original setting. Rather than extract treasures from a worthless matrix, it identified their value with their cultural setting, their uses, their stories, their informational content, all of which meant restoring a network of intangible associations around the naked artifact. Intrinsic value gave way to a complex form of value that vestiges derived from participating in a new intangible entity, ‘‘civilization,’’ invented in the late eighteenth century. Civilization thus emerged as the invisible but true object of excavation. This radical redefinition of the antique from artwork to archaeological

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:23

PS

PAGE 48

The Archaeological Turn 49

vestige required a series of focal shifts. After abandoning the picturesque surface, the gaze still had to shed its textual bias and learn to privilege material over textual traces. Next, it replaced artifacts in their cultural context, often physically, as when visitors at Pompeii desired frescoes, tools, and household implements to be left in situ. Only then could the buried city itself, so far treated as a mere shell, emerge into view as an object of curiosity. No longer an inert support, the city in turn yielded new meaning to the artifacts embedded in it and itself became a tangible figure for Roman civilization. Once this material framework was in place, it was possible to imagine the inhabitants return and animate the lifeless shell, but this also required unearthing the everyday life in the exposed dwellings. Finally, integrating these levels of focus (artifact, city, civilization, people), a synoptic view of life in antiquity came into view, the animated image of Roman civilization made present in a face-to-face relation. The illusion of resurrection was the final object of the new gaze.

From Text to Artifact The perception of artifacts was clouded not just by aesthetic bias but also by a deep-seated prejudice in favor of the written word. The modern European image of antiquity derived so greatly from the literary heritage that the material culture to which antiquarians had long sought to draw attention often seemed, to eighteenth-century eyes, a trivial distraction or laughable fetishism. The letter idealized, the trace debased. If the early humanists had taken an interest in ancient coins and inscriptions, their precocious erudition rarely had an impact on the writing of history, which for the most part remained a bellettristic exercise; such was the authority of ancient writers, indeed, that scholars long hesitated to confront their claims with the material record. History and antiquarianism, despite some overlaps, remained on separate tracks until around 1800. Even antiquarians long exhibited a sort of verbal bias, favoring coins and inscriptions over iconographic evidence and often adducing their evidence only to confirm or invalidate classic works. The great Benedictine savant, Dom Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741), author of the imposing ten-volume Antiquite´ explique´e et repre´sente´e en figures (1719–24), is often credited with founding a scientific iconography and freeing artifacts from the domination of texts;2 but as much as his text merely accompanies his great collection of engravings of ancient gods, heroes, weap-

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:23

PS

PAGE 49

50

chapter 3

ons, and costumes, these images also just serve to illustrate his own seamless narrative survey of ancient myths and customs. ‘‘When the images are lacking on certain subjects, I don’t refrain from explaining these subjects so as to present a continuous account.’’3 Which has priority? For Montfaucon, iconography clearly remains an auxiliary to history; the images help us ‘‘enter into the thoughts of historians’’ and attach visual profiles to the names of actors and sites that might otherwise remain empty signs (1:2–3). Another telling index of his verbal bias is his attitude to an engraving of Mithras that Pietro Sancto Bartoli allegedly based on the written ‘‘account of Flaminius Vacca.’’ Were that true, Montfaucon suggests, ‘‘it matters little,’’ since Vacca described the statue so well that one can easily paint it ‘‘without fear of error’’ (2:369). The next major step in the autonomization of the artifact was taken by the comte de Caylus (1692–1765), whose Recueil d’antiquite´s (1752–67), while similar to Montfaucon’s, greatly expanded his treatment of nonliterary antiquity (Egyptian, Etruscan, Gallic) and reduced the relative weight of philology in the act of classing, reading, and appreciating antiques. When Charles Lenormant sketched the early history of archaeology in the inaugural issue of the Revue arche´ologique (1844), this emancipation from philology was his major theme. Caylus surpassed Montfaucon in his view because he had a more direct and intimate relationship with his artifacts (publishing only pieces in his own collection rather than unreliable engravings of works he had not always seen himself ) and relied more on stylistic evidence than on literary sources.4 The true archaeologist, for Lenormant, lived with monuments, not books, and learned to date and classify antiques by comparing them to each other and by establishing a relative chronology of styles; he even argues that philology was accidental to Winckelmann’s genius and that Quatreme`re de Quincy professed a lifelong ‘‘indifference to philological erudition.’’5 The hot topic of the day, the oriental origin of Greek civilization, was beyond the scope of philology and could only ever be resolved ‘‘thanks . . . to the efforts of archeology’’ (12). In a speech on the state of archaeology that Ludovic Vitet gave to the Socie´te´ des antiquaires de Normandie three years later, he made the same point about the obscure ‘‘relations between the West and the Orient from the sixth century to the crusades,’’ affirming that ‘‘whoever only considered written documents’’ would never ‘‘guess that there existed relations between the bazaars of Byzantium and the markets of Cologne, between the convents of Thessaly and the cloisters of Auvergne and Poitou.’’6 When Georges Perrot, thirty-six years later, surveyed the progress of archaeology from Winckelmann to the present, he underscored how

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:24

PS

PAGE 50

The Archaeological Turn 51

greatly its modern history differed from the logocentric orientation of the Renaissance humanists; the modern archaeologist had to look beyond texts and inscriptions to every kind of ‘‘imprint left on matter by the men of the past,’’ and there were obviously many nations, such as ‘‘the Etruscans, whose entire literature has perished and who only speak to posterity through the monuments of their art.’’7 Archaeology defined itself, then, from 1750 to 1850, as an autonomous discipline by claiming its own space beside philology and often against the latter’s contemptuous dismissal of ‘‘the illiterates of history.’’8 The final consecration of a nontextual approach to the past came with the acknowledgment of the prehistoric existence of man, an idea long resisted for religious reasons in order to maintain the six-thousand-year biblical chronology since creation. The pioneering French prehistorian, Boucher de Perthes (1788–1868), had campaigned for the recognition of ‘‘antediluvian man’’ since 1838 and had published his findings in the three volumes of his Antiquite´s celtiques et ante´diluviennes from 1847 to 1864. His ideas had at first met with strong resistance in the Acade´mie des sciences, but when a delegation of English scientists visited his collection in 1859 and proclaimed the authenticity of the prehistoric stone tools he had found in diluvial strata that also contained bones from extinct animals, prehistory became an official scientific fact and a nonverbal approach to the past an obvious necessity.9 The decisive evidence for prehistory, itself necessarily material, was a piece of mammoth ivory with the image of a mammoth engraved on it—proving the coexistence of humans and extinct mammals—found by Edouard Lartet and Henry Christy at La Madeleine in 1864.10 It is worth citing Boucher de Perthes’s apologetic stance in 1847, when he admitted that his findings might ‘‘at first sight seem minimal’’ since ‘‘here [there are] no inscriptions, no medals, no bas-reliefs, no statues and no elegant vases’’ but only ‘‘bones and roughly polished flintstones.’’11 But Boucher proudly insisted that a bone was worth far more to him than any precious vase if only it ‘‘proved a fact’’ and stressed that when ‘‘dealing with a people whose very existence is in doubt, every vestige becomes history’’ (5). He embodies a radical intellectual opening to a class of traces that no verbal or artistic value had previously redeemed as worthy objects of inquiry and as such completes the decisive epistemological shift that made professional archaeology possible. ‘‘Nothing should be disdained, nothing rejected,’’ he wrote, speaking of prehistoric burial sites: ‘‘there, among those poor utensils, you find their entire history, their entire religion’’ (5). And E´lise´e Reclus, speaking of the Swiss lake dwellings from the stone and bronze age found in the 1850s, added that these ‘‘remains also

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:24

PS

PAGE 51

52 c h a p t e r 3

speak their own language, no less eloquent than that of the great monuments left by the Roman conquerors.’’12 The excavations at Pompeii were hardly the cause of this new sensibility to nonverbal evidence, but they help measure its progress and expose the subtle tensions between mute and audible traces. Observers at Pompeii were often blind to the wealth of cultural data its artifacts encoded. When Chateaubriand said that ‘‘one could get a better idea of the domestic history of the Roman people and the state of Roman civilization during a few walks in restored Pompeii than by reading all the works of antiquity,’’ he was not voicing a majority opinion.13 Such was the imprint of the classics and the Bible that for much of the nineteenth century excavations in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Asia Minor proceeded through textual filters. The case of Heinrich Schliemann, searching for Troy in Asia Minor in the 1870s, strolling up and down the hillsides with Homer as his guide is emblematic.14 But Schliemann’s behavior seems less eccentric when we see E. Egger forecast this very gesture in the Revue arche´ologique in 1846, inviting his readers to ‘‘study the battlefields of the Iliad, Homer in hand,’’ on the premise that some historic landscapes are so indelibly marked by glorious memories that there is ‘‘not a hill, not a spring, not a stream, in the space of a few leagues, that doesn’t have its name and legend.’’15 Emile Botta and Henry Layard’s digs in Mesopotamia in the 1840s were no less textually marked since the public looked to them for proof of biblical history.16 When Adrien de Longpe´rier mused about the reasons for the great public interest in Nineveh (Botta’s Assyrian museum opened to great acclaim in the Louvre in 1847, and Layard’s shipments went on display at the British Museum), he concluded that it was due neither to the city’s historical impact nor to its imposing ruins but to the ‘‘very short story of Jonah’’ which had ‘‘sufficed to make the name of Nineveh known to all nations.’’17 If Longpe´rier was above such sensationalism, he could still marvel that a bas-relief from Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad had furnished ‘‘new proof . . . of the veracity of Herodotus’ [account]’’ of Bablyon’s construction. Renan approaches Egyptian archaeology no differently, also relating monuments to texts: ‘‘the sight of the monuments, Herodotus and Manethon read on site, . . . have dissipated my doubts.’’18 Many of the official missions financed by the French government—to Greece (1830, 1843), Asia Minor (1833–36, 1861), Persia, (1840–41), Palestine (1850), Macedonia (1861), Phoenicia (1861)—turned in great part on making a rich harvest of inscriptions for scholars, even if the main political objective was to enrich the Louvre and boost French prestige. Before the age of permanent missions

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:25

PS

PAGE 52

The Archaeological Turn

53

abroad, most efforts centered on quickly capturing the mobile archaeological capital embodied in texts and artworks. It should be added that language itself, quite apart from any proverbal cultural bias, also appeared the selfevident key to unlocking the past at a time when many oriental languages and scripts were being spectacularly deciphered: J.-F. Champollion had decoded hieroglyphics in 1822, and Henry Rawlinson cuneiform in the 1830s and 1840s. Concurrently, Euge`ne Burnouf showed how the Zend manuscripts brought back from India by Anquetil-Duperron could be read. The notion that language was the precise imprint of a civilization, embodying the immaterial genius of a nation, as Herder, paving the way for romantic nationalism, had suggested, made it the privileged key in efforts to reconstruct vanished worlds. Gaston Boissier could thus invoke Cuvier’s feats to illustrate the linguistic breakthroughs of modern orientalism: these decoders merited a place beside the great restorer of extinct fauna for ‘‘giving us the key to these ancient lost languages . . . and thus making us know the nations that spoke them.’’19 It would of course be utopian to argue that archaeology should ideally achieve a wholly nontextual relation to the past, as if the legitimacy of the discipline depended on an ideal of purity that could only impoverish it by excluding a class of evidence. Thus Lernormant, despite his critique of philology, admitted in his programmatic article of 1844 that future discoveries depended on ‘‘an intimate alliance of archeology and philology’’ and counseled aspiring archaeologists to learn at least Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Phoenician, Chaldaic, Ethiopian, and Coptic, along, of course, with the modern languages of scholarship, and only then go on to tackle Sanskrit and Zend.20 At stake, then, in the big picture, was less a massive rejection of philology than the opening of an intellectual space where nonverbal traces could draw equal attention. At Pompeii, too, the reflex was to reach out for texts, and countless reports begin by retelling the story of the death of Pliny the Elder who commanded a fleet at Misenum in 79 c.e. and died trying to rescue refugees from the sea. This exemplary tale is reported by his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who stayed on at Misenum with his mother, in a letter to Tacitus many years later (106–7 c.e.).21 The first painters who sought to recapture the catastrophe often chose this episode to lend historical dignity to their works. Thus Angelica Kauffmann painted a Pliny the Younger and His Mother at Misenum in 1785, and Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes an Eruption of Vesuvius on Aug. 24, 79 A.D. in 1813 depicting the death of the uncle. The materiality of Pompeii was only to emerge slowly from beneath the lava of classical texts. Stendhal

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:25

PS

PAGE 53

54 c h a p t e r 3

testifies to this eye-opening shift from words to things during his visit: ‘‘one has the sense of being transported into antiquity, and, so long as one has the habit of trusting only one’s eyes, instantly knows it better than any scholar.’’22 No ancient text could impart as much information as quickly as the sight of Pompeii, which for Ernest Breton was ‘‘no longer that vague, remote, uncertain antiquity . . . of books, commentators, and antiquarians.’’23 This archaeological topos would soon solidify into a cliche´, one Gautier would invoke later in his Pompeian tale to convey how the casual tourist could effortlessly ‘‘penetrate at a glance . . . all these domestic details that historians neglect and whose secret civilizations bury with them.’’24 Nonetheless, the textual bias did not vanish overnight, and a transitional state between literary and material vestiges can be located in the materiality of scrolls, papyri, and palimpsests, which formed a hybrid class of objects between words and things. The high hopes invested in the carbonized scrolls found at Herculaneum are telling in this respect, while still testifying to the disproportional value accorded to textual evidence. Mme de Stae¨l echoes these hopes when she affirms that ‘‘a few burnt pages of manuscript . . . are all that remains to help us interpret the unhappy victims’’ (301). Implicit in this claim is the idea that only texts can unlock the past. A slightly different fixation on the scrolls animates the learned report that the British paleographers Drummond and Walpole published in 1810. While admitting that the hopes of finding a lost work of Livy in the burnt papyri found at Resina in 1752 had quickly been dashed, they still placed their epigraphic labors under the sign of a much needed return to classical studies in an age when ‘‘the revolutionary system’’ originating in France had led to the ‘‘neglect of ancient literature’’—and to the eclipse of the good sense of Racine, Boileau, and Fe´nelon.25 The ‘‘taste for classical literature’’ that they illustrated was a timetested antidote against the love of ‘‘political confusion, or military despotism, or barbarous pomp’’ in imperial France. The early literary resurrections of Pompeii as a rule center on the fantasy of a rediscovered text, as if only a lost manuscript could give voice to the enigmatic ruins of antiquity. The desire to unearth statues went along with a desire to unearth texts. An anonymous novella from 1775, Le Sacre de Numa, ou E´gerie, is thus subtitled A Story Found in the Ruins of Herculaneum and purports to be translated from a fragmentary Latin manuscript with no ending since ‘‘the lava of Vesuvius has entirely devoured the rest of the manuscript.’’ When Etienne-Franc¸ois de Lantier published an imitation of l’abbe´ Barthe´lemy’s famous Anacharsis in 1797, the Voyages d’Ante´nor, the subtitle

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:26

PS

PAGE 54

The Archaeological Turn

55

also proclaimed it a Greek Manuscript Found in Herculaneum.26 The content obviously has no bearing on the city’s drama, but the frame story is more elaborate and involves the narrator’s interest in a seemingly worthless manuscript kept at Portici which he later decodes in Paris. The manuscript is doubly archaeological: first, as an excavated object, and second, as a mine in which scholars can ‘‘acquire . . . some ideas about ancient manners and customs’’ (5). With Maisony de Laure´al’s 1837 Heraclead, or Herculaneum Buried Beneath the Lava of Vesuvius, the gap between text and artifact narrows. This false Latin epic of the catastrophe, allegedly translated from the historian Lucius Annaeus Florus, is not just an exhumed manuscript but itself unearths an image of the buried city and thereby conflates the work’s theme with its vehicle. Laure´al purports to have found the manuscript in the Vatican library in 1812–13 and predictably compares its archival ‘‘burial’’ to that of the lava-covered city before presenting his own labor of translation as a parallel form of excavation: ‘‘I resolved to translate the Heracleias . . . and to complete as it were the very slow exhumation of Herculaneum.’’27 Text and city have here traded places: Pompeii is no longer a mere cache for lost masterpieces, but a lost world to which Florus’s epic gives us access again. The once autonomous text is now valuable because it helps to resurrect the ruins that contained it. Still, a clear textual bias remains, as Laure´al’s claim to ‘‘fill a lacuna in epic literature’’ demonstrates, as if his work’s chief merit had been to mend a fragmentary literary heritage. The superiority of the written trace rested in part on its ideal and indestructible character, more durable than stone, an old argument that Hugo had updated for the post-Gutenberg age in his maxim ‘‘ceci tuera cela,’’ ‘‘this will kill that,’’ or the printing press will supplant the cathderal. But despite the merits of Hugo’s campaign to protect France’s heritage, he was perhaps wrong to state so categorically that literature outlasted monuments. Not only was archaeology becoming more adept at reading the most mutilated ruins, texts were also irreducibly material and perishable. Mme de Stae¨l testifies to this sense of textual fragility before the Pompeian scrolls: ‘‘when passing by these ashes that art has the power to revive, one hesitates to breathe for fear that a little air might disperse this dust on which noble ideas are perhaps still imprinted.’’28 Textual traces often seemed the most vulnerable. Winckelmann had to lament the careless loss of bronze inscriptions at Herculaneum. Renan, in turn, reported that he had been wise to copy every inscription in Phoenicia right away, since the locals, suspecting him to be after treasure, often went on to mutilate the stones he had studied.29 Texts are evidently not purely

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:27

PS

PAGE 55

56 c h a p t e r 3

ideal objects but can also perish and may resurface, like statues, broken, decayed, and stained with ash. It is in such terms that Carlyle saw the modern publication of Jocelyn of Brakelond’s twelfth-century chronicle: a work ‘‘unwrapped from its thick cerements,’’ exposed to ‘‘the common daylight,’’ but still encrusted in ‘‘Monk-Latin’’ and ‘‘covered deeper than Pompeii with the lava-ashes and inarticulate wreck of seven hundred years!’’30 Moreover, surviving parchments were often literally the site of textual excavations, as palimpsests began to reveal their dormant textual strata to scholars. Thomas De Quincey voiced the modern fascination over such textual archaeology in the ‘‘Palimpsest’’ section of Suspiria de Profundis (1845), writing that ‘‘the same roll has served as a conservatory for three separate generations of flowers and fruits . . . the Greek tragedy, the monkish legend, the knightly romance.’’31 Texts, then, were not only perishable like stones, but were often themselves a physical stratification of periods. The text’s newfound materiality reflected the parallel insight that monumental vestiges only became more, not less, eloquent with age and decay. The archaeologist was precisely the reader whose text came into being through erosion, whose record was generated by violence and usage, the noncoded script with which history marks matter. If Hugo’s cathedral-book was perishable, the ruin-book engendered by its decay could expect a much longer life. The inverted Hugolian formula, cela tuera ceci, might express this tendency to materialize the letter and textualize the ruin. The closing gap between words and things that marks the advent of archaeology finds a precise illustration in an anecdote that Louis-Se´bastien Mercier relates in the Tableau de Paris—a work that itself marks the transition from the Enlightenment to the age of archaeology. He reports on the ‘‘curious work’’ of the Perrier brothers, who, much like the Encyclopedists, wished to record an image of all the modern arts and crafts, but one which would take the form of an actual material record consisting of scaled-down replicas (1 foot ⳱ 1 inch) of modern tools and machines easy to store and preserve. This idea of a cultural heritage communicated directly through objects reminds Mercier of all the technical secrets antiquity has failed to pass on: ‘‘If the Ancients had had this foresight, we wouldn’t be here groaning over the loss of countless techniques that have had to be rediscovered ever so slowly over the centuries . . . we might have found, in a small chest buried beneath the ground at Herculeaneum, or elsewhere, the inventions of all the ingenious nations that have preceded us.’’32 Mercier of course misses the point here that Herculaneum itself was such a chest,33 but his timely insight that things can convey much more than verbal

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:27

PS

PAGE 56

The Archaeological Turn 57

representations marks the dawn of archaeology: ‘‘the written Encyclopedia will always be vague, narrow, and insufficient when compared to the object itself which strikes both the eye and the understanding’’ (1:618).34 By the mid-nineteenth century, this crucial revaluation of the nondiscursive object had become an archaeological norm. In his programmatic ‘‘On the Study of Archeology’’ (1850), Charles Newton starts from the premise that ‘‘the record of the Human Past is not all contained in printed books,’’ but is also ‘‘graven on the rock of Egypt’’ and ‘‘embodied in all the heirlooms of religions, of races, of families’’ (1). A purely material history of course became indispensible with the recognition of prehistory around 1860. At the same time, historians inversely turned more willingly to iconographic and archaeological sources. A telling index of this shift is Napoleon III’s project to write a History of Julius Caesar, for which he not only engaged a team of experts to assist him35 but also commissioned digs to identify the site of Ale´sia where Casear’s last battle against Vercinge´torix had taken place.36 A special body, the Commission de la topographie des Gaules, had been created in 1858 to map the territory of pre-Roman Gaul, and it financed the digs at Alise-Sainte-Reine, conducted from 1860 to 1865, as well as at Mont-Beuvray, the site of Bibracte, the capital of Caesar’s Eduen allies, starting in 1867. The commission also sponsored a few major archaeological expeditions related to Napoleon’s work in progress: Le´on Heuzey went to Macedonia in 1861 to study the maneuvers of Caesar’s army and the site of the battle of Pharsalus in Thessaly. The same year, Georges Perrot’s mission to Asia Minor aimed to provide the first full and reliable transcription of Augustus’s testament at Ancyra as well as to explore Galatia, a state founded by Gaulish invaders in the third century b.c.e.37 Louis-Napoleon’s recourse to archaeology to buttress his work did not end there: he went so far as to engage a graduate of the E´cole polytechnique to build replicas of ancient arms and siege machines, including a life-size trireme that was launched on the Seine on May 24, 1861, before the imperial couple, in one of the earliest uses of experimental archaeology ever recorded. If the emperor’s ideological aim was to legitimize his reign, the work was nonetheless a serious scholarly effort based on open discussions with his collaborators, a fresh harvest of evidence, and a passion for archaeology.38 As Me´rime´e reported in 1861: ‘‘the emperor . . . has become an accomplished archaeologist. He has spent three and a half hours on the mountain, in the most terrible sunlight, examining the vestiges of Caesar’s siege and reading his Commentaries.’’39 The emperor clearly wanted his work to measure up to current standards, and rather than fall back on reinterpret-

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:28

PS

PAGE 57

58 c h a p t e r 3

ing classical texts actually commissioned major archaeological works— excavations and expeditions—to produce fresh data on ancient Gaul and Rome. This historiographical revolution went hand in hand with a new appreciation for the artistic record and a willingness to study iconographic sources, as Francis Haskell has shown, singling out Jules Michelet, John Ruskin, Jacob Burckhardt, Hippolyte Taine, and Johan Huizinga as pioneers in an iconophilic historiography.40 Burckhardt believed that ‘‘the most secret beliefs and ideals [of an age] are transmitted to posterity perhaps only through the medium of art.’’41 Ruskin famously claimed in the Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) that architecture was the central form of cultural memory: ‘‘we may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her.’’42 Turning Hugo on his head, Ruskin affirmed that monuments embodied memories far better than texts: ‘‘how many pages of doubtful record might we not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! . . . We have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled fragments of her sculpture than even from her sweet singers or soldier historians’’ (178). The emergence of nonverbal evidence, however, comes at a price: the mute vestige has to be made to speak, to yield intelligible discourse, and to reconfirm, thereby, the place of logos in the order of knowledge. Archaeology, then, would be an updated type of philology capable of rephrasing the most obscure traces of the past; there is, however, a crucial difference: its discourse has first passed through the silence of the object and resembles the parole muette, the mute speech that for Jacques Rancie`re marks the modern regime of representation from Hugo to Flaubert, and which, instead of imposing words on things, captures the silent murmur of the world in a speech that cancels all hierarchies.43 Archaeology may force stones to speak, but to some extent this speech remains originary and authentic, irreducibly attached to the material vestige, emanating, as it were, from the thing itself, with the scientist’s role limited to amplifying its message. Thus Ludovic Vitet (Me´rime´e’s predecessor as Inspector of Historical Monuments) wrote about NotreDame de Noyon that ‘‘we will interrogate the monument [and] ask it to tell us its own story.’’44 This transmission of mute speech is perhaps most evident in natural history, where the scientist, a ‘‘new type of antiquarian,’’ in Cuvier’s words, has to confront a world untainted by written chronicles, unless, of course, he accepts the biblical creation story.45 The fossils and sediments are instead called upon to tell their own version of genesis, leading Quinet, in La Cre´ation, to marvel that ‘‘there is no grass so poor that it cannot tell us the story

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:28

PS

PAGE 58

The Archaeological Turn 59

of its odyssey across the cataclysms of geological periods.’’46 In the ‘‘infinite annals’’ of nature, even a ‘‘flower [that] has survived . . . can today recount the annals of a whole lost world’’ (40). The petrified relics of remote geological eras are witnesses speaking in an alien tongue: ‘‘plants become the archives of the past, living inscriptions that tell the story of revolutions swallowed up under the primitive sea’’ (41). The earth’s strata are legible ‘‘pages [which] have been scrambled . . . during the convulsions of the globe,’’ calling for a new type of philologist to apply ‘‘the spirit of criticism to the alpine masses’’ and ‘‘put the mingled pages and chapters of the book of the globe back in their place’’ (26). The speaking vestige arguably constitutes a new type of object, a hybrid monument, at once text and vestige, occupying a fuzzy zone between verbal and material traces. Texts could be studied as archaeological deposits (a metaphor with a rich legacy in modern theory) and material remnants as the script of an unknown language. Texts required excavation, and archaeological sites had to be read. History and archaeology converged to configure the past as a strange text buried in archaic language or enigmatic ruins. Michelet most aptly figures this hybrid science in an oneiric allegory of the past as a vast monument, ‘‘disfigured, covered with alien growths, moss, and mold, and stained by rains, the earth, and the violence of men.’’47 While the painter delights in this inarticulate surface (‘‘what pleases him is precisely the moss’’), the archaeological historian’s impulse is to ‘‘scrape’’ it clean, ‘‘to penetrate the earth and uncover the deep foundations of this monument; the inscription, I now see, is entirely buried, hidden far beneath . . . and to unearth it I have neither shovel, nor iron, nor pickaxe, my nails will have to suffice’’ (154). The phantasm of excavation here crystallizes around an elusive inscription to be unearthed and deciphered, as if the past were an imaginary text that could be extracted from the soil. This allegory takes a literal turn when Michelet suddenly recalls a chapel he had seen at Holyrood ten years earlier whose tombs were in fact coated with a ‘‘thick moss’’ which he had scraped off manually; one yielded the ‘‘inscription of the Frenchman who had first paved Edinburgh,’’ and another ‘‘four words, almost effaced, which I at last deciphered . . . ‘legibus fidus, non regibus’ ’’ (154–55). The symbolic charge of the anecdote turns it into a sort of primal scene of historiography which defines the historian’s task as one of finding tombs, clearing them, resurrecting the voices of the dead, discovering national origins (paving Edinburgh), and establishing society’s moral grounding (‘‘faithful to the laws, not to kings’’). The program applies to Michelet’s own enterprise of national regeneration

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:29

PS

PAGE 59

60 c h a p t e r 3

through history: ‘‘today,’’ he adds, ‘‘I am still digging . . . I want to reach the foundation of the earth,’’ to go beneath the ‘‘cold and sterile soil’’ of civil wars and uncover ‘‘the depths where human warmth recommences’’ (155). In Michelet’s poetic image, the antinomy between the archaeological gaze and a logocentric history has dissolved, and the historian construes his task as an act of excavation, even if the object unearthed (an inscription) remains distinctly textual (legibus fidus, non regibus). He endows the material past with speech, conjoins words and things, and reembodies an abstract language in the thickness of matter. Foremost among the romantic historians, he typifies a new gaze that sees the past as a body that must be excavated before it can speak.

Musealization and In Situ Appreciation The next step, after the vestige had been liberated from logos, was its reinsertion into a cultural context and removal from a purely aesthetic realm. A chorus of voices at Pompeii and Herculaneum early on began to call for new findings to be left in place and for old ones to be returned from Portici. Such wishes first met with ridicule; they triggered charges of sentimentality and impracticality. Winckelmann, above all, the ‘‘father of archeology,’’ had no notion of the city as a whole and mocked the desire for an ‘‘exposure of the entire city’’ as mere ‘‘curiosity’’ misapplied to ‘‘a destroyed city and a heap of stones.’’48 His argument against fully uncovering Herculaneum was simple and convincing: first, the wall paintings worth seeing had been cut out, and there was no use exposing the whole city only ‘‘to see destroyed old walls’’; second, it was necessary to remove the frescoes to prevent erosion from their exposure; third, the living city overhead, Portici, would have to be sacrificed so that a necropolis might relive; and fourth, the costs of a full excavation were forbidding, and only the theater really merited such a price. Lastly, exposed walls could be seen aplenty at Pompeii, but that effort was ‘‘best left to the English.’’ These arguments were, of course, largely sound, since the exposed monuments often did decay rapidly. In his Pompeiana (1819), William Gell warned that ‘‘they are beginning to suffer from the effects of that exposure which has taken place since their second birth,’’49 and presented his rush to draw the findings as a race against time.50 Nonetheless, Winckelmann’s remarks reveal a surprising indifference to the ancient city and a narrow focus on the artworks. If he found the theater worth excavating, it was as a pure and decontextualized work of architecture.

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:29

PS

PAGE 60

The Archaeological Turn 61

Nowhere is Winckelmann seduced by the romantic dream of seeing vestiges in their original setting. Goethe much preferred the museum at Portici to the tunnels of Herculaneum, and approved the king’s plan to ‘‘have a musuem built in Naples’’ for all his collections, including the pieces from Pompeii and Herculaneum, calling it a ‘‘great and wonderful undertaking.’’51 The idea that strip-mining the cities to enrich the museum might impoverish the artifacts did not occur to him. L’abbe´ de Saint-Non was among the first to suggest imagining the antiques in their urban milieu, as part of a living whole. It was the fascination of the tablets of Isis at the Portici musuem that made him reflect that displaying them amid a pile of curiosities stifled their eloquence and detached them imaginatively from the temple earlier visited. He thus proposed that they ‘‘always be kept apart’’ so that ‘‘the traveler and the curious, after visiting the temple, might reassemble in their minds the ornaments and furniture that adorned’’ the temple.52 There, in a nutshell, is the program of romantic resurrection, the path Gautier’s hero, Octavien, would take at Pompeii after seeing the famous imprint of a woman’s breast at the museum—conjuring forth her specter in the villa where it had been found. Here, Saint-Non still sees the reinsertion as a purely mental act, one the museum does not so much oppose as make possible as long as its internal order reflects the urban topography. Elsewhere, however, Saint-Non senses a type of charm that vestiges acquire from their setting; the sight of a female skeleton, left in its original place and attitude on Lord Hamilton’s suggestion, provoked a tender reverie in the abbe´ proving almost mathematically how much value the setting could confer: ‘‘preserved in this place, it makes an infinitely attaching impression; transported elsewhere, it is of no interest’’ (2:154). A worthless vestige becomes meaningful simply because it tells a story in its original setting. This allegory of location compels Saint-Non to extrapolate his insight to other objects and regret that ‘‘the same reflection was not made before transferring such a wealth of inscriptions, paintings, statues, and columns’’ to Portici, where they are no doubt valuable, but far less so than in situ, where they acquire ‘‘an incalculable worth and curiosity’’ (2:154). This insight into the value of location, into the bond between frame and image, slowly struck travelers. It was not just skeletons, but also furniture, tools, bricks, and edibles of slight value, spared and left in place by the excavators, that caught the imagination of travelers. Bergeret de Grancourt noted how evocative this ‘‘everyday furniture’’ was on location and thought the musuem pieces ‘‘would be more moving and captivating in their place.’’53

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:30

PS

PAGE 61

62 c h a p t e r 3

The same goes for painting: when Lalande (1765/1786) saw a humble ‘‘little perspective’’ on walls otherwise plundered bare, ‘‘[he] could not help but regret this displacement,’’ since ‘‘the paintings are much more attractive in the place for which they were made than’’ in Portici (99). These suggestions mounted into a full-fledged critique of despoliation by the turn of the century when a new sensibility denounced the dissection of Pompeii and Herculaneum as an unforgivable act of vandalism. For Creuze´ de Lesser (1801–2), the removal of the tablets of Isis seemed a true desecration of the temple, and the enlightened amateurs of the eighteenth century the heirs to the Goths from which Pompeii had been spared. So stripped was Herculaneum, that it no longer ‘‘merited the effort taken to descend into it,’’ while the valuables that had been ‘‘torn away’’ and ‘‘carried off ’’ had ‘‘lost half their value’’ in the process since ‘‘the ruins of Herculaneum were the true setting for the remarkable things found in Herculaneum.’’54 How much more impressive would the ‘‘ancient debris’’ that we admire in Portici be, Creuze´ asks, ‘‘had it been left . . . beneath the lava of Herculaneum and the ashes of Pompeii?’’ (176). Delphine Gay confirms the poetic spark generated by the setting in her melodramatic poem, ‘‘Le dernier jour de Pompe´¨ı’’ (1828), which takes its cue from the marble statue of a priestess left in its temple. Her inspiration stemmed directly from this encounter, rare enough to be striking: ‘‘it’s the first example of a transportable object that has remained within the bounds of the city.’’55 Her poem testifies to the meaning generated by location and embodies the surplus value produced by the collision of vestige and context.

Excursus: The Museum or the Monument? ‘‘Everything should be put in its place,’’ Chateaubriand stated. This belief is the kernel out of which the romantic doctrine of art as the expression of unique national cultures would develop. The idea implies both the indissociable bond between artworks and monuments (such as devotional paintings and sculptures) and the broader anchoring of art in specific cultural contexts (Homer in ancient Greece). The debate at Pompeii over the damage inflicted by the museum on the city should be placed within the larger polemic over what Quatreme`re de Quincy called the ‘‘destination of artworks.’’ The ‘‘trivial truth’’ that things belonged in their place, which Chateaubriand proclaimed in Ge´nie du christianisme (1802), was far from self-evident in the age of secularization and museal centralization that the Revolution had ushered

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:31

PS

PAGE 62

The Archaeological Turn 63

in. In 1802, indeed, the claim sounds utopian and reactionary, despite the recent Concordat passed between France and the Church. The age of the great national art museums was dawning; an irreversible current was sweeping works from their traditional setting onto a booming art market, into private collections, and toward those prestigious treasuries of the modern nation-states—the large state-owned museums. This centripetal flux was favored by the unprecedented mobility of artworks brought on by the Revolution’s confiscations and the Empire’s wars. The nationalization of Church goods by revolutionary decree (October 10, 1789), as well as the massive emigration of nobles had produced a drastic increase in the sale of artworks. Much of the national heritage, so firmly territorialized in the Ancien Re´gime, was up for grabs, and speculators purchased church spoils as well as goods from a new class of chaˆteau owners eager to raise cash. Making large profits on what nascent heritage warriors saw as a cultural catastrophe, they attained notoriety as the mythical bande noire mentioned by Hugo, Balzac, and others well into the 1820s.56 Napoleon, for his part, clearly believed the proper location of the world’s cultural treasures was in a French museum: in 1796, his army pillaged a large body of works in Italy (shipped home in a long triumphal procession) before making a rich harvest of antiques in Egypt in 1798. The Louvre (then the Muse´e Napole´on) was to house this hoard and make Paris the incontestable capital of the arts. This large dislocation of cultural goods eventually produced its own remedy: a new awareness of patrimoine, embodied in Hugo’s 1820s crusade against the ‘‘demolishers,’’ in the rise of a politics of conservation under Guizot in the 1830s, and in the midcentury mania for architectural restorations to which Viollet-le-Duc’s name remains attached.57 But as early as 1794, the abbe´ Gre´goire had coined the term ‘‘vandalism’’ in a report to the Convention that cautioned against a furious liquidation of the symbols of the Ancien Re´gime, thereby paving the way for a distinction between their old ‘‘use value’’ and their modern ‘‘educational value.’’58 Chateaubriand’s call for ‘‘everything’’ to be ‘‘put in its place’’ was a traditionalist reaction to revolutionary vandalism. His demand may appear retrograde before the irreversible modern tendency to musealize ethnic, cultic, and religious artifacts, but his ‘‘religious’’ attack on the museum can also be read as a function of a modern archaeological gaze that sees works contextually and foreshadows the romantic vision of art as the symbolic expression of a culture’s customs, beliefs, and institutions. The debate around the museum, however, tends to reduce his complex position to a simple binary choice.

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:31

PS

PAGE 63

64 c h a p t e r 3

The fate of the royal tombs at Saint-Denis during the Revolution is especially instructive since these were a central topic in the debate around the museum and inspired both fierce love and hatred as symbols of the French monarchy. Their fate as display items at Alexandre Lenoir’s Muse´e des monuments franc¸ais from 1793 to 1816 highlights a different role the museum played in modernity—other than as a mere aesthetic apparatus recoding traditional artifacts as pure art. After the state had decreed the destruction of the tombs in 1793, Lenoir exhibited their remains at the deposit turned museum which he ran at the Petits Augustins.59 As their self-styled savior (he had allegedly protected the tombs with his body), Lenoir had long been immune to criticism despite favoring their destruction to enrich his museum.60 For Chateaubriand, the poet of the counter-revolution, as for the young Hugo, the tombs inspired ‘‘a profound veneration’’ as ‘‘a treasure where the relics of time are deposited,’’ and he did not hesitate to denounce Lenoir’s museum even as he acknowledged an ‘‘obligation to the artist who had assembled the debris of our ancient sepulchres.’’61 His critique turned precisely on the aesthetic reduction the museum performs: ‘‘Cramped into a small space, divided into centuries, deprived of their harmony with the ancient temples and the Catholic faith, serving only the history of art and not the history of manners or religion, having lost even their coat of dust, they no longer speak to the imagination or the heart’’ (2:98, note 1). Lenoir’s deposit ‘‘serves only the history of art.’’ This sentiment was echoed by Quatreme`re de Quincy, another outspoken critic of Lenoir,62 who reported to the city council of Paris in 1800 that ‘‘[we can] pretend no longer that works of art can be preserved in these repositories of ignorance and barbarism.’’63 Insisting on a work’s vital link to its setting, he castigated Lenoir’s museum: ‘‘yes, you have transported the physical matter, but have you also brought that train of sensations, tender and profound, melancholic, sublime, and touching, that enveloped them?’’ History would soon vindicate Chateaubriand and Quatreme`re’s attack; on April 24, 1816, the Restoration passed a law that ‘‘restored monuments to their churches and families.’’ The royal tombs had to be returned, and Lenoir’s museum closed in December despite his proposal to ‘‘erect[] an expiatory chapel’’ for the royal remains.64 However, the principle of returning works, despite this temporary reversal, would seem as nostalgic in the big picture as the desire to restore the ancient monarchy, turning Chateaubriand and Quatreme`re into the quixotic champions of a lost authenticity—retrograde naysayers opposing the secularization and nationalization of heritage.

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:31

PS

PAGE 64

The Archaeological Turn 65

Yet less actually separates them from the musealizers than at first appears; and the museum was also in some respects antimuseal. The overly neat dichotomy between restorers and musealizers dissolves when we look at the theoretical grounds of the antimuseal protest. Chateaubriand had argued that a work’s beauty derived from its ‘‘relationship with the institutions and customs of a people’’65 A Greek and Egyptian temple could only trade places to their mutual detriment: if they did, ‘‘they would lose their chief beauty’’ (1:399).66 Quatreme`re de Quincy had expressed the same insight into the crucial function of place when attacking Napoleon’s plunder in Italy. His famous Lettres au Ge´ne´ral Miranda (1796) stressed the inextricable links between the work and its geographical setting: ‘‘the country itself is part of the museum.’’67 Rome seen as a museum was ‘‘unmoveable in its entirety,’’ ‘‘a colossus . . . whose bulk . . . is attached to the soil’’ (letter 3). Such is his artistic respect for Rome’s integrity that his neoclassical cult of ancient art comes to resemble Chateaubriand’s religious veneration for the homegrown Gothic heritage. His artistic convictions ironically lead him to affirm the deep unity of the work and its cultural and geographic setting, ‘‘that harmonic virtue [existing] between all the things, the sky that illuminates them, and the country that serves as their background ’’ (letter 4): ‘‘The true museum of Rome . . . is composed no less of the places, the sites, the mountains, the quarries, the ancient roads, the relative positions of ruined cities, the geographical relationships, the internal relationships among all the objects, the memories, and the local traditions (letter 3).’’ This credo may in fact be doubly ironic in light of what Leonard Barkan has called the original decontextualization of the works Rome once pillaged abroad, which the Renaissance only removed further from their origin.68 The fact, in any case, that Quatreme`re the classic and Chateaubriand the Romantic held such similar views calls for a reevaluation of their position. The vision of art that was emerging in Romanticism clearly vindicated this outlook theoretically. Its main thrust hinged on reembedding art in an organic cultural context—either by rereading past works as emblems of historical periods or by creating new ones that would express the customs and beliefs of the present.69 After the counterrevolutionary thinker Louis de Bonald, who first proclaimed that ‘‘literature is the expression of society,’’ Mme de Stae¨l, in De la litte´rature (1800), historiziced it as a function of shifting social and political regimes. Partly reacting against the Enlightenment’s search for natural and universal laws—on which the abstractions of revolutionary thought had been blamed—Mme de Stae¨l sought to resituate

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:31

PS

PAGE 65

66

chapter 3

the writer in a determinate social order by showing ‘‘the relationship that exists between literature and the social institutions of every century and every country.’’70 Her essay aimed to ‘‘examine . . . the influence of religion, of manners, and of laws on literature’’ (65) and to reconcile the old writercourtier with the coming republic. However, she still saw literature largely in the rhetorical and didactic terms of the old regime as representation rather than expression, and as the product of impersonal rules rather than individual or national genius. This would change in De l’Allemagne (1813), where the romantic/classic divide replaced her former ancients/moderns framework. The German Romantics, she observed, had forsaken the inspiration of classical antiquity for a ‘‘romantic poetry’’ inspired by ‘‘the traditions of chivalry.’’71 The native heritage of the Christian Middle Ages was replacing the myths bequeathed by the Greeks and Romans. Mme de Stae¨l conceded that ‘‘the poetry of the Ancients is more pure as art’’ but felt it was harmful to cling to foreign traditions: ‘‘The question for us is not between classical poetry and romantic poetry, but between the imitation of one and the inspiration of the other. The literature of the Ancients is a transplanted literature among the moderns: romantic or chivalrous literature is indigenous among us, and it’s our religion and our institutions that made it flourish’’ (2:213). The critical question is here how rooted an artistic form is, not just in a nation’s political climate, but also in its history, religion, geography, and popular beliefs. The classical poetry still favored in France fell far short of this standard: ‘‘our French poets,’’ she remarked, ‘‘are admired among all of our cultivated spirits . . . but they are completely unknown among the people and even among the bourgeois of the cities’’ (2: 214). Genuine art had become a plant rooted in the national soil rather than the self-contained product of consummate artifice: ‘‘Romantic literature is the only kind that is still susceptible to being perfected, since, having its roots in our own soil, it is the only one that can grow and revive again; it expresses our religion, it recalls our history: its origins are old, but not antique’’ (2:214). If the conditions of art’s vitality are the soil of national beliefs and history, then these are also what it expresses to its public. In this light, Chateaubriand’s religious nostalgia and Quatreme`re’s geographically rooted works reflect the broader consensus emerging on art as a culturally specific product. Their campaign is less against the museum per se than for an appreciation of art in its original cultural setting, whether that be religious and royalist (Chateaubriand) or geographic and classical (Quatreme`re). They merely literalize to an astonishing degree—by insisting on respect for the material setting—the romantic contextualist reading. Both stress

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:32

PS

PAGE 66

The Archaeological Turn

67

the fallacy of a pure formalist isolation of art from the social, religious, and geographic scaffolding that underpins its power to communicate. Where they erred was in supposing that the museum would actually enact a cultural apocalypse. Their opposition of rooted art to the rarefied aesthetic icons of the museum misrepresents this institution. The nineteenthcentury heritage politics that favored the museum’s growth also saw much more than beauty in the work: it simultaneously embodied memory, testimony, documentary value, age value, political prestige, and cultural identity. As such, the museum did not counter but reinforce the organic cultural vision that fueled Viollet-le-Duc’s architectural restorations, Guizot’s program of research into the national past, and the vogue for resurrections in historical novels and paintings. No doubt the museum could at times favor a pure aesthetic gaze, and the fear of this certainly fueled the antimuseal protest.72 But the actual practice of museumgoers in the nineteenth century shows that art served as a springboard for a mental journey to remote periods and countries; more than an aesthetic impression, it gave amateurs a direct experience of other worlds. When Stendhal, for example, set to work on the Chroniques italiennes in 1833, during his period as French consul at Civitavecchia, he was largely inspired by Renaissance painting. At the outset of Les Cenci, he recounts how seeing Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrix Cenci, executed for killing her father, induced him to unearth the documents of her trial and write her story. His empathetic identification with the portrait was perhaps predictable (‘‘I shared in the common curiosity’’73), but it also typifies the romantic experience of art as a trigger for historical reconstruction. Stendhal yearns to access an authentic past directly by reading the work as a sort of snapshot taken ‘‘the very day that preceded her execution’’ (56). Beatrix has ‘‘the astonished look of a person who is surprised just when she is weeping profusely’’ (54–55). His description slowly animates the portrait, alters it, fills it out, and restores details he supposes Reni had to suppress: ‘‘the disorderly hair of a poor girl of sixteen abandoning herself to despair’’ (54). In the end, his absorption becomes so complete that the painting disappears, transporting us directly into the world of Beatrix’s melodramatic misfortunes. The painting is a springboard launching the viewer into an alien world, not an inert icon for aesthetic contemplation; as such, it functions less as art in our modern sense (which artifically isolates aesthetic response) than as a historical relic of the type Balzac’s hero finds in the antique shop in La Peau de chagrin (a mummy, a mosaic, a cameo), and which triggers a series of imaginary odysseys to pharaonic Egypt, Renaissance Italy, and ancient Greece, conjuring up

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:32

PS

PAGE 67

68 c h a p t e r 3

‘‘the phantasmagoria of a panorama of the past.’’74 Museums and antique stores differ on many points, as do artworks and historical relics, but the gaze with which nineteenth-century viewers confronted them is often identical. This propensity to mental time-travel survives long past the romantic decades: Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Huysmans all wrote fictions on the basis of encounters with the plastic arts. When Edmond de Goncourt went to cool down in the Egyptian wing of the Louvre on a hot day in 1891, ‘‘all of pharaonic Egypt, all the bureaucrats and courtiers of the twenty-six dynasties, seemed to come alive around me . . . I was no longer of my time, no longer in Paris,’’ but contemporary with ‘‘the passage of the Red Sea under Ramses II.’’75 The experience of the museum in the nineteenth century, then, involved reanimating the artifacts and reconstituting the worlds to which they belonged. The museum that best illustrates this function is the one Chateaubriand denounced as the cemetery of the royal tombs. For a whole generation, the Muse´e des monuments franc¸ais, where Lenoir had organized French history into a series of period rooms, transported visitors into a living past—even if the pieces representing a period were not always from that period. Michelet found his vocation as a historian under the vaults of the Petits Augustins. While Chateaubriand felt that the royal effigies of Saint-Denis could never again ‘‘revive,’’ Michelet experienced Lenoir’s museal installation precisely as a resurrection. If Chateaubriand was sure that these ‘‘royal phantoms’’ would refuse to live again and only answer his anguished apostrophe with a ‘‘profound silence,’’76 Michelet felt that ‘‘all these wounded [kings] had found a refuge’’ there and a consolation in the ‘‘joy of seeing and conversing with one another.’’77 Striking a golden mean between geographic dispersal and museal isolation, Lenoir’s museum reunited and revived the dead: ‘‘Isolated in their churches or gathered in the museums, all these figures hardly speak to us. But there, at the Muse´e des Monuments franc¸ais, in each other’s company, in the society of their time and choice, in the soft light of the stained glass, they spoke, they spoke to you and they spoke among each other’’ (1:524). This imaginative spark between artifact and period was a romantic experience par excellence and could just as well be triggered by antiques, fragments, ruins, chronicles, and inscriptions. Chateaubriand’s hostility to the museum and the call for Pompeian finds to be left in place were both extreme formulations of a new gaze that understood human artifacts chiefly as the expressions of a culture. The gesture of relocation extended from the literal (placing furniture in ruins) to the imaginary (conjuring up the world of a painting)

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:33

PS

PAGE 68

The Archaeological Turn

69

to the symbolic (exhibiting works in a museum by country, school, period, artist, style, medium). The museum, in any case, was no machine to isolate the aesthetic essence of works, but a powerful archaeological device that helped reconstruct a coherent image of the past—the image of a century, a country, or a civilization. Proponents and opponents alike shared the same basic outlook but merely interpreted the imperative to preserve and contextualize in distinct ways. Renan, for one, lamented the dismemberment of Egypt’s antiques by greedy colonial rivals: ‘‘for more than a half century, Egyptian antiquities have been pillaged. What has been destroyed in this period is incalculable. The purveyors of musuems have scoured the country like true vandals.’’78 For Me´rime´e, on the contrary, the museum is the final refuge for shipwrecked antiques, and he marvels at the survival of the ‘‘famous altarpiece in gold’’ from the cathedral of Basel, which ‘‘by a sort of miracle’’ has made it from the eleventh century to ‘‘the safe haven of a French musuem’’ without being melted down.79 Neither Renan nor Me´rime´e were sentimentally attached to Egypt or the Middle Ages; the question was, for each of them, how best to safeguard a fragile historical heritage, and at times it meant preserving in situ, at times harboring in specialized shelters. Thus, while Me´rime´e also sponsored Violletle-Duc’s restorations, Renan was not above shipping artifacts back from Phoenicia.80 The same scruples were evidently not in force abroad, but the case of Egypt was also special since the viceroy, Saı¨d Pacha, had created an archaeological service there in 1858 to protect Egypt’s heritage and had appointed the Frenchman Auguste Mariette to direct it—the same Mariette, be it said, who had secretly excavated the Serapeum at night in 1850 and shipped seven thousand objects to the Louvre.81 The question of the museum’s active role in destroying ancient monuments (Pompeii, Egypt, Greece, Assyria) is in any case a political one which involves issues of funding (for expeditions) and national prestige (colonial rivalry) without directly engaging the aesthetics of reception; the imaginary reconstruction does not depend on the distinction between stolen mummies and native stone axes. For Me´rime´e, in any case, it is clear that the museum is where the past survives, just as for Michelet the royal effigies could only breathe in its fictional harbor. The museum isolated, but from the present, creating a temporal bubble that favored the imaginary synthesis the spectator performed. The false opposition of the museum to in situ preservation is also demonstrated by Chateaubriand’s vision for Pompeii. Citing Taylor’s claim that ‘‘Rome is merely a vast museum, Pompeii is a living antquity,’’ he seems to

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:34

PS

PAGE 69

70 c h a p t e r 3

endorse the contrast between the death-bringing museum and the living ruin.82 At Pompeii, an entire past world had remained intact, whereas Rome, if larger and nobler, had been destroyed, dismantled, and rebuilt many times, its past preserved only in museums.83 Yet the city Chateaubriand imagines quickly breaks down this distinction; faithful, at first, to the Ge´nie’s critique of violent displacement, he censures the greedy removal of ‘‘the tools of different trades, the furniture, the statues, the mansucripts’’ to Portici and echoes the call for things to be left ‘‘in the place where they were found and as they were found.’’84 At this point, however, he goes beyond his predecessors in proposing an all-out restoration which would effectively resurrect the city.85 His plan involved ‘‘putting roofs, ceilings, floors, and windows back in place to prevent the degradation of the paintings and the walls; restoring the old fortifications of the city, enclosing its gates, and finally establishing a guard of soldiers along with a few scholars versed in the arts’’ (2:1474–75). This revival of Pompeii recalls the feudal nostalgia of the Ge´nie, but here there is no question of stimulating a failing cult. Pompeii rediviva is not about reviving religion and reintegrating art into worship. Rather than save Pompeii from Portici—as he had wished to save Saint-Denis from Lenoir— this move dialectically transposes Portici into Pompeii, and drastically transforms the antique city into a museum of itself. ‘‘Would this not be the most marvelous Museum on earth? A Roman city preserved in its entirety as if its inhabitants had just left it fifteen minutes ago!’’ (2:1475). With or without the restorations, Pompeii was indeed becoming a museum of itself, a territorially rooted monument that secreted its own virtual display case, or rather collapsed the dichotomy between work and museum to house itself within itself. For Creuze´, as well, ‘‘the most curious of all museums is Pompeii,’’ and Louis Viardot could add, in 1840, when Pietro Bianchi had at last decreed that newly discovered frescoes be left in place, that ‘‘the museum of Pompeii should be in Pompeii, or rather should be Pompeii itself.’’86 Chateaubriand, then, affirms the concept of the museum even as he denounces the actual dismemberment of monuments, and the same was true for Quatreme`re who opposed Napoleon’s plunder in Italy but called Rome itself a ‘‘museum.’’ How can these enemies of the museum apply this very term to sites they would protect from it? The answer may be, first, that they only oppose a certain kind of museum, and second, that they also need the museum, since their celebration of embedded art is no naı¨ve throwback to a premodern integration of art into life but a sentimental reflection on this relationship. Visitors at Pompeii strolled through the first musealized city, a place

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:34

PS

PAGE 70

The Archaeological Turn 71

where the distinction between living and enclosed monuments was void. To musealize here was precisely to embed the monument in its history. Limited attempts at restoration of the sort Chateaubriand had fancied actually began during the French tenure, a fact Gautier would later celebrate, imagining the ‘‘voice of Pompeii’’ welcoming Napoleon’s troops into Italy.87 The two Bonuccis who thereafter directed the excavations also pursued the ideal of a living museum. ‘‘M. Antonio Bonuci,’’ wrote l’abbe´ Romanelli after visiting in 1817, ‘‘made every effort’’ as the new director ‘‘to repair the ruins, rejoin the fragments of columns and set them back in place.’’88 Charles Bonucci, his nephew and successor, also made restorations a top priority and ‘‘thought it was [his] duty to make every effort to return the Forum to its former splendor.’’89 When Giuseppe Fiorelli took over in 1860, the idea that Pompeii was its own museum had become firmly established, and ‘‘it was understood,’’ Casimir Chevalier wrote in 1888, ‘‘that leaving all the objects in place which did not risk deteriorating or vanishing was the only way to preserve the gripping physiognomy and unique character of this priceless relic.’’ Pompeii, he added, ‘‘must, as far as possible, become its own museum.’’90 Chateaubriand’s dream of a musealized city was thus slowly making its way.

The City as Object: An Image of Civilization Once the artifact had been embedded in its setting, a new reality, the ancient city itself, could emerge into view, and more broadly the civilization it embodied. A truly panoptic view of the city was of course only possible at Pompeii and not at the underground Herculaneum, but even Pompeii had for long remained curiously invisible as an integral entity. Mme de Stae¨l was among the first to stress this global perspective, calling Pompeii ‘‘a buried souvenir’’ that ‘‘has been recovered whole.’’91 Historically, it was under the French occupation of Naples, in 1811, that the attempt to excavate the whole perimeter and to remove the sand permanently first began; the focus then shifted from isolated artworks to architecture and urbanism as entire sectors were cleared of sand and exposed to view.92 Franc¸ois Mazois’s precise topographic survey, undertaken from 1809 to 1811, when Murat and Caroline, Napoleon’s sister, were the sovereigns of Naples, produced in the Ruines de Pompe´i (1813–38) the first coherent image of an urban ensemble. Looking back from the Second Empire, E. de Ke´ratry presented this critical shift as a choice between the ‘‘precious objects’’ and the ‘‘constructions’’; the method

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:35

PS

PAGE 71

72 c h a p t e r 3

of digging pits to extract the artifacts was damaging and ‘‘had to be renounced,’’ since the genuine find was Pompeii, ‘‘a true city from antiquity, isolated from the modern world, but complete in itself.’’93 This focal shift was no doubt complete by 1850, but already in the 1820s Charles Bonucci had valued the well-preserved city chiefly as a ‘‘model of the product of the manners, religion, and government of the ancients.’’94 The conscious archaeological goal of unearthing Pompeii itself—the city, not its treasures, or the city as the treasure—would only be explicitly articulated by Fiorelli in the 1860s: ‘‘He said . . . that the main object of the excavation of Pompeii was Pompeii itself, that the discovery of works of art should take second place, that efforts now focused above all on resurrecting a Roman city that revealed the life of the past, [and] that it had to be fully uncovered, down to its humbest houses, for the lesson to be complete.’’95 One reason for the city’s newfound visibility was no doubt a contemporary concern with urbanism (in the era of Haussmann, flaˆneur literature, hygienist tracts, and modern statistics), accompanied by a forceful reflection on the antique polis and its idealization by some nostalgic thinkers. Eager to create a pedigree for the middle classes, the Thierry brothers, opposing Roman law to the Salic law of the German conquerors, had already sought to trace the charters and liberties of medieval cities back to the Roman municipal regime, and in 1866 Fustel de Coulanges had published his great work on the genesis of the Cite´ antique.96 A retrospective ideal was taking shape which, for some, served to legitimize the bourgeois metropolis, and, for others, cast a critical shadow over its decadent modern descendant. Pehaps it is Hippolyte Taine who best illustrates the modern urbanistic gaze; in his Voyage en Italie (1864), he made Pompeii into a sort of imaginary homeland, finding there the image of an ideal aristocratic and aesthetic order. The city itself, he noted, far surpassed the endless bric-a-brac it contained, decisively subordinating the contents to the urban frame, and the tangible remains to a set of deeper realities: culture, the ancient city, civilization. What the mind retained after seeing this chaos of objects was above all ‘‘the image of the grey, reddish city, half-ruined and deserted.’’97 Through his nostalgia for the classical world, Taine saw the city as an integral plastic vision embodying a long-gone civic ideal whose passing he mourned. ‘‘The men who lived here made their city into their jewel and jewel case; the image of their acropolis . . . followed them everywhere’’ (1:58). This omnipresent vision helped nourish the citydweller’s patriotism for the ‘‘unique institution’’ of the ancient city, a ‘‘great invention’’ that embodied a ‘‘sovereign idea’’ of social organization. Critical

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:35

PS

PAGE 72

The Archaeological Turn 73

to the patriotic attachment of the ancient city was the great plastic power it wielded through its ‘‘sensible contours’’ on ‘‘the precise and picturesque imagination of the southern races’’ (1:58). The jewel to be excavated thus, for Taine, was the city itself and the municipal ideal to which it gave visual form. Taine’s plastic delight in Pompeii recalls the aesthetic orientation of neoclassical travelers, but the crucial difference is that Taine finds beauty not so much in sculptures, ancient ruins, or picturesque landscapes as in the idea of the original city, which he grasps as the plastic cipher of a moral order, as a visual power that ceaselessly molds the minds of the inhabitants. Whereas Goethe, who reserved his admiration mainly for the artifacts, felt cramped in the dwellings of the ‘‘mummified city’’ and was happy to leave them for the seaside,98 Taine’s urge is to enter them to absorb the plastic impression of antiquity. ‘‘They are small,’’ he concedes, but encode an alien lifestyle into which he is eager to be initiated: ‘‘They are made to take in the cool draft, to sleep in; men spent their days elsewhere, at the forum, at the baths, at the theater. Private life, so important for us, was very dimished; the essential thing was public life.’’99 This does not stop Taine, who, eager to relive the Roman life, plunges into this domestic space, stopping at the locus amoenus of an internal garden, pool, and fountain, to reconstitute the ancient life of leisure: ‘‘is there a better place,’’ he asks, ‘‘to let one’s body live, to dream soundly and to delight in what is most beautiful in nature and life, without polish or refinement?’’ (1:62). The interior architecture helps him reconstruct and contemplate the moral texture of ancient life: ‘‘the more one tries to reconstitute these manners in the imagination, the more attractive they seem, and the more they conform to the climate and to human nature.’’ All that sets Pompeii apart from the modern city serves as a vital clue for the archaeological reader. The city has become an imago mundi encoded in the idiom of urbanism and architecture. ‘‘All these streets are narrow,’’ Taine observes, sufficient only for a single chariot, leading him to contrast the slow pulse of the ancient city to ‘‘the great circulation of our cities.’’ This trivial observation helps him identify ‘‘a salient characteristic of ancient civilization,’’ namely ‘‘the lack of industry . . . [for there] it’s the slave who turns the mill’’ (1:60). The slave-driven economy never generated the lively traffic on display in Haussmann’s Paris. The theater, too, reveals the abyss between a stiff modern world and an ancient one devoted to the cult of sensations: lying in the open air, on a hilltop, facing the sea, right below a radiant Vesuvius, it contrasts starkly with ‘‘our nocturnal gas-lit theaters full of mephitic odors’’ and illustrates ‘‘the difference that separates the gymnastic, natural life of the

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:35

PS

PAGE 73

74 c h a p t e r 3

athletic body from the complicated, artificial life of the black tailcoat’’ (1:64). And the baths: ‘‘what a contrast . . . it’s because today bathing only serves to clean us, but then it was a pleasure and a gymnastic institution’’ (1:64).100 The artworks at the museum in Naples also offer clues to the alien customs and mentality of the Romans, in particular the infamous erotic frescoes which Taine had no doubt came from the ‘‘brothels of Pompeii,’’ but which he celebrated as emblems of a naturalistic view of sexuality: ‘‘in the paintings of the brothels . . . the bodies are large and healthy, without tasteless lubricity or seductive langour; love there is not a perversion of the senses or an ecstasy of the soul: it is a function’’ (1:70). As for the arabesques, dancers, and vegetal motifs that adorned many dwellings, instead of belittling them as mediocre art, Taine ennobles them by comparing them to ‘‘our wallpapers’’ and stresses their subaltern role in an architectural ensemble. Pompeii, in short, is an urban miscrocosm, embodying an implicit critique of the hollow luxury of the Second Empire: ‘‘Pompeii is a Saint-Germain, an ancient Fontainebleau, but one [can] see the abyss separating these two worlds’’ (1:61). Taine subordinates every aspect of Pompeii to its role in a social, urban, and architectural ensemble, while the city itself, in turn, is merely the plastic cipher of an aristocratic and aesthetic culture. The main point here is not Taine’s retrospective utopia, but the emergence of a holistic view of the city, although the role of utopian longings should not be underestimated in the elaboration of the idea that past cultures can be grasped as organic entities. Thus Taine’s aestheticism and sensualism finds a broad echo in many late nineteenth-century depictions of Pompeii: Petit-Mangin’s poem, for instance, A Pompe´i: E´tude paı¨enne (1871), revels in the sumptuous details of an aristocratic marriage, which Paula and Lentulus happily consummate just before Vesuvius erupts, and breaks with Bulwer’s tradition of moral melodrama in favor of a sensuous pagan elegy.101 Same tendency in Jean Bertheroy’s sentimental erotic novel, La Danseuse de Pompe´i (1899), where Nonia, an ingenuous courtesan, embodies a guiltless aestheticization of the life of the flesh; the menacing volcano is here reduced to a fiery serpent with which she dances in the crater of Vesuvius after her lover dies.102 This blend of antiquity and erotica touched a nerve during the belle e´poque, and much like Bulwer’s novel earlier inspired a new set of artworks, notably Paul Roussel’s sculpture, Nonia, Dancer of Pompeii (1909) and Charles Lenoir’s painting of the same motif (1913) (figs. 3 and 4). E´mile Vitta, lecturing at the Universite´ populaire in 1902, also invokes the utopia of an aestheticized life at Pompeii (‘‘art was everywhere; it had penetrated life; it colored serious affairs as well as pleasures

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:36

PS

PAGE 74

Figure 3. Paul Hippolyte Rene´ Roussel (1867–1928), Nonia, Dancer of Pompeii (1909). Photo: Francois Vizzavona/Daniel Arnaudet. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:04:59

PS

PAGE 75

Figure 4. Charles Amable Lenoir (1861–?), Dancer of Pompeii (1913). Photo: Francois Vizzavona/Maryse El Garby. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:05:20

PS

PAGE 76

The Archaeological Turn 77

. . . and the most humble aspects of existence’’) but extends it downward to embrace the Pompeian worker, for whom ‘‘every creation . . . was the product of joy and love.’’103 If Fe´licien David’s 1859 opera, Herculanum, still turned on the battle between Christian innocence and Roman vice, the sets had now become sumptuous and exotic, and the show seemed—at least in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s review—an early instance of fin-de-sie`cle decadence: ‘‘lictors, treasures, draperies, bacchanals beneath funerary sphinxes, torches, satyrs, drinking songs, flowers, and slaves,’’ it was all there, Villiers only regretted that the corrupt queen, Olympia, was not nearly decadent enough to kill herself voluptuously like Cleopatra.104 The utopian shadings of Pompeii in the late nineteenth-century vary: the city might be serene and classical, excessive and decadent, spiritual and erotic, or aesthetic and virile, but in each case the accent has shifted from the dream of Pompeii’s destruction to the consoling vision of a flawless organic world. These utopian reˆveries all presuppose the perception of Pompeii as an urban whole, one embodying an alien civilization that can be symbolically appropriated by antimodern poets. Taine could only idealize the cite´ antique at Pompeii because the city had become an object of inquiry for novelists, scholars, urban planners, and hygienists. But the city, in turn, pointed to the modern reflection on ‘‘civilization.’’ The new concept of civilization as an integral whole had found a concrete figuration in many of the archaeological revelations of the nineteenth century: Pompeii and Nineveh had risen from the ground and given body to this intangible object. Indeed, Chateaubriand’s desire to musealize Pompeii was no doubt a prescient response—and visual correlative—to what Franc¸ois Guizot had called the ‘‘intangible facts’’ of ‘‘civilization’’ in a very influential course he had given at the Sorbonne in 1828. Guizot had there tried to theorize civilization as a ‘‘moral fact’’ that cannot easily be ‘‘give[n] . . . life and animation’’ or ‘‘exhibit[ed] . . . in clear and vivid colours’’ like ‘‘the narratives of battles.’’105 But ‘‘the fact civilization,’’ he insisted, ‘‘is the fact par excellence—the general and definitive fact, in which all the others terminate’’ (13). Just as the archaeological gaze had reinserted artifacts into an urban whole, so Guizot projected a new history that would recruit all the social sciences in the effort to grasp this total but invisible object: ‘‘Take all the facts which compose the history of a nation, and which we are accustomed to regard as the elements of its life; take its institutions, its commerce, its industry, its wars, all the details of its government: when we would consider these facts in their aggregate . . . we ask in what they have contributed to the civilization of that nation’’ (13). This overarching totality, not the story of kings, reigns,

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:05:21

PS

PAGE 77

78 c h a p t e r 3

and battles, was becoming the true object of history, so that specific topics held meaning for Guizot only by their participation in this solar idea: ‘‘for civilization is a sort of ocean, constituting the wealth of a people, and on whose bosom all the elements of the life of that people, all the powers supporting its existence, assemble and unite’’ (13).106 Between Plato’s forms and Hegel’s idea, Guizot’s all-embracing ideal entity both precedes and imparts being to all institutions and practices: ‘‘such is the value of this general fact, that it gives value to everything it touches’’ (14). It was more and more in light of this ‘‘general fact’’ that archaeology excavated sites such as Pompeii and Nineveh. When Nineveh emerged in the 1840s, Renan hailed it as ‘‘the appearance of entire civilization that had been thought annihilated down to its last vestige.’’107 Vestige and civilization were here inextricably linked as the two poles—material and ideal—of the archaeological gaze.

Private Life: Civilization Civilization, however, was a lifeless fact until it was animated by the people who had inhabited the empty urban shell. The wish to see them return was a leitmotif of much Pompeian literature and painting, as well as a phantasm hidden beneath much more sober reportage. Pompeii was ‘‘an antique city whose inhabitants had fled yesterday,’’ Creuze´ wrote, but who ‘‘would still recognize it today.’’108 Bulwer-Lytton had felt a ‘‘keen desire’’ after his visit ‘‘to people once more those deserted streets . . . [and] wake to a second existence—the City of the Dead!’’109 Alfred de Curzon’s painting, Un Reˆve dans les ruines de Pompe´i (1866), directly portrays this poetic act: a dreaming poet, seated at a triclinium in the ruins with Vesuvius in the background, conjures up the ancient inhabitants (fig. 5).110 The ghostly city consistently prompted visitors to imagine their imminent return: ‘‘when the form of the place has been conserved so intact,’’ Gautier noted, ‘‘it seems strange that life should have withdrawn, and one is led to believe at every moment that the old hosts are going to reappear.’’111 In Arria Marcella, he had realized this very phantasm by depicting a young dreamer who sees the city come alive as he strolls through its ruins at night. This recurrent phantasm expresses naı¨vely the deeper desire to see that intangible notion, civilization, in the form of a moving, living tableau. The dead vestiges and the abstract idea, two lifeless poles, had to be joined and animated by an agent; it became imperative to see how people had produced, used, and experienced their culture, and this question took the modern form

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:05:21

PS

PAGE 78

The Archaeological Turn 79

Figure 5. Paul Alfred de Curzon (1820–95), A Dream in the Ruins of Pompeii (1866). Muse´e Leon Alegre, Bagnols-sur-Ceze, France. Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY.

of an inquiry into private and everyday life—realities much more central to civilization than the old political history. The desire to ‘‘penetrate at a glance all these interior mysteries, all these domestic details that historians neglect’’ shifted the focus away from the great events.112 It was rooted in a reaction against the public character of classical history and a newfound interest in the ethnography of antiquity which paralleled the autoethnography that realists such as Balzac undertook for contemporary France. The novel had indeed broken new ground for history in this domain, thanks in part to Walter Scott’s interest in ‘‘the private life of our ancestors’’ and recourse to overlooked details which ‘‘throw considerable light upon the vie prive´e of our forefathers.’’113 The shift in focus from public to private antiquity is apparent already in Chateaubriand, who saw Pompeii as a vivid illustration of ‘‘the domestic history of the Roman people’’ and raised the humble ‘‘domestic dwellings’’ over the ‘‘public monuments’’ as the true building blocks of ‘‘cities properly speaking.’’114 Franc¸ois Mazois’s volume on the ‘‘private dwellings’’ affirmed their equal if not greater value: ‘‘they offer the curious tableau of private life among the simple citizens.’’115 Mme de Stae¨l in turn cited the comparison with Rome to stress what was truly novel about Pompeii: ‘‘in

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:05:33

PS

PAGE 79

80 c h a p t e r 3

Figure 6. The Temple of Augustus (1897). From Carl Weichardt, Pompeji vor der Zerstoerung (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1897). Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University Library. Photo: John Blazejewski.

Rome, one finds hardly anything but the debris of public monuments, and these monuments only recount the political history of bygone centuries; but at Pompeii it’s the private life of the ancients that you see before you just as it was.’’116 She went on to highlight the ‘‘frighteningly well preserved . . . domestic usages’’ which ‘‘the sudden interruption of life’’ had frozen in a catastrophic light: ‘‘The amphoras are still prepared for the feast the following day; the flour which would soon be kneaded is still there; the remains of a woman are still decked out with the jewels she was wearing on the feast day that the volcano troubled’’ (300). It was such humble vestiges that opened a unique window on the little known daily and private life of antiquity (fig. 6). This revelation was not due to ‘‘isolated inscriptions’’ or ‘‘dubious statues’’ but to what Ernest Breton called ‘‘the complete material of existence.’’117 Visitors at Pompeii consequently began to privilege domestic interiors over public space and to pay equal attention to humble and princely dwellings. Creuze´ remarked that ‘‘the antiquarians at Pompeii greatly admired a small temple of Isis, but there are ancient temples elsewhere, and only there can you find Roman houses and streets.’’118 Gaston Boissier, echoing Fiorelli, wrote that interest shifted from

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:05:46

PS

PAGE 80

The Archaeological Turn 81

the villas of the wealthy to the ‘‘dwellings of the poor with their humble utensils and vulgar caricatures.’’119 Attention shifted from Rome to Pompeii, from public archictecture to private dwellings, and from the forum to domestic space: ‘‘what we should seek’’ at Pompeii, Breton wrote, ‘‘is mainly the knowledge of the private life of the Romans for which we would interrogate the Coliseum or the Pantheon in vain.’’120 The centrality of everyday life to the study of civilization can be gauged by the importance journalists attached to it. Urban journalists such as LouisSe´bastien Mercier and Restif de la Bretonne had already pioneered a new form of reportage in the late eighteenth century on the sites, customs, types, microevents, and institutions of Paris destined for a long afterlife. One of their disciples, Victor de Jouy¨, the self-styled hermit of the Chausse´e-d’Antin, makes the connection between such ethnographic journalism and archaeology explicit: in order to legitimize his own enterprise, he imagines that ‘‘in the excavations of Herculaneum or Pompeii the manuscript of some Hermit of the Janicule or the Aventine Hill were found, who, like me, had been busy in his lifetime collecting and publishing his observations on the manners of the people of Rome.’’121 However trivial, such a text would accumulate value over time by preserving an image of the daily life of ‘‘that majestic people of which historians only show us the big picture.’’ Its very triviality would no doubt appear fresh and truthful beside the great narratives by allowing us to ‘‘observe these masters of the world in the interior of their private life, to follow them to the baths, the forum, the dining room, the theater, and to study the domestic manners that contemporary historians have neglected to paint in their faintest gestures.’’ The interest in the private life of antiquity thus exactly parallels the modern mapping of domestic space that Balzac would pioneer in his Sce`nes de la vie prive´e, and it is not too much to say that the ethnographic impulse of Balzac and the physiologists of modern life was itself deeply archaeological, committed to creating a durable literary archive of the daily life that political history neglected. The scopic drive to penetrate the dwellings of the Pompeians also often carried an erotic charge that explains its intensity; the desire to see and know sublimated an imaginary possession: ‘‘as we penetrate into each house,’’ Ke´ratry wrote, ‘‘our eyes are regaled with the private life of the patricians, the Pompeian beauties, and the slaves who will perish in the games of the arena.’’122 Even the scientific urge to ‘‘enter their private life’’ to ‘‘divine their intimate feelings, their mutual relations, their hatreds, their affections’’ clearly has voyeuristic roots.123 Such sublimation also colors the utopian idealizations

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:05:47

PS

PAGE 81

82 c h a p t e r 3

Figure 7. Jules-Fre´de´ric Bouchet (1799–1860), Ancient Scene in a Palace at Pompeii. Photo: Michele Bellot. Muse´e Vivenal, Compiegne, France. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

of ancient life, which often vindicate the body’s needs: sex, for Taine, was a simple biological function at Pompeii, while Renan contemplated ‘‘the fresh . . . impression of the voluptuous existence that the Romans who liked the ‘Greek life’ led there in the first century.’’124 The abundant erotic art, phallic emblems, and brothels also fed the perception of Pompeii as ‘‘a city of pleasure,’’ in the words of the marquis de Nadaillac (1807–1904), an earnest Catholic archaeologist who felt that ‘‘a joie de vivre dominated all the passions of this happy people’’ among whom ‘‘a brothel was one of the remarkable buildings.’’125 Gautier’s story of course turns on the power of desire to resurrect a Pompeian woman. Penetration and animation thus go hand in hand, and the desire to surprise life is also what infuses it in the inhabitants. Depictions of Pompeian interiors would often combine scopic curiosity, as a result, with a mise-en-sce`ne of seduction; Jules-Fre´de´ric Bouchet’s Ancient Scene in a Palace at Pompeii, for example, shows a scantily dressed couple embracing in a secluded recess below the statue of a Venus Pudica (fig. 7).

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:05:59

PS

PAGE 82

The Archaeological Turn 83

The interest in the private, domestic, daily life of antiquity goes hand in hand with the rise of a new individual: the anonymous town dweller. The archaeological gaze conjured up the nameless Pompeian rather than Hegel’s world-historical individual. Charles Bonucci evokes this average being when guiding visitors through his dwelling: ‘‘[here] . . . the Pompeian relaxed in the pleasures of the bath’’ and here he enjoyed learned conversations; in the tranquil Street of the Tombs, ‘‘the Pompeian rested below the cypress trees.’’126 Boissier also imagines repopulating Pompeii with its nameless citizens, regrouped into ‘‘a sort of tableau vivant of the popular classes of the empire.’’127 For him it is the authorless graffiti, not the great writers, that ‘‘seems to restore the inhabitants to us. Pompeii comes alive and is peopled once more when we read them’’ (401). Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii is of course the supreme example of a text that penetrates the city’s private life and resurrects a broad cross-section of the population (patricians, slaves, merchants, gladiators, priests, Greek colonists, early Christians). The centrality of the anonymous citizen reflects the newfound importance of this concept in the social sciences and modern literature. The social types of the physiologies and the Come´die humaine, the faceless crowds of Zola’s novels, the random bypassers in Baudelaire all pointed to the anonymous being forged by the abstract equality of modern bourgeois society. Guizot’s lectures on civilization often invoked the nameless burghers of the twelfth century—their fortified towns, manly conduct, hardy lifestyle, and fierce independence—as an agent of history. ‘‘The French nation descends,’’ he wrote, ‘‘from the burghers who obscurely though courageously revolted in the twelfth century.’’128 The work of civilization was the product of a vast number of anonymous actions, the gradual creation of silent subjects whose aggregate labors had forged modern commerce, laws, technology, and institutions. The long obscure struggle of the burghers to win municipal freedoms founded modern liberal society, a thesis Augustin Thierry would amplify in his Essai sur la formation du Tiers E´tat (1853), and Jules Michelet endorse by ascribing the French Revolution to anonymous actors. The politics of bourgeois legitimacy after 1789 had in part come to rest on the recognition of a collective nameless agent. Even the prehistoric populations of Europe should not be forgotten: thus the Swiss lake dwellers had for ‘‘twenty centuries . . . prepared the soil for the civilization it now carries’’ and earned ‘‘their title to our pious gratitude.’’129 Civilization, then, was a bourgeois idea: it relocated agency in a faceless people, in the struggles of daily life, and in the manners elaborated in the domestic sphere.

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:06:00

PS

PAGE 83

84 c h a p t e r 3

Archaeology at Pompeii clearly reflects this bourgeois vindication of private life and anonymous individuals. The nameless ‘‘Pompeian’’ was a hero of the modern bourgeois epic of civilization. Curiously, this perspective did not inspire any excavation of class struggles at Pompeii—as it had in Guizot’s history and Scott’s novels. If the historical novel of the Middle Ages had traced the origin ‘‘of our present institutions’’ to the ‘‘struggles for liberty and for justice,’’ antiquity seemed to diffract such issues beyond recognition.130 The groundswell that reshaped the ancient world at Pompeii was instead the spread of Christianity, seen as a force regenerating Rome and its decadent patricians from within; the plays, novels, and poems of Pompeii endlessly recycled this theme. Bulwer exploits the contrast between ‘‘the hollow but majestic civilization of Rome’’ and ‘‘the early struggles of Christianity’’ (viii–ix). The nameless martyrs of the religious revolution take the place of the modern class struggle: ‘‘one is . . . overcome with respect,’’ Ke´ratry wrote, ‘‘at the sight of these inert bones and the thought that they were present at the mysteries of the first century of Christianity.’’131

Antiquity as Presence A living image of civilization arose out of a series of progressive syntheses: artifacts were reinserted into dwellings, houses woven into an urban fabric, and the city interpreted as an embodiment of civilization. This spectacle was the outcome of long reorganization of the gaze and not a specter that emerged spontaneously from the ground, but its fascination paradoxcially stemmed from a powerful illusion of immediacy. Indeed, the impression of beholding a ‘‘lost civilization’’ directly was the final poetic payoff for the archaeologist who had sacrificed aesthetic delight: the presence of the past replaced the presence of the artwork. The experience of presence thus lies at the core of the archaeological imagination and constitutes a veritable leitmotif in romantic writing about historical vestiges: the mystique of presence is, as it were, the secret theology that drives this secular cult of relics. ‘‘One has the sense of being transported into antiquity,’’ Stendhal wrote about Pompeii, where he felt a direct, almost personal relation with the past: ‘‘it’s a great pleasure to see this antiquity face-to-face.’’132 This relation abolishes time and death; the past is miraculously alive, rather than a remote ideal filtered through texts and commentaries. Time and again, texts stress the facial character of this visual communion, as if the past had not just been embodied but also person-

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:06:01

PS

PAGE 84

The Archaeological Turn 85

ified, condensed into a personal encounter, as often happens in archaeological fictions; in Arria Marcella, for instance, the signal that Pompeii has revived is that ‘‘Octavien finds himself face-to-face with a handsome young man,’’ and soon thereafter Arria herself materializes as an erotic emblem of the lost city: ‘‘he found himself face-to-face with his chimera, one of the most intangible ones, a retrospective chimera.’’133 But even more sober accounts succumb to abstract personifications: ‘‘it’s the real thing, living antiquity in person,’’ Breton remarked, ‘‘one feels it, sees it [and] touches it’’ (6). There was no need to pass through dead letters since the past was physically open to direct personal contact, dialogue, and communion. This is not to suggest that Pompeii’s unique preservation alone could procure this experience of immediacy. Museums, novels, chronicles, and paintings, even smells, could produce the same sense of presence. Immediacy was not located in a certain place but, rather, within the restructured gaze that the tourist at Pompeii shared with readers and museumgoers. Saint-Non had created an imaginary tableau by projecting the museum’s artifacts into the temple of Isis. Dumas, too, had extrapolated a vision of ancient life from the utensils displayed at Portici: ‘‘ancient life, positive life is there . . . you see the ancients eat and drink here, when in our theater they only eat and drink to poison each other.’’134 If his antiliterary reaction recalls the epistemological shift from words to things that supports the experience of presence, this poetic illusion in no way excludes textual mediation; literature is often its supreme vehicle, in fact, as Carlyle, speaking of Jocelyn’s medieval chronicle, makes clear: ‘‘by means of certain confused Papers,’’ he wrote, we are transported ‘‘into a somewhat remote Century’’ and can ‘‘look face to face on it.’’135 Though words are essentially the absence of the things they signify, and irremediably embody this absence, it is also in their essence to try to abolish this deficiency by simulating presence; literature can thus also produce the illusion that archaeology sought in objects. It was a hallmark of romantic literature—especially the historical kind—to abolish the gap imposed by verbal representation and transport readers by powerful pictorial devices. The best example of this ambition is no doubt Prosper de Barante’s popular Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, whose author tried to satisfy the modern reader’s desire to ‘‘know the existence of peoples and individuals before us’’ and to see them ‘‘reconducted living before our eyes.’’136 Obtrusive analysis could only undermine this visual imperative by interposing a level of doubt, conjectures, and textual mediations, which, in Barante’s view, could serve no intellectual purpose since ‘‘there is

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:06:01

PS

PAGE 85

86 c h a p t e r 3

nothing as impartial as the imagination: it has no need to draw conclusions; it is enough that a tableau of the truth should come to be drawn before it’’ (36). Such a tableau would give direct access to history, making all further commentary superfluous, since the greatest understanding came from an ‘‘intimate knowledge of what one has seen happen’’ (13–14). The distance between reader and eyewitness would ideally be reduced to zero, making the former ‘‘a contemporary of the fifteenth century . . . liv[ing] in the middle of [the events]’’ (20).137 Barante went about fabricating this face-to-face relation by rewriting the ‘‘naive chronicles’’ in a limpid modern idiom that made both author and text evaporate from the reconstituted scene. His visual poetics recalls Leopold von Ranke’s oracular claim to represent the past wie es eigentlich gewesen (‘‘how, essentially, things happened’’),138 often read as the manifesto for a new positivist history, but no doubt also rooted in the romantic dream of a representation that is also a presentation and a resurrection.139 Barante and Ranke could be said to translate the archaeological model of a face-to-face encounter into historiography. Ranke’s intellectual ideal is already implicit in Mme de Stae¨l’s visual impression that at Pompeii ‘‘it’s the private life of the ancients that stands before you just as it was.’’140 The illusion of presence that texts, ruins, and museums can produce in the viewer finally points to the operation that lies at the core of the archaeological gaze: the resurrection of the past. Immediacy implied that the lost or fragmented past had been mended, reassembled, and made whole again. If illusion was an end in itelf, its ontological premise was a serious ethical ambition, the desire to reconstruct worlds that history had shattered. To excavate a civilization was not just to recover its debris or conjure up a fascinating illusion, but to rescue it, as it were, from continued death by reuniting its disjecta membra into a living whole. Archaeology resurrected the past: this metaphor was perhaps implicit in the act of digging, but in the nineteenth century the mere discovery of vestiges came to coincide with their resurrection. Saint-Non makes this equation explicit at Herculaneum: ‘‘let’s try to sketch the history of its discovery, and, so to speak, of its resurrection.’’141 To exhume Pompeii was in itself to restore it to light and life: ‘‘modern life,’’ Gautier wrote, ‘‘has come to wake up ancient life. This city, suddenly swallowed up, . . . has been instantly resuscitated.’’142 Likewise, for E´lise´e Reclus, ‘‘archeology has resuscitated’’ the Swiss lake dwellers just ‘‘by examining the debris found in the mud of the lakes.’’143 However self-evident such claims appear, mere exposure had not always implied revival, especially since this is to attribute a divine power to the archaeologist which the humble grave

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:06:01

PS

PAGE 86

The Archaeological Turn 87

Figure 8. Despre´s, View of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii in Its Current State (1779). From Richard de Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque a` Naples et Sicile (Paris: Dufour et Cie, 1781–86). Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

robber had never claimed.144 And divine this power truly was because archaeology was seen as a magic operation that effortlessly revived the past: to get from buried potsherd to shining temple, it was enough to flick the wand. The major publications of engravings from Pompeii testify to the instant and uncanny character of archaeological resurrection: Saint-Non, Franc¸ois Mazois, William Gell, and Carl Weichardt all drew sumptuous recreations right beside their drawings of the actual ruins. An exhibition of ‘‘photosculptural views’’ of Pompeii in Paris in 1874 also mobilized this device.145 This rhetorical juxtaposition of ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’ allowed the amateur to pass quickly from ruin to restoration without seeing the labor involved—and thereby to admire the archaeologist’s prowess even more. As George Seure put it during a projection of parallel photos at the Muse´e Pe´dagogique in 1907: ‘‘it is useful . . . to contemplate simultaneously the two views, which illuminate each other and make it plain how much work the archeologist has to perform to reconstruct the past on the ruins of the present’’146 (figs. 8 and 9). This leap could evidently be hard to perform, and Gautier’s praise of ‘‘the obliging erudition’’ of Pietro Rosa, his guide at the Palatine Hill in 1869,

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:06:09

PS

PAGE 87

88 c h a p t e r 3

Figure 9. Despre´s, The Temple of Isis at Pompeii as It Must Have Been in the Year 79. From Richard de Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque a` Naples et Sicile (Paris: Dufour et Cie, 1781–86). Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

hints at this prestigious power: ‘‘in these ruins, the beauty has vanished, and the science of an architect is necessary to erect once more, through an ideal restoration, all these scattered fragments.’’147 The poet evidently possessed his own magic power, the imagination, on which he could draw to fill in the ruins more impressionistically, as Gautier illustrates in Arria Marcella when his hero sees ‘‘the missing parts grow back in half-tones, and a sudden moonbeam . . . sketch out a ruined ensemble. The voiceless spirits of the night seemed to have repaired the fossil city for some spectacle of fantastic life.’’148 The poetic faculty easily achieves at night what reason could not accomplish at day: ‘‘he saw, in a perfect state of integrity, the portico whose structure he had [earlier] tried to grasp’’ (253). This poetic shortcut, however, does not so much negate the laborious path of erudition as mimic the magic gesture attributed to it. The poet’s fantastic reanimation and the scholar’s visual reconstruction both eliminate the viewer’s labor, and lend support to the magic notion that mere discovery implies resurrection.

................. 17036$

$CH3

09-26-08 11:06:18

PS

PAGE 88

four The Specular Past

The literary recovery of the past favors a visual language in the nineteenth century and tends to make use of various forms of optical mediation: lost landscapes resurface through the medium of visions, paintings, mirages, panoramas, dioramas, and magic mirrors. When Gautier revives Pompeii, he invokes one of the new popular technologies of optical illusion: ‘‘the city was peopled gradually like one of those tableaux in a diorama, at first deserted, but whose figures, invisible until then, a modification of the lighting begins to reveal.’’1 Historians and poets exploit such spectacular visual rhetoric chiefly for two reasons: first, because it favors the reader’s illusion of being contemporary with events and, second, because it buttresses the implicit philosophical desire to affirm the continued existence of the past. These two are clearly connected: it is the reader’s experience of eyewitnessing that overcomes his instinctive incredulity at the integral survival of the past. The visual communion with history is not just a question of feeding the public sensational spectacles, but an existential issue that concerns the ontological status of both the past and the viewer. Balzac provides a good example of the existential stakes involved in seeing the past come alive at the end of Splendeurs et mise`res des courtisanes (1847). There the hero, Lucien de Rubempre´, is imprisoned in the Conciergerie after failing to make his way in nineteenth-century Paris, and just as he is about to commit suicide, a consoling hallucination transports him into the restored medieval monument that once occupied the prison’s place. The ancient palace of Saint-Louis, Balzac recalls, has been modified in modern times, when ‘‘cells to lodge as many defendants as possible’’ had been jammed

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:34

PS

PAGE 89

90 c h a p t e r 4

between the old Gothic pillars in a ‘‘prostitution of one of France’s greatest memories.’’2 Lucien’s private failure resonates with Balzac’s jaundiced view of modernity as a fall from feudal splendor, and his last-minute vision of ‘‘the Palace in all its primitive beauty’’ suggests not just his own but also the country’s redemption through this flashback to the world of divine monarchy. ‘‘The residence of Saint Louis reappeared just as it had been, [and] he admired its Babylonian proportions and oriental fantasies’’ (473). Balzac here mobilizes the visual language of ‘‘hallucination’’ (also the chapter’s title) to explain Lucien’s experience, noting that under great stress ‘‘specters’’ and ‘‘phantoms’’ can surface and that ‘‘dreams then become embodied, [while] vanished things relive in their original shapes’’ (473). The monument recovers its original state through a process that recalls the reverse engineering that Viollet-le-Duc would soon perform at medieval churches and fortresses such as Ve´ze´lay and Carcassonne. Such is the comforting mirage that the shock of modernity triggers in Lucien, and which reconciles him with his death: ‘‘while preparing himself to die, he wondered how such a marvel could still exist unknown in Paris.’’ A faint echo of the sages of antiquity, he calmly accepts death before this vision of an enduring past in which visuality overcomes mortality. What this psychological state of grace highlights is the tension between the presence of the image and the ontological vacuum of the past, between simulacrum and being. The insubstantiality of the past cedes before an undeniable visual experience. The historical imagination did not require the advent of the photograph, which, as Barthes has argued, conveys an irrefutable ‘‘having-been-there,’’ to invest images with our faith in the perpetuity of the past. Spectral representations (ghosts, icons, portraits, masks, and visions) have of course always mediated between the here and the beyond and projected the shadows of the past on the present. The spectral image is structured diachronically, arched between emptiness and plenitude, luminous being and vacuous deceit; it bridges two incommensurable worlds like the light from remote stars arriving on earth. This spectral poetics of presence is clearly no novelty, but the romantic period transforms it, for the first time, into the nucleus of its relation to history. The importance of the visual in the poetics of recovery has produced an often recurring phantasm: the allegorical dream of excavating actual paintings from the earth, as if the ambition to forge a historical simulacrum had created a material correlative in the soil. The ‘‘Jeune enchanteur,’’ for example, a story that Baudelaire translated, takes its cue from ‘‘a large fresco’’ excavated at Pompeii in 1815 in the ‘‘presence of the king of Naples’’ and depicting a

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:35

PS

PAGE 90

The Specular Past 91

group of nymphs behind which a gallant Amor whispers mysteriously.3 It is this enigmatic image that first triggers the return to antiquity, soon completed by a papyrus recounting the story behind the fresco. If the text ends up explaining the mysterious image, it is nonetheless the fresco that first secures a direct visual channel to the past. In Gautier’s Roman de la momie, likewise, the Egyptian queen’s mummy first yields an immediate plastic image of the past, before a papyrus roll unpacks the details of her tragic love story. Her royal body ensures the ‘‘real presence’’ of history, as it were, prior to any textual exposure, as if her imago opened the breach through which language flows. Texts may present themselves as the necessary supplements to the silent image, but to realize this ambition often means a becomingimage of the text itself: thus Maisony de Laure´al likens his pseudoepic L’He´racle´ade to a ‘‘modern copy of an ancient and noble painting, unearthed as it were with Herculaneum, and perhaps destroyed today.’’4 The poem encodes its labor of visual re-presentation, its desire to overcome the alienation of language, through this identification with an excavated painting. The idea that an image of the past could be retrieved directly from the ground, that archaeology dug up crystal balls, is indeed a major romantic myth, one Gautier perfectly illustrates before a subterranean trompe-l’oeil painting of a window opening on a Roman street that he saw on the Palatine Hill. This image is an archaeological fable: it is as if the act of digging had ‘‘suddenly opened a window on Antiquity through which one saw Rome as if one were the contemporary of Augustus.’’5 In the new mythology of the nineteenth century, the earth functions as a vast storehouse harboring a visual archive of the past.

Visual Ontology: Spatializing Time It is not surprising that a visual language dominates the rhetoric of resurrection: images favor an ontological illusion that verbal signs, diffracted through space, time, and grammar, can never approximate. The ancestors in Rome were perpetuated by death masks, or imagines, rather than by textual facsimiles; the word is not nearly so much flesh as the image. The visual mode suits romantic historicism well because it abolishes temporality, extracts a fixed image from the flux of time, and projects the entropic axis of narrative into the utopian economy of the spatial enclosure. Pictures are an antidote to decay, and their fixity stands for immutability. While G. E. Lessing’s Laokoon

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:36

PS

PAGE 91

92 c h a p t e r 4

(1766) had decisively undermined the ut pictura poesis tradition, arguing that poetry was an art of time and action, while painting was spatial and descriptive, and recommending that each art respect these limits, this artistic division of labor would prove a fruitful source of tension for Romanticism. By violating the time/space frontier, the historian could project the fleeting past of narrative into the perpetual present of the image. Jules Michelet, for example, in his famous Tableau de la France, abruptly interrupts the progress of his medieval history with a panoramic view of France as it might appear from a Jura summit; this vista transcends the flux of narration, gathers the fleeting march of events into a timeless spectacle, and telescopes the contingency of historical destiny into an essential vision of France.6 The visual abstracts from time—it immobolizes and embalms. It is perhaps Michelet’s friend, Edgar Quinet, who provides the most telling example of how panoramic visuality neutralizes time. In his late romantic epic of natural history, La Cre´ation (1869), written in exile in Switzerland, Quinet, overlooking the Alps, tries to assemble the ages of the earth into a single vista. Blurring the line between spatial and temporal vision, he gazes out simultaneously over an alpine landscape and the earth’s geological history; his domination of the landscape is also a mastery over the receding past: ‘‘I perceive, unfolding before me, like the circles of Dante, a series of landscapes succeeding each other and receding from age to age.’’7 While the code of perspective normally denotes spatial distance, in Quinet’s panorama the receding planes stand for geological eras spreading out concentrically around the viewer toward an archaic horizon. ‘‘The world of today is only the foreground of these landscapes . . . that only reveal themselves to me . . . to mark a background that always slips further away, quaternary, tertiary, jurassic, liassic, triassic, carboniferous, silurian, devonian’’ (1:29). By transposing history into space, stratifications into receding planes, Quinet constructs a composite landscape that condenses the geological past into a visual totalization that makes him the ‘‘contemporary of lost ages’’ (1:28).8 Aside from just visualizing remote periods, this image also makes them ontologically equal, copresent and coeternal in an anachronistic visual field. If the panorama is the privileged visual form for such omnitemporal spectacles, many others are possible, for instance the long frieze Hugo unravels at the outset of La Le´gende des sie`cles, grounding his fragmented epic of humanity in an inaugural vision of the ‘‘wall of the centuries,’’ a vast horizontal monument made of the debris of every age.9 A divine gaze that envisages world history sub specie aeternitatis is implicit in all such spectacles.10 Quinet’s and Hugo’s use of

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:36

PS

PAGE 92

The Specular Past 93

visual codes to master time are not isolated examples. As Reinhart Koselleck has argued, time has always been conceptualized in Western cultures in spatial terms, so that our ability to think time, and hence tame it, is firmly tied to a regime of visual representation.11 When romantic historians, from Barante to Michelet, exploit visual codes, they inevitably do so as part of an unconscious strategy to slow, contain, or spatialize a flow of events. The tableau disarms time: it ensures that the fleeting events and words that narrate them resist dispersal and become gathered into the closed economy of the monument. One historian in particular, Lord Macaulay, has left valuable testimony to the importance he attaches to the image in his essay on ‘‘History’’ (1828), which is worth examining in detail. In order to sketch a portrait of the ideal historian, he turns ‘‘to the analogous art of portrait-painting.’’12 The good portrait performs a crucial operation which the historian should emulate: far from being a simple snapshot, it absorbs the entire biography of the sitter into a single visual representation. Macaulay has in mind ‘‘portraits which condense into one point of time, and exhibit, at a single glance, the whole history of turbid and eventful lives’’ (187). Such temporal condensation comes across as a utopian model for a romantic historiography eager to grasp and solidify an intangible duration. While the merely picturesque helps to capture a modern public of novel readers and reinvest the turf usurped by Scott, the pictorial, on a deeper level, transcends the tragic medium of history itself. It enables the historiographer to absorb and transubstantiate the elusive flow of events into bright pictures detached from the axis of perpetual becoming. The term Macaulay uses, portrait, should be understood broadly in this context to apply not just to individual actors but also to larger unities, such as cities, nations, and periods, which can be condensed into tableaux. ‘‘The perfect historian,’’ as Macaulay writes, ‘‘is he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature’’ (225), just as a biography is telescoped into the portrait. Merely recounting a series of actions and a concatenation of events, without giving them volume and depth, risks reenacting their historical dispersal within the narrative itself, where they will once more evaporate after filing past the reader. It is the literary act of imprinting actions on the retina that transforms them into durable memories and reverses the entropic thrust of narrative. Macaulay insists that ‘‘changes of manners’’ be represented not just by ‘‘a few general phrases,’’ but ‘‘by appropriate images,’’ and that the historian should ‘‘intersperse’’ among ‘‘the battles [and] the sieges . . . the details which are the charm of historical

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:36

PS

PAGE 93

94 c h a p t e r 4

romances’’ (225–26). This remark evidently registers the shift, dating back to the eighteenth century, from military and political history to the history of civilization which we find in Voltaire, Adam Ferguson, and Legrand d’Aussy, but its stress on the visual also connects this paradigm shift with the urge to capture the being of societies rather than their surface turmoil. The wish to exploit local color in the agon with the novelist conceals the more pressing imperative of engraving the past in memory and thereby bestowing permanence on it: history ‘‘would not merely be traced on the mind, but branded into it’’ (228). Macaulay here anticipates the principle that would soon guide Baudelaire’s art criticism, namely that the quality of a painting can be measured by the intensity of the afterimage it leaves: ‘‘memory [is] the great criterion of art,’’ he would write; ‘‘art is a mnemotechnics of beauty.’’ Baudelaire’s rejection of eclecticism would be summed up in the damning charge that ‘‘the work of an eclectic artist leaves no memory.’’13 This convergence comes as no surprise given Baudelaire’s well-known preoccupation with modernity as a transitory flux from which the artist must distill the eternal element of beauty. Romantic historians had intuitively put this visual ‘‘mnemotechnics’’ into practice long before Baudelaire theorizes it. This operation may occur intermittently, as when Michelet inserts his Tableau de la France into his narration or Hugo freezes the action of Notre-Dame de Paris to paint a panorama of the medieval city; but the visual engraving can also be continuous, coterminous with a narrative so vivid that it keeps depositing a visual residue. Barante had thus justified a purely narrative over a reflective history in which ‘‘nothing strikes the imagination, nothing remains in the memory except for an opinion on the things of the past’’; narrative, on the contrary, gave rise to ‘‘those lively memories that a sort of sympathy with the actions imprints on the mind.’’14 Visualization prompts memorialization; the imago engraves. Macaulay concurs that such sympathy stems from ‘‘the art of narration, the art of interesting the affections and presenting pictures to the imagination’’ (221). It is quite immaterial, then, in the end, whether the optical imprinting is intermittent (the tableau) or continuous (the vivid narrative), since both forms express and counteract the same anxiety of memory. Macaulay’s distillation of time into portraits is also associated with a second visual operation: the condsensation of any given moment, itself infinitely rich, into a finite image that can capture its totality. A perfect history would ‘‘record ALL the slightest particulars of the slightest transactions,’’ but in practice even the most copious work retains ‘‘an infinitely small proportion

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:37

PS

PAGE 94

The Specular Past 95

to what is suppressed’’ and must appear infinitesimal ‘‘when compared with the immense mass of facts’’ left out (188). Macaulay here confronts the inability of words to fully represent anything and the entropy intrinsic to verbal transcriptions of the world; selection, hence forgetting, must occur in the face-off between finite signs and a protean world.15 Such loss is evidently the condition for reality to emerge at all in language, but this disjunction had so far remained unproblematic for classical historiography which grounded its nobility precisely on selection, forgetting, and idealization and constituted the dignity of memory through its rejection of the trivial. Macaulay in turn protests against the ‘‘aristocratical contempt’’ of heroic history for all that is ‘‘too trivial for the majesty of history’’ (221). Such noble oblivion strikes him as a useless prejudice, even if, unlike Michelet, he exhibits no religious impulse to redeem the past in its totality. He flatly asserts, on the contrary, that ‘‘no past event has any intrinsic importance’’ and a bit lamely limits the purpose of history to helping us ‘‘form just calculations with respect to the future’’ (222), a utilitarian restatement of the historia magistra vitae topos that had started to lose ground in the late eighteenth century.16 Rather than espouse the romantic credo that ‘‘every event has intrinsic importance,’’ Macaulay formulates its skeptical inversion—but his target here is less the utopia of a total memory than the heroic claim that only a select few deeds merit recording. The claim, as such, comprises its own antithesis, since if nothing is intrinsically meaningful then any detail can potentially carry great weight; as in Flaubert’s poetics, where the equal banality of everything opens the novel to a world of infinite details, the devaluation promotes. The historian can no longer uncritically select data according to the old hierarchies, and it is here that the modern desire for a total record does mark Macaulay’s thought: ‘‘no history can present us with the whole truth,’’ he admits, ‘‘but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole’’ (188). Selection should thus operate symbolically, making the finite text recover an impossible totality by means of poetic condensation. The ideal history would outwit the dilemma of selection by distilling the world into its words and thereby achieve what Luka´cs ascribes to art rather than science—a totality that is closed and symbolic rather open and cumulative.17 A metaphor illustrates this scheme for a total representation: the perspectival painting. ‘‘History has its foreground and its background: and it is principally in the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another’’ (189). Figuring history as a receding landscape is a way of preserving the dream of a total

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:37

PS

PAGE 95

96

chapter 4

representation; it incorporates oblivion within the picture itself as the invisible mass around which the painted world is structured. ‘‘Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon’’—lost as distinct particulars, that is, but still subtly imparting ‘‘their joint effect’’ to all that remains visible. Such an image would explode the monopoly of the foreground which had led royal historiographers, in Thierry’s words, ‘‘to conceal the whole mass of the nation behind court mantles.’’18 Macaulay’s use of perspective, unlike Quinet’s, does not equate spatial regression with a return to primitive times but with the inexhaustibility of a single moment. The painting encloses this unrepresentable totality in a square frame and recuperates the details lost in the hazy backdrop as an ineffable aura. Both the portrait, then, and the perspective permit Macaulay to package history visually, first as as duration compressed into a still image, and second as a social totality mapped along a spatial regression. These two rhetorical uses of painting, as condensed narrative and total mimesis, as duration and extension, exploit the image as a bulwark against memory loss. To these two visual operations can be added a third, perhaps more obviously associated with romantic historicism: a tendency to abolish the representational gap between picture and world, word and thing. The new expressive regime that marks romantic literature seeks, as has long been recognized, to make words thinglike and grant things voices in a radical cratylic gesture that would topple the deceitful edifice of rhetoric and deliver language over to being.19 The capital role the image plays in this poetic program is by no means accidental, given the perception that it reflects the world less arbitrarily than words and conveys being more directly. In this reverse platonism, where the sensible surpasses the intelligible, the image is valorized as a privileged form of access to absent beings because it more readily blurs the line between signs and things, makes things present, and grants them being. It is in this light that the romantic leitmotif of transporting readers into the world depicted should be read, rather than strictly as a tenet of poetic sensationalism. Montalembert, the Catholic art critic, can here exemplify this attitude; in his hagiography of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, in which he aspires to paint ‘‘a faithful image of the habits and manners of society in a period when the reign of the church and of chivalry were at their apogee,’’ he strikes the pose of a textual pilgrim reconstructing the ‘‘entire edifice’’ of the thirteenth century. The effort to transport the reader into Elizabeth’s world seamlessly

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:38

PS

PAGE 96

The Specular Past 97

blends religious faith and literary illusion-making: ‘‘you see the abbey, the church, the cathedral rise up again in all their splendor and beauty; you fancy you are walking under its majestic vaults, amid the crowd of the faithful, surrounded by the symbolic pomp . . . of the ancient cult.’’20 However one views this Catholic nostalgia, the poetic restoration here is not primarily sensational, designed to feed what Balzac called a ‘‘people of eyes.’’ The simulacrum here surges forth so vividly that it both replaces and redeems the absent thing, and while the operation presupposes belief it also reinforces it. Just as the ritual reenactment of myths always makes their substance contemporary again, so the poetic convocation of a world of faith makes it absolutely present here. The religious subtext in this example makes the ritual aspect especially visible, but the point is that it is present also in more profane restorations, such as Hugo’s medieval Paris, Flaubert’s Carthage, and Gautier’s Egypt, since the ‘‘lost world’’ has itself become a modern secular myth. The mythical content is in both cases strictly analogous, since the reader’s faith in the reality of the image is ultimately invoked to guarantee his own survival; since the palace of Saint-Louis still exists, Lucien need not fear death; since Carthage has not been forgotten, Flaubert, too, might be remembered. The referential collapse of image and world thus inaugurates a circuit of faith in which our own memory is ritually bound up with the miracle of historical resurrection. It is not surprising, then, that poets favor sacred sites and monuments embodying enduring identities, such as Notre-Dame, Saint-Denis, Dijon, Jerusalem, and Rome, for their ritual recreations.21 Symbols of transhistorical identities, their fragility still echoes the individual’s, and the poet’s labor of restoration binds their two destinies together. At the deepest level, then, visual resurrections restore resurrection itself; they revive revival and credit faith. The nostalgia intrinsic to Romanticism is less for a specific age than for a cultural space in which the faith in enduring entities such as souls, cathedrals, religions, and civilizations was still possible. The century of the steam engine can put no more faith in personal immortality than in the eternity of the social order: the soul’s impermanence reflects that of the modern industrial landscape. To resurrect the past amid this whirlwind of change is to perform a ritual of continuity that also fabricates the specter of an enduring self. Proust will formulate this ambition in secular terms at the end of the century—salvation through art—while still rooting the endeavor in the endurance of a sacred monument.

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:38

PS

PAGE 97

98 c h a p t e r 4

Gautier’s Egypt: Image and Immortality in Le Roman de la momie One visual resurrection in particular, Gautier’s revival of pharaonic Egypt, can serve here to illustrate the role the collapse of image and world plays in assuaging anxieties of mortality. Already in ‘‘Le Pied de momie,’’ Gautier had expressed a fantasy of identification with ancient Egypt; there the poet had dreamt of joining the deathless by marrying a three-thousand-year-old princess. Arria Marcella stages the same dream, of course, but the culture of embalming makes ancient Egypt a more proper homeland for immortals than Pompeii. The erotic form the assumption of eternal life takes in Gautier’s stories, where it it is figured as a sexual communion with a morte amoureuse, harnesses a death drive to the dream of a deathless existence. The erotic charge of the double wish to die and conquer immortality emerges quite clearly in Cleopatra’s critique of Egypt’s monumental culture, which she reads as a program for celestial rape: ‘‘what folly! disembowel the sky with gigantic triangles of stone, you won’t elongate your corpse by an inch.’’22 Despite her feminist stab at this phallic posturing before the gods, the overall thrust in Gautier’s work is actually to affirm this equation and conceive la petite mort as the channel for a rebirth among the dead. Immortality is the major phantasm behind Gautier’s historical reveries.23 Egypt appeals to him because he can see in it a petrified kingdom of immortals frozen in hieratic gestures. Even its landscape carries the seal of eternity and death: ‘‘these rocks resembled the bones of the dead calcified on a pyre, and their deep cracks yawned with the ennui of eternity.’’24 More profoundly, Egypt remains immune to change, not just to bodily decay, but life itself there has conquered an immutable rigidity: ‘‘we have the steam-engine; but steam is less powerful than the idea which raised the pyramids, dug the hypogea, and carved sphinxes out of the mountains.’’ Unlike modern Europe, Egypt had ‘‘the sense of eternity’’ (53) and strikes Gautier as an ahistorical realm whose proverbial immobility is in fact its greatest asset. Equating beauty with eternity, he admires in the Pharaoh’s splendid figure an enviable form of Elysian life: ‘‘the king was endowed with a superhuman beauty: his clear, pure, regular features seemed the work of a chisel . . . he did not seem to be a part of that feeble race which, generation after generation, falls like leaves’’ (158). Such power may be the Pharaoh’s privilege, but Gautier also disseminates this immortal stillness over the entire Egyptian landscape, suffusing it with a timeless plastic quality: ‘‘the palms stood immobile as if they had been

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:39

PS

PAGE 98

The Specular Past 99

sculpted in granite’’ (79), just like the ‘‘forest of gigantic artificial flowers’’ (91) adorning a palace and the human groups that people this mineralized world: the Egyptians have a ‘‘bare chest the color of baked clay,’’ the ‘‘Negroes of the upper Nile’’ are ‘‘as black as gods of basalt,’’ ‘‘the Ethiopians [are] tanned,’’ and the Asians carry ‘‘beards braided into spirals’’ like the Assyrian sculptures found by Botta (71). Egypt is indeed mummified, as Claudie Bernard has argued, and Gautier only resurrects it in the form of an embalmed culture. Historical time has not yet begun to flow through its streets since Egypt still exists ‘‘in an age when History has barely begun to stammer’’ (57). If modern archaeology has undone the course of history by exhuming Egypt, this abolition of time also conveys, quite literally, the actual lifeworld Gautier ascribes to Egypt. This sculptural immortality seduces him, but he also acknowledges that the ‘‘god of basalt’’ who exemplifies it suffers an ‘‘immense ennui, similiar to the one mummies experience’’ (161). The invulnerable life of the image is unfortunately also an antilife, since a fatal disempowerment overcomes everyone, from the Pharaoh’s slaves and captives to the princess Tahoser, whom his gaze fixes and freezes in the field of his power. The train of captives that marches into Thebes at the outset quickly flattens into an ‘‘ethnographic procession’’ that adorns the palace walls, where ‘‘one could see the nations of the four parts of the world with their special physiognomies and particular costumes’’ (159). The conquered are shackled in bas-reliefs ‘‘representing . . . the victorious Pharaoh whipping and trampling his enemies,’’ enslaved for all time in these ‘‘enormous chronicles written with a chisel on a colossal book of stone’’ (89). The Pharaoh also turns living beings to stone when he passes by: ‘‘his terrified guards seemed to freeze into statues’’ (133). It is the gaze of omnipotence that petrifies this world and embalms it within a shell of terror: ‘‘the habit of power had put in his eyes that penetrating light . . . of gods and kings’’ (158). The women in his power are reduced to ‘‘smiling shadows [who] made no more impression on [him] than the painted figures of the frescoes’’ (160). The immortality of Egypt is that of an empire of terror in which life is both frozen and preserved. Even the Pharaoh himself falls victim to this spectral reign of terror as one more image in the space through which his power radiates. His gaze flattens the world into a submissive frieze, but just as he ‘‘dominate[s] the city spread at his feet,’’ he is struck by ‘‘the limits of human power’’ (137). To be a deathless imago also means to be lifeless, changeless, and undesiring. Indeed, the immortal ruler is rather annoyed with his condition: eternity means ennui, and omnipotence

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:39

PS

PAGE 99

100

chapter 4

forecloses the possibility of any desire stemming from obstacles. His limitless power paradoxically entraps him in the grip of a total impotence. Seamless and polished ‘‘like pink granite,’’ it was beyond ‘‘the power of any human emotion to disturb . . . his smooth, beardless face’’ (84). The same ‘‘stony serenity’’ locks him into living death as the loveless queen in Une Nuit de Cle´opaˆtre, who complains that ‘‘Egypt annihilates and crushes me’’ with its bronze skies weighing on her like ‘‘a giant tombstone.’’25 These sovereign woes are no unwitting deconstruction of Gautier’s dream of immortality, but a major theme, at once earnest and parodic: the ennui of the spectral immortal who only desires to desire, scans in vain for obstacles, and masters every life and death but his own. The story properly begins when the Pharaoh returns in triumph with a long train of captives, and suddenly confronts the internal, female obstacle of Tahoser—who evidently loves another and refuses to be flattened into a frieze on his wall. Her resistance strikes a sudden spark of life; while his ‘‘mask remained as immobile as the golden mask of a mummy, . . . his pupils had slid beneath his painted eyelids towards Tahoser, and a spark of desire had lit up their dark disks’’ (87). The king enters the world of bodies, obstacles, desire, and death: ‘‘I saw you . . . [and] I understood that there existed outside myself a necessary being, imperious and fatal, whom I could not do without’’ (161). This recognition of his limits expels him from the Eden of images into a mortal body: ‘‘I was a king, almost a god . . . you have made me a man’’ (161). When the flight of the Jews once more underscores his finite power, Tahoser can begin to reciprocate his love and declare: ‘‘now I love you; you are a man, and not a god of granite’’ (181). The novel thus narrates the erosion of his power in two stages: if meeting Tahoser at the outset marks his entry into vitality, then the political setback when Moses liberates the Jews at the end seals his descent into mortality. This final exodus reverses the influx of captives at the start and decisively annihilates the Pharaoh’s power in the Red Sea debacle. The novel encodes the recognition that the immortal Egyptian kingdom was a mere simulacrum, an empty empire of images: ‘‘what use is it that the bas-reliefs of temples and palaces represent me armed with a whip and a scepter,’’ he asks, when ‘‘I am nothing but a vain simulacrum?’’ (183). The real and imaginary separate out. The deathless world of mummies and friezes decays into a myth, a false religion that can easily be repudiated; on departing, the tribes of Israel ‘‘marched past the copper statue fabricated by the magicians, and which had the power to stop fugitive slaves,’’ but now ‘‘the spell . . . did not work’’

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:40

PS

PAGE 100

The Specular Past 101

(183). The imago is powerless; the imposing ‘‘god of basalt’’ is merely a ‘‘vain simulacrum.’’ Gautier thus ends up refuting the very idolatry that grounds his novel poetically, along with the cult of images sustaining the dream of immortality. The animation of the stony Pharaoh has only made him mortal and undermined the very immortality that Egypt symbolized. The Red Sea fiasco also looks forward to the future ruin of an Egypt irreversibly launched into historical time, just as the Jews embark on their own history. The novel thus curiously ends up affirming a temporality of death (‘‘the work of death never stops’’ [75]) and setting narrative over pictures, passage over stasis, mortality over eternity. Gautier seems to concede that this opening on time and desire may be the condition for meaningful life. But this makes his stony utopia a paradoxical invention: how is it possible to ‘‘resurrect’’ a world of death? why animate mummies if their immortality is so unenviable? and why bother if it delivers them to death? Claudie Bernard concludes, not unjustly, that Gautier’s reanimation is destined to fail because breathing life into Egypt also undercuts its key attraction. The flesh-and-blood revival of Tahoser and the Pharaoh reinserts them into a linear, mortal time. Their sculptural fixity is in her view a textual counterweight to this sacrifice which only amounts to ‘‘remummifying’’ them and betraying the mission of the historical novel— which aims above all to familiarize and ‘‘de-monumentalize’’ a heroic past.26 Such a verdict of failure, however, should perhaps be nuanced, or at least disengaged from any normative view of what the historical novel should do. This would mean understanding the novel in light of the pictorialism of resurrectionary writing which tends to blur the line between picture and referent. The Egyptian fantasy, it is true, proves deceptive on the surface, since its ideal of a sculptural life embodied in sphinxes and ibises seems a puerile poetic phantasm. Immortality is only the vegetative life of stones, a nightmare of ennui. Has the novel failed? Perhaps, but only if read as an ahistorical utopia of immortals. On closer inspection, the agony of immortality is less the symptom of a failed utopia than the reflection of a modern French malady: the Pharaoh’s affliction strangely resembles that mal du sie`cle that exotic dreams were supposed to cure, and indeed both he and Cleopatra are avatars of the modern world-weary poet.27 Gautier, the mortal, and Egypt, the undying, mirror each other’s exiles just like the two melancholy obelisks of his poem, ‘‘Nostalgies d’obe´lisques.’’28 The poet envies the mummies their petrified serenity, just as they yearn for his passions; inversely, the poet immobi-

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:40

PS

PAGE 101

102

chapter 4

lized by ennui fantasizes the gargantuan desires of an Egyptian king who is in fact an impotent simulacrum reflecting only the writer’s power to manipulate images. Desire and petrification also mutually feed each other here since the desiring gaze (the poet’s, the Pharaoh’s) turns to stone all that its vision embraces, while the world petrified by ennui (France, Egypt) listlessly awaits the spark of desire to awaken. The poet and the Pharaoh are mirror images: the limits of the king’s geographical reach reflect the poet’s finite historical reach. The text would appear to recapitulate the very problem it had set out to solve—producing a concrete figuration of poetic omnipotence and immortality. If Gautier fails to resolve this contradiction, he nonetheless keeps it in suspense through a seesaw motion, and in this resides his true trick. He finds an unstable median state between life and immortality, balancing stasis and desire, animation and petrification, image and body, frieze and narrative. Challenging both realistic and fantastic codes, he carves out a hybrid realm in which flesh-and-blood beings exist in a crystalline space immune to loss. This is a poetic experiment rather than a failure to abide by the conventions of the historical novel. His Egypt is an otherworldly kingdom of desire, peopled by deathless mortals, eternal but yearning, pleasure seeking but unchanging, inhabiting a paradise marvelously free of ennui, a place Gautier can only imagine under the bell jar of Egypt’s past. The idea of a radically finished, hence perfect history unlocks an imaginaire of repetition, return, and deathless being; because the past has gone, it is: nothing new can now change it; there it can cycle endlessly, attaining in death the solidity of true being. The credo from Arria Marcella holds good here: ‘‘nothing dies, everything always exists’’ (266). Gautier keeps this impossible space open by engaging in a ceaseless play of animation and petrification that blurs the line between pictures and things. At the outset, when the explorers first descend into Egypt’s underworld, they find stiff hieratic tomb paintings, which the poet predictably animates in the torchlight: ‘‘the golden hall shimmered, and . . . the colors of the paintings burst forth in full splendor’’ (46). Like the Pharaoh gazing at the triumphal friezes that reflect his power, the poet here scans a treasury of images of ancient Egypt which his verbal powers will soon animate in the textual mirror: ‘‘the gods with animal heads . . . the half-naked rowers . . . the kneeling weeping women . . . the headless Justices,’’ all these begin to stir ‘‘as if they had been endowed with life’’ (46)—and they obviously prefigure the resurrection of Egypt in the papyrus that tells Tahoser’s story.

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:40

PS

PAGE 102

The Specular Past 103

The living figures in Tahoser’s internal novel, in turn, look strangely like Egyptian paintings, sculptures, and bas-reliefs, as if prior to all depiction they already resembled stylized representations or existed only as walking images. Tahoser herself ‘‘offered the most pure Egyptian type, and sculptors had probably thought of her when they carved the images of Isis and Hathor’’ (63). The musicians in her suite strike poses that recall pictorial norms: ‘‘a harp player . . . held herself in a kneeling pose . . . of the sort that painters like to reproduce on the walls of hypogea,’’ while a ‘‘standing musician . . . played a sort of mandora’’ in a ‘‘sculptural pose’’ (65). On the boats of the Nile, passengers are seen ‘‘crouching’’ in the posture proper to the ‘‘judges examining Osiris.’’ This subjection of bodies to pictorial norms reaches an absurd climax when the bound captives march into Thebes contorted by an ‘‘ingenious cruelty’’ bent on ‘‘hindering human attitudes as much as possible’’ (81). They may be purposely tortured, but their agony is also a broader symptom of the plight of the bodies that inhabit this sculptural realm where they are torn between life and iconicity. The beauty of Gautier’s interstitial space comes at a price: it imposes a terrible inertia into which the poet must ceaselessly breathe new life to prevent his creation from congealing. Perfect beauty, in Gautier’s terms, exists only in the fixity of death, at the degree zero of pure representation which Tahoser’s funerary images embody: they had ‘‘that immobile life, that frozen movement, that mysterious intensity of Egyptian art’’ (47). The novel’s wager is to recreate Egypt from such paintings, and as a painting, without sacrificing the beauty of a purely plastic world or the vitality of mortal life. At once figural and literal, the text oscillates between ekphrasis and realism, tableau and trompe-l’oeil, conjuring before us painted bodies traversing a sculptural landscape. The oxymoronic phrases ‘‘immobile life’’ and ‘‘frozen movement’’ balance these contrary trends. And just as the characters seem to stem from friezes, so, at times, they fade back once more into lifeless representations. Tahoser’s entertainers flit back into the wall at a simple gesture, ‘‘withdraw[ing] silently in single file, like the figures depicted in the frescoes’’ (68). Similarly, when the Pharaoh’s women take fright, they seek refuge by reverting into harmless images and ‘‘lean silently against the painted wall, trying to blend in with the figures in the fresco through their immobility’’ (132). A perpetual morphing of images and bodies into each other patterns the text and defines the hybrid representational space Gautier tries to open up. The poetic mummification of Egypt is no accident, but the result of an ambiguity Gautier maintains by refusing to choose between life

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:41

PS

PAGE 103

104 c h a p t e r 4

and representation. The ubiquitous lizards, stone dead for long spells, but which suddenly flash into life, then freeze again, are characteristic of this calculated transgression, as is the ibis that brusquely takes wing in a silent, motionless landscape. Such lightning instants, with which Gautier systematically disrupts Egypt’s stony tranquility, destabilize the frozen vista and suffuse it with latent undercurrents of life; nothing caught in the immobilizing grip of representation is truly dead; the sphinxes that seem harmless are just mortally bored, in the grips of the ‘‘sadness of a sphinx tired of perpetually staring at the desert.’’29 Gautier’s Egypt is an interspace: it is a tableau set in motion by a ludic realism that ceaselessly undercuts its own illusions and freezes its characters into images only to release them once more into narrative motion. This strategy allows Gautier to resurrect Egypt, not without self-parody, as a deathless utopia, historically ruined but representationally imperishable. Historical time is dissolved in imaginary space, as the text sublimates words into pictures, blends bodies and statues, and erects a vision of eternal Egypt over its fragile archaeological remains. The hybrid space-time of Le Roman de la momie expresses, in the final analysis, the eternity of the having-once-existed. Gautier’s Egypt has the ex post facto solidity of a perished world that can only relive as a representation, as invulnerable to death as Hector who is yet slain anew every time the Iliad is read. The difference, if there is one, is that Gautier’s epic world is conscious of its own spectrality: ‘‘an immense and solemn sadness weighed on this country, which was never more than a great tomb, and whose people never seem to have had any other occupation than to embalm the dead’’ (323). Even the living are sullen shades, mournfully reenacting their gestures in the Hades of history; as Cleopatra complains: ‘‘Egypt is truly a sinister kingdom . . . everything here contains a mummy; it’s the heart and nucleus of everything’’ (323, 331). Such self-conscious spectrality may even be, to extend Barthes’s remarks on Michelet, a generic marker of romantic historicism.30 The pictorial strategies of Gautier, Macaulay, and Quinet all illustrate a single comprehensive ambition: the spatialization, fixation, and presencing of an entropic past prone to irrevocable dispersion. Vision imprints, counters time, freezes, records; what narrative disperses, pictures crystallize. In a subsequent step, the reader is telescoped into the tableau or made so certain of its presence by the blurring of picture and referent that the past comes to possess an autonomous existence. The claim here is by no means that these strategies

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:41

PS

PAGE 104

The Specular Past 105

are new, since they clearly take their place in the tradition of ut pictura poesis and the tropes of ekphrasis and hypotyposis. What is proper to romantic historicism is not so much this formal heritage as its manner of exploitation, which is, first of all, systematic and continuous rather than episodic; pictorialism is less a trope than the very medium of historical language, so much so that even pure narrative, in violation of Lessing’s theory, is here seen as a purely visual mode when contrasted with eighteenth-century philosophical history. Narrative, as Thierry wrote, despite its forward movement, touches reality more directly than discourse by ‘‘enabling the facts to speak for themselves’’ and manifesting the ‘‘picturesque truth’’ and ‘‘naı¨ve colors’’ of the chronicles.31 He does not recognize, in other words, the categorical opposition between action and description, deeds and details, since both, in his protopositivist poetics, favor a visual overcoming of verbal alienation; story, color, truth, and tableau form an inextricable nexus. The pictorialism in his program is also less rhetorical than ontological, less geared to striking and seducing the reader than to affirming and preserving the past’s integral existence. Pictures serve both to condense duration and extension into a finite totality and to annul the tragic gap between representation and reality. Thierry and Barante both explicitly reject the routine equation of romantic historicism with the picturesque and oppose their own visual epistemology to the supeficial cult of appearances; the difference, it is true, is not always obvious, since the idiosyncrasies of dress, manners, and speech on which they rely to differentiate periods and nations are also what seduce a public avid for exotic impressions—but the exotic, as Victor Segalen knew, exists in many keys and can become a powerful cognitive tool.32 The picture, in any case, serves to recover a truth lost to the abstract historiography that Thierry felt had homogenized France from the fifth to the seventeenth century.33 And it also serves to underwrite an ontology that guarantees the virtual existence of what the eyes register. While words are in a sense always the plaintive echos of absent things, pictures denote their presence, their vibrant reality, their incontrovertible being, whether in the trompe-l’oeil mode of Zeuxis’s grapes, so perfect that birds mistook them for real grapes, or in the mystical mode of idols, which make the god present in the image—and whether the image is representational or abstract. Though this is not the place to argue such a claim, evidently open to deconstruction, it seems plausible that images differ anthropologically from words (seeing is believing) by the greater ontological credence humans place in visible things.

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:41

PS

PAGE 105

106 c h a p t e r 4

Optical Devices: Magic Mirrors, Cameras, Mesmerism A telling index of the visual imperative in romantic historicism is the abundant use of metaphors of optical immediacy which invite the reader to believe he is literally witnessing a scene from the past. These include magic mirrors, animated paintings, windows on time, fantastic cameras, mesmeric vision, and other tropes that telescope the reader into a living past. The magic mirror of medieval romance acquires new life, for instance, through its reuse by nineteenth-century authors such as Nerval, who invokes it in Sylvie when a Parisian actress awakens the memory of a forgotten love; the poet hesitates to approach her for fear of ‘‘troubling the magic mirror that reflected [Sylvie’s] image.’’34 The story then relates his quest to track down this resurgent childhood image, which he finds reflected across the multiple stratifications of later memories. William Clarke also resorts to the magic mirror in his guide to Pompeii, where he deploys it as a modern figure for time travel. Pompeii clearly realizes the modern dream of a time-machine quite literally, but Clarke desires such a mirror to expose England in its preindustrial, preRoman, even prehistoric state: ‘‘We have often wished, in various parts of England, that we could recall for a moment the ancient aspect of the country; reclothe the downs of Wiltshire with their native sward, and see them studded with tumuli and Druid temples, free and boundless as they extended a thousand years ago, before the devastations of the plough and Inclosure Acts.’’35 To reverse this narrative of industrial degradation, Clarke mobilizes an optical fiction from the ‘‘romantic fictions of the middle ages . . . which tell of mirrors framed with magic art to represent what had formerly passed.’’ Such a device, he suggests, ‘‘might soon make [the] fortune [of an entrepreneur] in this age of exhibitions’’ (3). Indeed, progress might redeem itself by ensuring the technological retrieval of the very past that technology has destroyed. This update of the medieval mirror is then explicitly embodied in a modern optical device, the ‘‘dark chamber’’: ‘‘what exhibition could be found more interesting,’’ he asks, ‘‘than a camera-obscura, which should reflect past incidents . . . and recall, with the vividness and minuteness of life, at least the external characteristics of long-past ages?’’ (3). Capricious metaphors, to be sure, of an undisciplined text, but these are common enough to expose a widespread fantasy. Carlyle also modernizes the topos of the magic mirror to describe Jocelyn’s newly published chronicle, which he calls ‘‘a magical speculum, much gone to rust,’’ but ‘‘wherein the marvellous image of his existence does still shadow itself.’’36 The medieval motif, appro-

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:42

PS

PAGE 106

The Specular Past 107

priate to Jocelyn, is transformed into a technomiracle for the disenchanted modern reader whom Carlyle invites to ‘‘peep with us into this singular camera lucida, where an extinct species, though fitfully, can still be seen alive.’’ The idea of a retrospective camera is actually a recurrent motif in Carlyle’s writings, and we also find it in On Heroes, where it signifies the slow transformation of prehistoric events into lasting legends and myths: ‘‘what an enormous camera-obscura magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human Memory.’’37 Carlyle is here describing the process by which Odin was refashioned from a great warrior into a powerful god after his death, worshipped by later generations forgetful of his human origins. He gives this historical theory of myth as the magnified image of prehistoric events a distinctly optical form: ‘‘some gleam as of a small real light shin[es] in the centre of that enormous camera-obscura image’’ (23). The implication is that the image of humanity’s heroes can never be lost, since even ‘‘if the man Odin himself have vanished utterly, there is this huge Shadow of him which still projects itself over the whole History of his People’’ (26). Carlyle takes this shadow to be a biographical image broadcast directly out of a forgotten past, ‘‘like some enormous camera-obscura shadow thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past,’’ offering a sort of photographic ‘‘Portraiture of this man Odin’’ (26). It was clearly tempting to reactivate the magic mirror in a period that avidly consumed historical spectacles, an aspect of romantic culture that Maurice Samuels has recently studied.38 It also made sense to technologize this motif, since technology embodied the magical powers of modern civilization and played a major role in the popular spectacles of the nineteenthcentury city—such as panoramas, dioramas, wax museums, and theater—all of which conjured up vivid scenes from the past for a modern public that Balzac called a ‘‘monster of sixty million eyes.’’39 Clarke’s ‘‘camera-obscura’’ merely literalized the technological utopia latent in these historicist phantasmagorias by proposing a direct access the the past without the mediation of paint, wax, or mise-en-sce`ne. The idea of the retrospective camera took the step from a technology of illusion to an ontology of presence in its fantasy of capturing light still radiating from a remote event. It is this ontological force that interests me here, rather than the commodification of history that Samuels locates in the spectacles produced for a mass public after the Revolution to project a sense of control over an accelerating history and convey the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. While panoramas and wax museums certainly reified history, as Samuels shows, and exploited illusion to fabricate identities

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:42

PS

PAGE 107

108

chapter 4

for modern capitalism, the romantic program of visual restitution also largely transcends such immediate ideological uses; the urge to ‘‘realize the past,’’ prior to any political function, draws its energy not just from the deeper ‘‘memory crisis’’ that Richard Terdiman has identified, but also from an ontological crisis provoked by the loss of durable, transcendent coordinates and stable essences.40 If Clarke’s and Carlyle’s metaphors belong to science fiction, and not to historical romance, their reference to photography is nonetheless telling because it points to the utopian horizon implicit in romantic historicism. Photography provided at once a model of neutral representation and a form of direct, ontological proof of the contents it presented. If it only emerged as major cultural force in midcentury when it began to challenge portrait painters and Baudelaire took offense at its antiartistic nature, its impact was in some sense retrospective since, as Francis Haskell has suggested, historians may have revalorized earlier visual sources on the basis of its documentary prestige; and, more importantly, as Jonathan Crary has argued, its conceptual basis was perhaps already in place in the early nineteenth-century theories of vision that made its invention possible. Be that as it may, the photo, as Roland Barthes would later argue, always conveys a ‘‘having-been-there’’: ‘‘there is always in every photograph the stupefying evidence that this happened that way.’’41 This uncanny referentiality is obviously rooted in the chemical process that enables light from a real entity to be captured on a photosensitive surface, from which Barthes infers that ‘‘the photo is literally an emanation of the referent’’ (34). This is not the place for a detailed study of his theory of photography in La Chambre claire, but it is worthwhile noting that it echoes, and prolongs, the elegiac romantic quest to resurrect the past, since it is organized around a photo of his mother whose death he cannot accept and since he explicitly invokes the example of Michelet who, ‘‘alone against his century . . . conceived History as a Protestation of love.’’42 Barthes is as it were a romantic latecomer who articulates the ontological myth that informs historicism, but whose faith has been reduced to the literal photo itself; writing and painting are irreducibly semiotic, coded, fictional, and ‘‘authenticate’’ nothing but themselves, whereas photography ‘‘doesn’t invent; it is authentification itself ’’ (135). Hence the scandal of a ‘‘message without a code’’ but also the miracle of an image that ‘‘authenticates the existence of . . . a being’’ (166), ‘‘ratifies what it represents’’ (133), and issues ‘‘a certificate of presence’’ (135). The bar was no doubt set lower a century and a half earlier, when the being-there of the past with which Barthes, like

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:42

PS

PAGE 108

The Specular Past 109

his predecessors, was concerned, was still accessible to the imagination of genius; where Gautier could affirm that ‘‘the sails on Cleopatra’s ship [still] swell on the azure of an ideal Cydnus,’’ eternally rehearsing its fate, the modern era of suspicion feels ‘‘an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in History, except in the form of a myth’’ (136). There were still artists in Gautier’s time who had plausibly authenticated the past in Barthes’s sense, and, if not photographed it literally, at least captured the aura that he can now only detect in photos. His allusion to Michelet inserts his photographic necromancy in the wake of the great resurrectionist who believed that ‘‘love’’ and his ‘‘gift of tears’’ could make the dead speak again in his narrative mirror. ‘‘Photography,’’ Barthes admits, ‘‘has something to do with resurrection’’ (129). It is striking in this light to see that Taine had already used a photographic metaphor to describe Michelet’s uncanny receptivity to the past: his ‘‘faculty of suffering and rejoicing . . . upon contact with the past,’’ Taine wrote, ‘‘is to the spirit what the delicate chemical film is to the luminous plate on which it is spread.’’ Sympathy is the mental equivalent of photosensitivity: ‘‘one retains moral imprints, the other retains physical imprints; and the same mechanism underlies the art of the photographer and the talent of the historian.’’43 Such precise metaphors are rare, but point to an idea implicit in the romantic understanding of sympathy as a faculty able to pick up and amplify the faint signals of voiceless beings. Sympathy, indeed, is widely recognized as the historian’s most vital asset: it forms the core both of Michelet’s own sense of his power to renew French history and of his readers’ perceptions. Thus Flaubert wrote him admiringly that ‘‘I have followed you from work to work, . . . and have stood more and more in awe of this immense sympathy that only keeps growing,’’ adding that ‘‘it will no longer be acceptable to write about anything without first feeling affection for it.’’44 Thierry, in his manifesto for a new history, had already made ‘‘sympathy . . . the soul of history’’ and contrasted the ‘‘common admiration . . . [for] heroes’’ with the ‘‘lively sensibility’’ needed to trace ‘‘the destiny of an entire nation’’ and the lot of simple men.45 The project he conceived in 1826 of publishing a vast history of France by cobbling together the chronicles and merely mending their gaps illustrates the urge to amplify the fading voices of the past: ‘‘every century would then, so to speak, tell its own story, and speak in its own voice.’’46 While sympathy may presuppose belief, it also reinforces it through the spectacle it produces, which retrospectively confirms the things it has made visible. Perception and belief, seeing and being, form a selfauthenticating circle: Michelet ‘‘feels so violently,’’ Taine wrote, ‘‘that he

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:43

PS

PAGE 109

110 c h a p t e r 4

cannot help himself believing . . . he sees nothing but his dream: thus is it proven for him.’’47 Taine’s critical but admiring remarks, while they reflect the midcentury positivist turn and look forward to Barthes’s skepticism, also seem to project back on Michelet’s sympathy the ontology of photographic proof. The slight anachronism, however, rather than point to two conflicting paradigms, reveals a single unbroken visual ontology common to Michelet and Barthes, to Romanticism and late capitalism, but whose photographic standard of proof has simply come to be taken more literally. The fact that Clarke and Carlyle imagined a magic camera and that Michelet trusted his flashes of intuition actually places them in the photographic paradigm for which the past’s being has become an issue—which is also to say that the advent of photography only concretizes an ontological problem that had already arisen with the secular dissolution of transcendence. The link between seeing and being is of course as old as history and the principle of eyewitness testimony, but the modern problem is less documenting what ‘‘has been’’ than confirming its post-mortem ‘‘ongoing being,’’ which is why Clarke’s camera and Michelet’s inspiration cannot be reduced to eyewitnessing. Unlike bystanders who testify, they gaze back upon events long after their ocurrence, and witness them only as an observer on a remote planet might centuries later with a powerful telescope—a trope that Barthes incidentally invokes: ‘‘the departed being touches me like the deferred rays from a star’’ (126). The fact that photography marks a semiotic threshold vis-a`-vis every coded form of representation should thus be historicized, and the photo needs to be reinserted into the larger family of images, from Roman imagines to bourgeois portraits to religious idols, which all in different forms open a channel to absent beings. The ‘‘real presence’’ that the photo communicates is not exactly a new experience, but the scientific avatar of an immemorial pictorial myth.48 Still, it proves very helpful in understanding romantic historicism as a visual regime that is at once religious and documentary, committed to proof and to resurrection, to the past’s having-been-there and to its still being-there, levels that are strictly inseparable in its visual ontology. The broad anthropology of the image invoked here does not contradict the specificity of the forms that iconic mediation can take or deny the novelty of the uses to which Thierry and Michelet put it, which constitute a wholly original if rather unstable blend of the scientific and the religious. Moreover, unlike the types of iconic communion that concern ancestors, heroes, saints, spirits, and gods, which all take, as it were, a personal form, the new historians

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:43

PS

PAGE 110

The Specular Past 111

enlist vision to lend life to entire cultures, periods, nations, and civilizations—even to History itself.49 It may be that they personify these intangible entities in face-to-face encounters, but this does not diminish the novelty of ritually communing with abstract entities that remain profane and immanent. The old sacred beings have all evaporated, but not without first depositing a thin film over the profane landscape of the past,50 so that, as Barbey d’Aurevilly remarked, the age value of a statue now has come to outshine its religious aura—‘‘a quite exact description of the spirit of this age, more antiquarian than Christian in religion.’’51 Barthes, interestingly, acknowledges a residue of sacrality in the photo’s modest function of authentication and moreover ties his much cited ‘‘reality effect’’ in with the premodern fetishism of relics, as if the positive cult of the real—as evidenced in museums, realist novels, diaries, newspapers, and photos—had supplanted an earlier yearning for transcendent images. The ‘‘taste of our whole civilization for the reality effect’’ is at once a denial and transformation of the sacred: ‘‘secularized, the relic no longer conveys the sacred, except that very sacred which is attached to the enigma of what has been, is no more and yet offers itself to be read as the present sign of a dead thing.’’52 A weak, diluted sacrality comes to invest the visual rendering of history in the nineteenth century, which all at once secularizes the religious image and sacralizes profane history.53 Clarke’s and Carlyle’s magic mirrors are not the only figures that anticipate Barthes’s modern ontological myth of photography. They are symptoms of a more widespread recourse to visual tropes capable of capturing history ‘‘live,’’ which are all more or less magical, but at the same time rooted in the modern scientific concern with authenticating the past. The myth of the magnetic gaze merits mention here as a major example of the new optical ontology. Though the ‘‘science’’ of mesmerism had been discredited at the end of the eighteenth century, its aftereffects were long-lived, especially in romantic literature and in writers such as Gautier and Balzac, who imagined that extraordinary beings possessing ‘‘second sight’’ could violate the laws of time and space by launching magnetic jets from their eyes. As the esoteric doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau affirms in Gautier’s Avatar (1856), ‘‘the spirit is everything, matter only exists in appearance; the universe is perhaps only a dream of God or an emanation of the Word in the cosmos.’’54 In practice this meant that he who had ‘‘mastered the untapped occult powers’’ could visualize any event at will: ‘‘nothing is opaque before my eyes anymore; my gaze traverses everything.’’ The mind of the mesmerist is itself a sort of cam-

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:44

PS

PAGE 111

112

chapter 4

era obscura, like Michelet’s sympathetic imagination, where memories and hallucinations can be displayed. Gautier calls it an ‘‘invisible prism’’ that filters ‘‘the rays of thought’’ and projects them ‘‘on the white canvas of [the] brain.’’ It is enough to be ‘‘armed with will-power,’’ a form of ‘‘intellectual electricity,’’ to ‘‘open very wide windows on eternity and infinity,’’ spaces which the mind’s eye can cross in a second ‘‘since electricity travels seventy thousand leagues in the same interval of time’’ (314). To prove his point, the mesmerist Cherbonneau cites the ‘‘magic mirror in which Mephistopheles makes Faust see the image of Helen’’ and urges his skeptical client to gaze into a bowl of mesmeric liquid while thinking ‘‘intently about the person you wish to see appear . . . living or dead, near or far, she will come at your call, from the ends of the earth or from the depths of history’’ (315). Mesmerism established a pseudoscientific basis for the visibility of distant people and events; as such, it also authenticated a faculty poets often dreamed of possessing and gave their uncanny powers of evocation the stamp of reality. The imagination tapped directly into reality. Balzac, certainly, felt that his mental vision differed from mere invention and that he could envision remote and bygone scenes; he possessed the ‘‘second sight’’ of so many of his heroes. In Ursule Miroue¨t, he stages an elaborate scene of detection to illustrate the forensic powers of mesmerism. The incredulous doctor Minoret is given a conclusive demonstration by an enigmatic mesmerist in Paris who uses a medium to evoke the minute actions of Ursule, his niece, in their provincial home—details she later confirms for him. The medium ‘‘moves around in a world we wrongly call invisible . . . for a person put in this state, distances and material obstacles don’t exist.’’55 The medium’s perception is purely sensual; she is immediately present on site, a limited witness of the real event rather than an omniscient spirit reporting from beyond the grave. ‘‘I don’t see well,’’ she remarks about some folded bills, and proves unable to name a person she sees: ‘‘ah! to tell you that, I would have to read it or hear it’’ (830). These failings serve to authenticate her voyance as a pure unmediated perception of reality, untainted by concepts or contextual knowledge. The medium’s innocence makes her vision resemble the neutral impressions that a remote camera might record. In this case, second sight only transgresses space, proving ‘‘that a spiritual world exists’’ (828), but it returns more radically at the novel’s de´nouement in the form of a retrospective vision of the past—one of Balzac’s recurrent obsessions.56 Ursule has at this point been defrauded of the rich doctor’s inheritance by an unscrupulous uncle who has

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:44

PS

PAGE 112

The Specular Past 113

stolen and burnt his inconvenient will shortly after his death. When Ursule’s hope of inheriting seems entirely lost, the dead Minoret appears to her in a dream to repair the injustice and guides her spirit into the actual past to witness the crime as it occurs. ‘‘The late Minoret, her godfather, appeared before her and signaled her to come with him; she got dressed, and followed him through the darkness to the house . . . where she found every last thing just as it had been on the day of her godfather’s death’’ (3:959). He shows her the ‘‘little Boulle dresser’’—which she will later find empty—and lifts its lid to expose the will, then points out the thief ‘‘eavesdropping in the corridor, [then] going to pry open the lock and seize the bundle of papers’’ (3:959). The mute deictic nature of this demonstration, based purely on visual recognition, once again underscores the direct access magnetic vision opens to an absent reality. What Ursule sees is exactly what a closed-circuit surveillance tape surfacing months later might have recorded. The event is integrally preserved; existing outside time, it is always hypothetically retrievable, preserved in some indestructible archive. Mesmeric vision provides a guarantee that grounds this atemporal ontology and simultaneously realizes the historicist dream of Clarke’s magic camera. The close link between magnetic vision (seeing the past) and the literal dream of resurrection (denying the finality of death) is moreover born out by another mesmeric leitmotif: the myth of the mesmerist as an all-powerful healer. The mysterious mesmerist in Ursule Miroue¨t had ‘‘brought dying daughters back to their mothers, fathers to their aggrieved children, and adored mistresses to lovers crazed with passion; [he had] cured patients abandoned by the doctors’’ (3:826). His reputation is ironically enough to revive another ailing and ‘‘persecuted mesmerist’’ from ‘‘the side of the grave’’ (3:827). The dead doctor, moreover, who has unfinished business on earth, returns to Ursule as a specter in her forensic dream, producing a direct link between retrospective vision and resurrection. As if to stress this relation, Ursule wakes up after her dream standing ‘‘before [a] portrait of her godfather’’ (3:960), which links his plastic image with the region in which the past subsists. Gautier, too, links seeing and being, most obviously in a poem where he beholds the ghost of a younger self in dark mirror, ‘‘a retrospective specter’’ that correlates vision and revival.57 The poem explicitly identifies the image as the form in which perished beings survive: ‘‘The image ravished from the grave / Loses its stony stiffness; / The warm purple of life / Runs through the veins of the past.’’58 The spectral image, then, in Balzac and Gautier, is a sort of mesmeric talisman that preserves past entities in a visual

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:44

PS

PAGE 113

114

chapter 4

matrix. But if the image can serve as a springboard for resurrection, the condition for this operation, it should be recalled, is inevitably the unstated doctrine of a subsisting past. Image and being are thus inextricably linked in the optics of resurrection, and the mesmeric transgression of space and time performs the same function as all the other optical figures that capture and ontologize the past: the panorama, the magic mirror, the camera obscura. There emerges an entire nexus of figures in the nineteenth century that together point to a modern form of historical scopophilia rooted in mourning and fetishism. The modern myth of time travel takes a personal, anecdotal form in Balzac and Gautier, but to see how it directly informs the historian’s scopophilia and concern with the persistence of the past we can turn, in conclusion, to Thomas Carlyle’s famous account of Fortunatus’s hat in Sartor Resartus (1834). Carlyle also departs from the Kantian categories of space and time that restrict our empirical senses, which his philosophical tailor, Teufelsdro¨ckh, calls ‘‘two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances’’ that form an ‘‘all-embracing . . . universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves.’’59 While the living are strictly imprisoned in this canvas, its cloth might still be rent ‘‘asunder for moments, and look[ed] through,’’ a fantasy Carlyle here embodies in the magic ‘‘wishing Hat’’ of Fortunatus, who simply had to ‘‘put it on, and wish[] himself Anywhere, behold he was There.’’ As a historian, however, Carlyle sets more stock in time travel, and therefore imagines ‘‘another Hatter,’’ a craftsman who might supply ‘‘Time-annihilating’’ hats. It would suffice to ‘‘clap on [this] other felt, and, simply by wishing that you were Anywhen, straightway to be Then!’’ The historian could then be brought instantly face-to-face with the remote past: ‘‘This were indeed the grander [to annihilate time]: shooting at will from the Fire-Creation of the World to its Fire-Consummation; here historically present in the First Century, conversing face to face with Paul and Seneca; there prophetically in the Thirty-first, conversing also face to face with other Pauls and Senecas, who as yet stand hidden in the depth of that late Time!’’ (197–98). Carlyle’s fiction is no doubt the clearest formulation of the romantic dream of seeing history unfold and as such marked the imagination.60 His treatment of time travel surpasses the other myths considered so far because he clearly articulates the spiritualist ontology that they all presuppose. The hat prompts the question: ‘‘is the Past annihilated, then, or only past? is the Future non-extant, or only future?’’ (198). His point is that true being is not bound to its empirical

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:45

PS

PAGE 114

The Specular Past 115

manifestations: ‘‘Time and Space are not God, but creations of God’’ and as such appear before God as ‘‘a universal HERE’’ and ‘‘an Everlasting NOW.’’ But while theology had understood this in terms of God’s transcendent view over time and space, the historian here draws the more secular inference that ‘‘Yesterday and To-morrow both are’’ (198). This slippage is not a trivial change of accent, for the historian who appropriates the divine outlook catches a ‘‘glimpse of IMMORTALITY’’ and gains the consoling conviction that no mortal beings ever truly perish. ‘‘Is the lost Friend still mysteriously Here?’’ Carlyle asks. That hopeful question points to the deeper payoff of time travel. Fortunatus’s hat does not just make historical tourism possible, but verifies the existence of a past and future that our empirical limits obscure. Carlyle is thus compelled to articulate the doctrine implicit in all the optical figures of retrospection: ‘‘know of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and for ever’’ (198). This is the central belief that lies at the heart of balzacian mesmerism, historical cameras, and magic mirrors, and which forms the deepest stratum in the visual imperative of romantic historiography. What would often be debunked as vulgar spectacularity, cheap local color, and a sacrifice of the intelligible to the sensible61 in fact masks a quasireligious urge to ontologize the past and ground the faith in its existence in pictures vivid enough to vouch for its reality. Romantic writers often felt, moreover, that they did not so much invent as ‘‘divine’’ the past, a position that presupposes its endurance in some esoteric mode. When Gautier, in the aftermath of the Commune, toured the ruins of Paris, he found it consoling to think that ‘‘one cannot set fire to history with a petroleum bomb. The Present, in all its fury, cannot suppress the irrevocable Past.’’62 Irrevocable, perhaps, but also indestructible; nowhere is the doctrine of a lost but enduring past more clearly stated.

................. 17036$

$CH4

09-26-08 11:04:45

PS

PAGE 115

five Body Politics

‘‘Art browses through the centuries, browses through nature, and interrogates the chronicles’’ Hugo wrote in the romantic manifesto that served as preface to his gargantuan play Cromwell (1827); it ‘‘strives to reproduce the reality of facts . . . [and] restores what the annalists have truncated, harmonizes what they have disfigured, divines and repairs their omissions, fills in their lacunae with imaginings that have the color of the age.’’1 Hugo here outlines the basic recipe for a poetic resurrection of history which he situates at the heart of romantic creation. ‘‘The goal of art is almost divine: it is to resuscitate, when it is making history, and to create, when it is making poetry.’’ This statement points to a practical concern with the labor of recreation that the optical ontology of history did not address: how does the artist flesh out a world of which mere fragments remain? What poetic operations can translate virtual being into a tangible reality? The romantic response, predictably, is to turn to the imagination, but more specifically to an art of divination capable of extrapolating an organic whole from a fragmentary record. Divination is no arbitrary term, but a recurrent romantic idea that names a method for recreating the past, and thus also the mental faculty capable of completing a truncated record. This intuitive power resembles the fantastic visual tropes of the previous chapter but unlike these constitutes an actual mental faculty, a practical device for processing real evidence, which, however unscientific it may appear, engages directly with a substratum of traces. In the first half of the nineteenth century, before the advent of positivism, divination constituted an unstated method that guided historical recreation. The hypothetical character of its products was clearly understood, as

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:50

PS

PAGE 116

Body Politics 117

Viollet-le-Duc’s infamous statement on architectural restorations shows: ‘‘to restore an edifice,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is not to maintain it, repair it, or rebuild it, it is to return it to a complete state that may never have existed at any given moment.’’2 Divination thus shifts history toward fiction but implicitly justifies this shift through Aristotle’s claim that poetry surpasses history in charting an ideal course of events in which verisimilitude replaces messy contingency. Hugo’s apology for poetic history in La Le´gende des sie`cles illustrates this attitude: ‘‘all these poems are condensed historical reality or divined historical reality. Fiction, sometimes, falsification, never.’’3 Divination thus recovers a form of fictional truth by revealing what Renan calls ‘‘the soul of history.’’4 This truth, however, since it neglects no known evidence, but merely supplements a flawed record, retains its commitment to the past’s being; rather than extract an ideal history from a record that may deviate from this platonic prototype, a` la Vico, romantic history remains deeply invested in the world of singularities.5 This chapter looks at the ideas and figures deployed in the process of reconstructing a fragmentary past and moves from an overall visual ontology to the actual labor of fleshing out the virtual image. The spectral past invoked by Gautier must be embodied again and made flesh; the promise of being proves inadequate unless it can at last be verified by touch. The presence of the face-to-face encounter was therefore the prelude to an incarnation of the past, in which the artist makes its body accessible for a fetishistic communion that mobilizes both sacred and erotic impulses. This incarnation can be broken up analytically into three stages: in the first place, divination, the psychic process of intuiting the missing parts; second, the rhetorical correlation of part and whole, which generates a new organic totality from the fragments; and third, the incarnation of this entity in a living, suffering body. Romantic resurrection invariably draws on this trinity of devices—mental, rhetorical, and poetic—which jointly form a period style that positivist historiography will sweep aside after 1850.

Imagination and Divination The imagination was briefly promoted, in the romantic period, to a fullfledged cognitive faculty, following the radical aesthetic philosophy put forth by the Jena Romantics who, at the turn of the century, elevated poetry to a privileged method of accessing truth and being.6 This rehabilitation made it

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:50

PS

PAGE 117

118 c h a p t e r 5

possible to entrust the imagination with the task of filling in the gaps in the historical record. It is important to bracket later critiques of this approach in order to grasp its contemporary legitimacy: it was never a question of inventing the past, as mythmakers might, or of embellishing it rhetorically, as classical historiography had, but of charting a new course between the myopia of antiquarian history—so numbed by historical skepticism that it refused to go beyond a sterile assembly of facts7—and the abstract tableaux of philosophical history which soared above questions of detail. Embodying history meant articulating dead facts into living wholes or fleshing out grand narratives with details; it meant adding art to science and science to art, reuniting erudition and belles lettres, and mutually enriching the imagination and the archive. Only one thing was certain: history was incomplete, fragmentary, a ruin that needed restoring. How exactly this incompleteness was understood varied over time and between authors, and it is instructive to look here at an early formulation of the ‘‘historian’s task’’ by the German philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who on the threshold of the modern historiographical revolution reaffirmed the kinship of history with poetry by pointing out that ‘‘the truth of past events’’ can be rendered only insofar as the historian ‘‘assembles and makes whole the incomplete and fragmentary data of immediate observation.’’8 However complete the record itself may be, an essential part of history will always remains empirically inaccessible and require the scholar’s intervention: ‘‘past events . . . are only partially visible to the senses, the rest must be intuited, inserted, and divined’’ (35). Sense data provide only a ‘‘fragment’’ of the total picture and exist only in a ‘‘scattered, truncated, and isolated’’ form. But the invisible part is not a missing document that might yet surface, a mere empirical gap, but the internal linkage that binds events into an ideal framework. ‘‘The truth of past events rests on the addition of that . . . invisible part of every fact which the historian himself must provide’’ (36). The historian must thus be ‘‘proactive’’ and ‘‘creative,’’ and ‘‘work the assembled fragments . . . into a whole’’ by using his ‘‘imagination . . . like the poet’’ (37). Humboldt does not yet suggest divining actual events, but his idealism, in stressing the need for an invisible frame, already presents a precocious critique of naı¨ve positivism. His language is already divinatory: it points to the need to make up for a deficiency in knowledge through the poetic faculty. ‘‘Pure imagination,’’ it is true, risks subordinating the real, but the historian can safely rely on his ‘‘intuitive and associative skills’’ (37) to stitch together an image of ‘‘how things really were’’ (36). Humboldt thus fully engages a

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:51

PS

PAGE 118

Body Politics 119

form of divination even if here it only concerns the ‘‘inner truth’’ of the empirically given. Still, his idealist doctrine of incompletion contains in germ the principle that the Romantics will mobilize to repair the factual record. The invisible supplement will soon also encompass the missing visibilia of history. The temptation to visualize the unknown prompts the Romantics to rely more heavily on their inner sight. The mind’s eye becomes the site where obscurity is peeled away from a hidden past. Humboldt had already stressed this labor of seeing: his historian had to ‘‘make the truly operative forces visible’’ with the help of a ‘‘gaze sharpened by study and practice’’ (41). The eye is no longer a passive witness but an active organ dispelling a fog. Poets, protected by their license, are able to state this more boldly than historians, as Hugo does at the outset of La Le´gende des sie`cles, where he celebrates the power of his gaze to pierce through the vapors of time. His eye becomes an active agent: There are no fogs, as there are no algebras, Which in the depths of numbers and of the skies Resist the calm deep fixity of the eyes; I gazed at this wall, at first vague and hazy, Where all seemed vapor, vertigo, illusion; And under my pensive eye the strange vision Grew less foggy and more clear just as my Pupil grew less troubled and more assured.9 The unknown is here a dim landscape that slowly falls into focus under the straining gaze and yields to its pressure. Vision dispels the blanks: it is an active organ, an instrument of research, a cognitive faculty exhuming forgotten events. The mind’s eye becomes the mental equivalent of the magic mirror, an organ Hugo also asks his readers to mobilize in Notre-Dame de Paris to create a mental image of the Place de Gre`ve in the Middle Ages: the reader merely has to gaze at a ‘‘poor smothered tower’’ to ‘‘reconstruct in [his] thoughts the group of buildings to which it belonged’’ and ‘‘find intact the gothic square from the fifteenth century.’’10 With less rhetorical flourish, Hugo’s clairvoyance also had its uses in the new historiography. Mme de Stae¨l thus appealed to the heuristic power of the imagination when debunking ‘‘scholars who only seek to assemble a collection of names which they call history,’’ and who, ‘‘lacking all imagina-

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:51

PS

PAGE 119

120 c h a p t e r 5

tion,’’ can never ‘‘penetrate the past.’’11 To breathe life into dead letters was precisely the achievement of Thierry, who had taught Renan that ‘‘documents remain mute unless they are animated by a luminous consciousness.’’12 By this new standard, the great Benedictine scholars of the eighteenth century had failed to write true history since ‘‘they discussed, classed, and analyzed texts’’ but remained ‘‘insensible . . . to what struck the imagination’’ (2:96). The modern desire to ‘‘go back to the most remote times,’’ as Mme de Stae¨l put it, and ‘‘imagine how the earth, in its first youth, appeared to men,’’ requires what she called ‘‘a continuous effort of the imagination, which divines and dicovers the most precious secrets.’’ What these remarks point to is an implicit method which, while never openly professed, governed historical practice from the late Enlightenment to its institutionalization under the Third Republic. As late as 1857, Renan, himself a preeminent philologist, still defended Thierry’s accurate instincts against his modern detractors, whose scientific austerity he debunked as a ‘‘bland manner limited to insignificant particularities.’’ Their litany of documentary proof ended up resembling a dull chronicle, while Thierry’s poetic recreations often unexpectedly struck the mark: ‘‘the imagination, which exclusively erudite historians proscribe with such fanfare, often has a better chance of finding the truth than a servile fidelity that remains content to reproduce the original tales of the chroniclers’’ (102). Thierry was thus justified in trusting his ‘‘direct intuition of the feelings and passions of the past’’ (90). Taine took a more skeptical attitude, but was also able to look back admiringly on Michelet’s ‘‘heated imagination’’ and concede that ‘‘the conclusions of his lyrical divination were almost as exact as those of patient analysis.’’13 Thierry and Michelet exemplify the use of the imagination, then, not so much to embellish their tales as a method of investigation. This method, however, did not imply writing imaginary history, as it no doubt would today. For all their admiration of Walter Scott, the romantic historians aimed not to fictionalize the past but for the utopian ideal of a total recovery, an ambition which admittedly drew them toward the plenitude of fiction—but also made them regard Scott as a deviant realization of their ideal. What is at stake here is less the contested frontier between novel and history per se than the more general divide between art and science which has haunted historiography since antiquity, when the conflict between history as an inquiry into truth and as a rhetorical exposition first emerged.14 It was not until the late nineteenth century that history would at last decisively repudiate its artistic heritage to bolster its scientific status, and even then this

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:52

PS

PAGE 120

Body Politics 121

rejection remained ambiguous. Leopold von Ranke had still insisted that history was unique among the sciences in also being an art,15 and Gabriel Monod, in the inaugural issue of the Revue historique (1876), had still referred to the regrettable ‘‘antagonism . . . between literature and erudition’’ which he felt was destined to disappear.16 But if history had, from the start, had a hybrid identity, sandwiched between poetry and philosophy, truth and legend, contingency and law, inquiry and rhetoric, these enduring dualities actually masked what was revolutionary about romantic history, namely that its poetic ‘‘method’’ tended to dissolve these apparent antagonisms. While erudition became a source of poetic inspiration, the imagination, conversely, sharpened the scholar’s vision, and broke with its purely rhetorical role as a tool of exposition. Under the new name of divination it came to inform historical inquiry; the implied reference to soothsaying stressed both its factual orientation and its useful character: one did not go to the oracles for entertainment but to derive counsel from the future course of events, or, as was also the case, from an obscure past, since early divination was also oriented backward and may even have constituted the first form of history in Mesopotamia.17 Divination, then, preceded history proper. The process that gave birth to history out of epic, when Herodotus radically separated testimony from the divine inspiration of the Muse,18 is thus in a sense reversed by the romantic return to divination, which rehabilitates the vision of genius as a regime of evidence. ‘‘The historian,’’ as Schlegel wrote, ‘‘is a prophet turned towards the past.’’19 The crucial point about divination here is thus not how it differed from early historiography, but that it differs from the imagination in acknowledging the factual character of its object and in consulting actual evidence. For Quatreme`re, for example, the fragments of a mosaic found at Pompeii would allow archaeologists to ‘‘divine what the eruption of the volcano had destroyed.’’20 The operation fills in a preexisting picture, adds the missing parts and enhances the faded colors, as when a damaged painting is restored—which is indeed a recurrent metaphor for romantic recreation.21 As art is to science, so these fictions are to facts, fleshing out actual ruins with virtual bricks. Quinet even reimagines this dichotomy as a modern division of labor in suggesting that scientists enlist artists to assist them: ‘‘why shouldn’t the arts help us rediscover the past . . . the imagination, guided by science, could breathe life into dead things.’’22 The romantic historian thus unites art and science by applying ‘‘lyrical divination’’ to the record, or what Friedrich Schlegel terms ‘‘divinatory criticism’’ in contrast to systematic science.23 Taine calls such ‘‘historical divina-

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:52

PS

PAGE 121

122 c h a p t e r 5

tion’’ a ‘‘poetic method’’ that oscillates between ‘‘resurrection’’ and ‘‘invention.’’24 Renan himself would still adhere to this procedure in La Vie de Je´sus (1863) by arguing that ‘‘an element of divination and conjecture should be permitted in such an effort to make the great souls of the past live again.’’25 The principle of poetic coherence served, in this case, as an epistemological guarantee of historical probability, on the assumption that truth could be measured by aesthetic criteria: ‘‘the great sign of attaining the truth is that one has succeeded in combining the texts in such a way that they form a logical and plausible narrative where nothing shocks the eye’’ (105). The verisimilar here completes the actual, and flows like cement into the fissures of the record, constituting a poetic superstructure that masks the gaps of the empirical base. The truth thereby recovered need in no way be literal, ‘‘since what must be rediscovered is not the material circumstance, impossible to verify, but the soul of history itself ’’ (105). Artistic merit thus becomes a critical touchstone: ‘‘a dry, choppy, artificial work,’’ however well documented, has failed to capture this ‘‘soul’’ (105). A cut-and-dried philological approach is insufficient since interpretation also engages the scholar’s aesthetic sense: ‘‘texts need to be interpreted tastefully . . . they must be solicited gently’’ (105–6). In Renan’s view, Thierry embodies this hermeneutic skill: he possesses ‘‘the faculty essential to this type of restitution . . . the intimate sense that detects the spirit beneath the dead letter of charters and chronicles.’’26 Renan’s account of Thierry’s method condenses the practice, theory, and myth of divination into a single dramatic example: he marvels at the ‘‘prompt and lively operation’’ with which his one-time mentor ‘‘seized the original document, embraced it, at times anticipated it, and incorporated it into his story’’ (93). Thierry’s narrative positively devours its sources to produce a new organic creation by means of divination: ‘‘the slightest debris revealed an organic ensemble to him which, by means of a sort of generative force, sprung forth whole before his imagination’’ (93). The fragment dissolves within a seamless organic totality. Thierry himself confirms that he experienced his research as a form of divination: ‘‘by virtue of devouring long infolio volumes . . . my eyes acquired a power that astonished me and which I can impossibly explain, the power of reading, as it were, by intuition, and of almost immediately finding the passage that interested me.’’27 This unerring instinct for the right passages is coupled with a hallucinatory vision of the scenes described, as Thierry falls into a ‘‘sort of ecstasy that absorbed me inwardly . . . I heard nothing, I saw nothing; I only saw the apparitions

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:52

PS

PAGE 122

Body Politics 123

triggered in me by the reading.’’ He likens his experience to the ‘‘marvelous faculty of divination’’ of Nicolas Fre´ret (1688–1749), a scholar of chronology in whom he recognizes a precursor of the modern ‘‘revolution in the manner of understanding and writing history.’’28 Both of them possessed ‘‘this singular gift of intuition . . . which, passing over the fields of the dead, . . . gave them life again’’ (93). Divination, far from opposing science, is one of its key assets, as Renan made clear in his early treatise on L’Avenir de la science (1848–49), a manifesto of sorts for philology as a master science. Cautioning scholars against the twin pitfalls of religious dogmatism and common sense (138), he there presented philology as a science in which ‘‘it is necessary to divine rather than see, to seize a thousand almost imperceptible nuances, and to pursue secret and hidden analogies.’’29 Science requires a sort of esprit de finesse since ‘‘the truths of criticism’’ rarely dress up as ‘‘geometrical theorems’’ but rather beckon like ‘‘fugitive lights that one glimpses in the corner of the eye.’’ It is the ‘‘philological spirit’’ that best captures such subtleties, and since science here means largely the study of texts, Renan situates Thierry’s documentary divination at the heart of historical method. Following in Vico’s footsteps, he reconciles Renaissance humanism with modern science once again by celebrating the pioneers of a critical-intuitive approach to ancient texts: he singles out Petrarch, in particular, as the man in whom ‘‘the philological spirit . . . first appeared,’’ and mischievously extolls his admiration of a Greek Homer that he could not read. This fetishistic investment in the manuscript was itself enough to start dissolving the hermeneutic obstacle of the letter: Petrarch ‘‘has divined antiquity; he possesses its spirit . . . [and] understands with his soul the letter that escapes him’’ (192). Divination thus emerges as a key feature of Renan’s textual science: he closely links the words decipher, interpret, and divine as related methods of reconstituting such things as statues, alphabets, and texts.30 Even more telling here is his appeal to divination to help elucidate the origins of Christianity, the task to which he would later devote his major work, L’Histoire des origines du christianisme (1863–82), but which he here anticipates.31 The French have misunderstood ‘‘this curious embryogenesis’’ by seeing in ‘‘Christianity . . . the work of all humanity,’’ including Plato and Socrates, when in fact ‘‘the primitive seed is entirely Jewish,’’ and the gospels and Saint Paul ‘‘should be explained by the Talmud, not by Plato’’ (312). Christianity arose almost imperceptibly out of Judaism by a slow germination that the scholar can only intuit: ‘‘it must be entirely divined: neither Christians nor Jews nor pagans have transmitted anything

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:53

PS

PAGE 123

124 c h a p t e r 5

historical on this first emergence or its main hero’’ (312). The scarcity of documents thus forces Renan to recognize divination as a critical rather than a purely artistic attitude. Divination is not restricted to poets and historians: as a pan-romantic faculty, it is just as often pressed into the service of archaeology, geology, and natural history, all of which confront fragmentary evidence. Archaeology suffers almost by definition from obstructed vision. When Charles Newton excavated the Temple of Demeter at Cnidus in 1857, he felt that he ‘‘clearly divined’’ the original ‘‘arrangement’’ of the temple from ‘‘faint indications.’’32 The father of archaeology, Winckelmann himself, possessed an acute gaze, according to Walter Pater, which enabled him to penetrate and recover the true Hellenic spirit; working with only the ‘‘vestiges of the classical spirit,’’ he was able to ‘‘feel[] after the Hellenic world, divine[] the veins of ancient art,’’ and extract the collective psyche from ‘‘a few stray antiquarianisms.’’33 He had the power to ‘‘divine[] the temperament of the antique world . . . [from] a few faces cast up sharply from the waves’’ (208–9). If geology and natural history would seem less reliant on empathy with human bodies, their concern is nonetheless with the larger body of creation—an artifact of God or of the nature that bore humanity—so that these sciences often provoke the same affective investment and participate in a broadly conceived romantic historicism. When Cuvier divines giant cataclysms from faint geological traces, he finds these events ‘‘clearly imprinted everywhere for the eye capable of reading their history in the monuments’’ of nature.34 When Michelet’s gaze sweeps over the seafloor at low tide, he reads the ‘‘history of the globe . . . in gigantic registers where the accumulated centuries openly display the book of time.’’35 And Quinet, exiled in the Alps, finds consolation in the geological panorama that allows him to ‘‘evoke at will before his eyes . . . any age of the globe.’’ His gaze animates the mountainous ruins and ‘‘reconstructs before [his eyes] these edifices that have collapsed so many times.’’36 Far from being aberrant, the use of divination in natural history is in fact its most frequently cited exemplum, since Cuvier’s animal reconstructions provide the authoritative model for poets, historians, and archaeologists who regularly invoke him to legitimize their speculations. Balzac’s celebration of Cuvier in La Peau de chagrin is only the tip of the iceberg. When Gaston Boissier sings the praises of archaeology, he throws philologists into the arena to compete with Cuvier for prestige: scholars who have found ‘‘the key to ancient lost languages’’ deserve as much glory for pushing ‘‘the memory of humanity back several centuries.’’37 The architectural restorer Viollet-le-Duc

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:53

PS

PAGE 124

Body Politics 125

pays homage to Cuvier for ‘‘suddenly unveil[ing] . . . the history of the world before the reign of man,’’ and is ready to ‘‘follow him with zeal down this new path.’’38 Flaubert imagines a social science neither strictly materialist nor idealist to be pioneered by some ‘‘philosophical Cuvier’’ who might ‘‘reconstitute an entire society’’ by just looking at ‘‘a verse or a pair of boots.’’39 Same ambition in Hugo, who imagined ‘‘applying to social facts what the naturalist has achieved with zoological facts: the reconstruction of the monster from the imprint of the claw.’’40 The examples can be multiplied; if Cuvier hardly pioneered the practice of divination, his prestigious work constitutes the scientific legend that grants it authority. Divination actually emerges as a central cognitive faculty within a new nineteenth-century epistemology that turns away from the regularities of nature to the singularities of history. Whereas Galilean science, as Carlo Ginzburg has pointed out, rejected nonrepeating phenomena as impossible to subsume under general laws, the modern period rehabilitates the science of singular events, or scientia singularis, by developing a ‘‘divinatory paradigm’’ that Ginzburg sees at work in forensic pursuits such as medicine, crime detection, and art history.41 History itself, as a science of unique persons and events, is clearly the broadest instance of this forensic regime devoted to reconstructing singularities. It proceeds by induction, using clues to ‘‘divine’’ a course of events, much like early hunters tracked prey by studying their footprints, Ginzburg argues, and much like Voltaire’s Zadig succeeds in divining the character of the queen’s lost dog from its tracks.42 Such inductive skill rises to the forefront in the modern genre of the detective novel, whose heroes, Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Rouletabille, all excel at retrospective divination, and similarly lies at the core of Balzac’s broad view of genius as an intuitive faculty: his master criminal Vautrin, for example, ‘‘divined truly in his criminal sphere, like Molie`re in the sphere of dramatic poetry, like Cuvier with his vanished creations.’’ It reaches beyond sense data to make an absent thing present:43 ‘‘genius in all things is a form of intuition.’’44 The power of the eye to move from the claw mark to the monster, from forensic clue to direct testimony, gives rise to a key archaeological motif that has deeply marked romantic historical writing: the conceit that the relic itself has seen, and now serves as a witness to the events it has experienced. ‘‘We will interrogate the monument,’’ Ludovic Vitet wrote about Notre-Dame de Noyon; ‘‘we will ask it to narrate its own story.’’45 Stones, fossils, relics, and ruins are so many faithful spectators to which historians can put questions,

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:53

PS

PAGE 125

126 c h a p t e r 5

so many prosthetic eyes that extend their gaze into the deep past. The eye and the trace, overcoming their separation, merge into a single intuitive organ of knowledge, so that the fragment paradoxicallly reconstitutes its own history. Quinet thus summons countless relics to the witness stand in La Cre´ation, asserting that it is ‘‘small, imperceptible things, mollusks with shells, which possess the secrets of the mountains.’’ Animating these clues, he solicits their testimony: ‘‘if there is an imperceptible being, such as the foraminifer, let it show itself . . . it was a witness to these events, it was involved in them, it played its part.’’ The smaller the witness, the greater the landscape it takes in, illustrating the redemptive logic that moves from fragment to totality: ‘‘finally, I pick up an almost invisible critter from the ground . . . and this infinitely small thing tells me: I, I alone know the age of the Alps.’’46 A fossilized flower ‘‘today narrates the annals of an entire lost world’’ (40), and there is no ‘‘grass so humble that it does not owe us the tale of its odyssey across the cataclysms of geological ages’’ (39).47 This fiction of fossils bearing witness conveys the comforting idea that someone was there to see it, that the world was always present for consciousness, that a hypothetical eye always kept vigil—long before the advent of humanity. Nature can be made a witness to its own past, which it harbors in its geological archives and in the genetic code of creatures that recapitulate the phylogenesis of their species as they grow to maturity.48 Mute evidence turns into direct testimony as the historian’s gaze reshapes itself within the actual fossil. Divination thereby rejoins the dream of magic optical devices that allow us to be present on the scene. One chapter in La Cre´ation, subtitled ‘‘Impression that an immortal being would receive of the succession of beings on earth,’’ tellingly literalizes this dream by fast-forwarding ‘‘the spectacle of [their] insensible succession’’ before the gaze of an immortal (95). More revealing yet of the desire that no past should go unwitnessed, lest such oversight should revoke its existence, is Quinet’s concern with the birth of the visual organ itself and his identification of a crucial epistemic watershed at the emergence of the trilobite, ‘‘the first being that had eyes capable of seeing’’ (107–8). With this shellfish the world became visible: ‘‘before it all beings were born blind and stayed blind, as if a still formless nature did not wish to be seen by any living creature.’’ Quinet dwells at length on this mythical moment: so far the ‘‘blind Ocean’’ has been inhabited only by ‘‘small floating mollusks’’ too lowly to behold nature’s splendor, but the advent of vision inaugurates historical time. When ‘‘this first eye, formless and reticulated, . . . opens in the abyss,’’ nature suddenly becomes dimly

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:54

PS

PAGE 126

Body Politics 127

present to itself: ‘‘already, in every corner of the abyss, at the bottom of the primordial seas, there is an open eye. It looks, it sees. Living nature has ceased to be blind’’ (108–9). Quinet’s divining gaze here loops back on its own birth and thereby adds a pivotal moment to Hegel’s historical epic, the primal scene when history originates by existing for an eye. This ‘‘story of an eye’’ also concludes the analysis of divination by stressing that seeing itself constitutes the foundational stratum in romantic historical consciousness. The unseen does not exist for history; it is the act of witnessing that constitutes its ontological guarentee. Through its efforts to recapture a primordial witness, romantic divination confirms this premise.

Fragment and Totality While retrospective prophecy mobilizes what Thomas Huxley has termed ‘‘Zadig’s method’’ to move from traces to their absent causes, it also involves the reassembly of fragments into an organic totality. The two approaches are congruent and overlap, but if the first in theory claims the blessings of science, the second is more overtly rhetorical in its use of poetic recombination. The first interprets traces, the second practices an architecture of relics and welds heterogeneous pieces into a fictional whole that symbolizes the past. The practice of restoring fragmentary objects such as statues, buildings, and texts was of course a major Renaissance pursuit, and while that model very much persists in the nineteenth century—whether in the form of Cuvier’s prehistoric animals or Viollet-le-Duc’s building restorations—a new model of reconstruction as the synthesis of alien elements also emerges. The Renaissance had repaired concrete artifacts that were incomplete by extrapolating the missing parts; the goal of romantic reconstruction is often more abstract: it uses disparate fragments to restore larger conceptual totalities such as cities, nations, periods, peoples, and languages, whose existence transcends bounded physical objects. These entitities are, in a sense, fictional, and can only be represented indirectly, or forged from scratch out of the scattered remnants of the past. As theoretical constructs, they are nowhere physically present but mesh with and clarify the extant data. The novelty of romantic resurrection lies in producing representations of such abstractions, not in reproducing actual things that had a concrete existence. The ‘‘integral life’’ that Michelet wished to resurrect is clearly a utopian concept; the ‘‘centuries’’ on display in Lenoir’s museum were similarly ideal images, just as the reconstruction of

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:54

PS

PAGE 127

128 c h a p t e r 5

‘‘Indo-European’’ points to a wholly hypothetical language.49 Such things do not strictly preexist their reconstruction but are produced through a collision of eclectic fragments that an author assembles and a reader strives to synthesize imaginatively. Cuvier’s animal reconstructions adhere in this sense to the older model of concrete objects, but this model clearly still possesses great currency and in many ways still patterns the ideal-eclectic version. While periods, peoples, and civilizations have no tangible body and presuppose no unique and indispensible form of evidence, but emerge into view precisely as a heterogeneous mosaic, they are often still conceived as unified organic beings possessing body and agency, such as Michelet’s France, Gautier’s Pompeii, or Herder’s Zeitgeist. Such personifications anchor the eclectic model in an organic metaphor and make it possible to present nations as bodies, cultures as cathedrals, and periods as life spans, as well as to endow all such abstractions with a unique physionomie. But this organic overlay veils the novelty of the mosaic model based on the collision and synthesis of incongruous fragments. This new logic is nonetheless on display everywhere: in collections, museums, eclectic buildings, antique stores, period rooms, historical novels, and romantic historiography. Such assemblages may resemble the old cabinets de curiosite´s but also differ greatly from them in pointing to an ideal synthesis peformed by the spectator. An invisible entity envelops, binds, and suffuses all the items and enlists them in the figuration of an organic whole that transcends its contingent parts. The museum is no doubt the chief vehicle of this operation, the institution that best shows how the collision of fragments can evoke a larger cultural context. Lenoir’s museum is here exemplary in its ambition to forge a visual correlative of each century in a series of period rooms. These were made by uniting ‘‘the most remarkable sculpture fragments coming from torn-down buildings in different places.’’50 Not only is Lenoir’s object, the century, itself a novelty, but it is based on a montage of scattered pieces stemming from dismantled monuments such as churches, tombs, and statues. Lenoir’s century rooms recreated no lost original monument, the way the Elgin marbles in the British Museum did, but presented an arbitrary juxtaposition of pieces pointing metonymically to the fiction of unique periods.51 Display items were often themselves random assemblages, such as the tomb of Abelard and He´loı¨se that Lenoir ‘‘fabricated’’ in the convent garden ‘‘from Gothic and modern pieces’’ or the ‘‘crowning piece’’ of the Renaissance room, a tomb by Jean Goujon that Lenoir himself had ‘‘constructed from authentic bits of Goujon and moldings of his works stored at the Lou-

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:55

PS

PAGE 128

Body Politics 129

vre.’’52 Each work on its own and each room as a whole were thus arbitrary assemblages united only by style or chronology. The individual pieces tended to dissolve within the larger image of the period displayed, as Wilhelm von Humboldt made clear in his letters to Goethe: the statue of Valentine de Milan hardly qualified as ‘‘an artistic ideal,’’ but her face mesmerized him as the ‘‘physiognomic imprint and stamp of the age,’’ the same way that each room as a whole imparted ‘‘an image of those centuries.’’53 Such historical impressions were not as readily formed in standard musuems, as Michelet points out, for whom Lenoir’s deposit was the antithesis, not just of the isolated monument, but also of the type of museum that glorified art by staging a competition between schools and artists; the miracle here was that the debris of the past had been ‘‘so softly harmonized,’’ that each piece, rather than clamor for attention, conversed with its neighbors to the point of regenerating an imaginary collective body.54 What Lenoir reconstructed then was no actual monument but an abstract image of each period which transcended all the pieces. Lenoir’s museum pinpoints a crucial trend within the larger museum culture taking shape in the nineteenth century. Too often defined as machines that extract the artistic quintessence from manmade objects and contribute to the rise of an autonomous aesthetic sphere, museums are perhaps more properly called devices that assemble distinct artifacts under a unifying rubric—such as prehistory, Spanish painting, ancient Egypt, or even marine invertebrates. This classifying operation displaces attention from the singular object to the category it exemplifies and promotes the projection of the ideal horizon to which all the assembled objects belong. For the museumgoer, if not for the scientist, this horizon is less an abstract class than the cultural, historical, or ecological lifeworld in which the class exists. Museums did, of course, also detach works from the world, highlight their aesthetic qualities, and stage a competition for singularity, but this trend was held in check by a centripetal integration of the works into their fictional lifeworld and would only become dominant in the twentieth century, when Vale´ry experienced the museum as a disturbing competition of masterpieces: ‘‘I stand amid a chaos of frozen creatures, each of which clamors, without success, for the inexistence of the others.’’55 The overemphasis on the production of a purely aesthetic gaze is an anachronistic projection that obscures the museum’s major role as a time machine that transported viewers into lost worlds, a function that was arguably dominant for much of the nineteenth century, when musuemgoers often envisaged individual works as monads mirroring

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:55

PS

PAGE 129

130 c h a p t e r 5

their original horizon and sought to reconstruct the world to which an assemblage belonged. Lenoir’s century rooms were hardly unique in this respect: when Edmond de Goncourt visited the Egyptian wing of the Louvre, ‘‘all of pharaonic Egypt seemed to come alive around [him], the whole world of civil servants and courtiers of the twenty-six dynasties.’’56 In Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Jules Verne relates the impact of the famous Danish National Museum in Copenhagen where the three-age system for dating prehistoric artifacts (stone, bronze, iron) had first been applied.57 His volcanic explorer admires this ‘‘curious establishment where all the marvels that would allow one to reconstruct the history of the country from all its ancient stone weapons, its goblets, and its jewels are piled up.’’58 Indeed, in archaeological museums, where artistic appreciation was not foregrounded, such cultural synthesis took center stage, as in Charles Newton’s view of the museum as a device to project a picture of the ‘‘human past’’: ‘‘we dig [evidence] out from the barrow and the Nekropolis, and out of the fragments thus found reconstruct in museums of antiquities something like an image of the Past.’’59 Even relics of the nonhuman past gave rise to projections of alien lifeworlds, such as the fossils in the Museum of Natural History, in which Michelet saw less a gloomy chaos of bones than a primitive ecosystem. Dubbing Lamarck ‘‘the blind Homer of the Museum,’’ whose shells spelled out the epic poem of an unsung world, he reads the scientific labor of classfication (Lamarck ‘‘created, organized, named’’) as a creative act bringing a lost world into focus.60 Lamarck’s naming of ‘‘the class of Invertebrates’’ amounted to a farreaching gesture of divination: ‘‘a class?’’ he asks, ‘‘but it’s a world.’’ By simply gathering ‘‘this tiny population’’ into a class, Lamarck has resurrected a marine civilization and granted ‘‘these obscure, teeming peoples, exiled by science,’’ their heroic place in the scheme of evolution. Any organized collection, then, be it artistic, archaeological, or zoological, could serve as a springboard for such reveries, which were arguably—like Raphae¨l’s hallucination in Balzac’s antique store—the most common way of consuming museums. The fabrication of homogeneous period images evidently simplifies history by carving out a progression of distinct and coherent lifeworlds and positing an imaginary Zeitgeist beneath each of its empirical manifestations. While such idealist reifications are rightly suspect, and Lenoir clearly imposed a fanciful grid on artifacts whose distinctiveness he violated, this objection overlooks their heuristic role in crystallizing invisible totalities and making the historical horizon of human productions palpable. The period concept is

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:55

PS

PAGE 130

Body Politics 131

a necessary evil which attained its modern form in assemblages of Lenoir’s type which forged a series of ideal physiognomies. This is the term Chateaubriand used in his E´tudes historiques to stress the newfound need to differentiate periods (‘‘one must see with one’s own eyes what can be called the physiognomy of the times’’)61 and the meaning of Thierry’s injunction to see ‘‘history face to face’’ and to impart ‘‘the originality of every period.’’62 The corporeal metaphor implicit in the physiognomic language borders on outright personification in Hugo’s more graphic rhetoric in La Le´gende des sie`cles, in which each miniepic constitutes the facial imprint of a period. Its poems are at once ‘‘the successive imprints of the human profile’’ and live ‘‘imprints molded on the masks of the centuries.’’63 History may be losing its great actors, but it is acquiring a human face; periods are turning into animate beings whose fate must be narrated.64 Such imprints are clearly totalizing fictions which recreate no empirically existing thing, but the language of physiognomy serves to ‘‘harmonize’’ their heterogeneous components. Lenoir’s museum models this organic synthesis, but a more radical and purely textual example of the operation can be found in Les Mise´rables, where Hugo devotes a whole chapter to forging a synoptic image of ‘‘the year 1817’’ which endows it with its own unique character.65 The chapter presents a disjointed list of events taken randomly from the year 1817, as if Hugo had shredded a pile of newspapers and stitched a few hundred headlines and news items together. The result is one long paragraph that stretches over five to six pages, a solid block that masks its own inner incoherence, yet more radically formless than any chronicle. It presents a junk heap of facts ranging from important political events to the bizarre fait divers: in 1817, ‘‘Napoleon was at Saint-Helena’’ and it was also ‘‘the year that Louis XVIII . . . named the twenty-second of his reign.’’ But Hugo then adds that ‘‘the palais des Thermes . . . served as storefront for a cooper’’ and that ‘‘the most recent Parisian sensation was the crime of Dautun who had tossed his brother’s head in the fountain of the Flower Market.’’ This rigorous arbitrariness recalls Lenoir’s artificial rooms, where everything from an era was presumed to share a family resemblance, but Hugo’s assemblage goes much further in refusing to impose any form on the chaos of 1817. Instead of organizing the year’s events, he radically disarticulates it into its atomic components, and heaps up the journalistic analogue of the bande noire’s depredations. Rather than present some putatively direct image of 1817, Hugo resists the specter of immediacy by pursuing the erosion of the year’s memories to a state of pulverization. ‘‘There lies, pell-mell,’’ he concludes, ‘‘the confused flotsam that has survived

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:56

PS

PAGE 131

132 c h a p t e r 5

the year 1817, now forgotten’’ (187). His poetic goal is evidently to present the year in ruins, and while this may seem to achieve the contrary of a resurrection, he actually paves the way for a more ideal reconstitution of the horizon that makes the year’s events intelligible. Poetic license here enables Hugo to occupy a ruinous landscape forbidden to historiography. It is true that Michelet’s adoption of a ‘‘last judgment’’ viewpoint pointed toward a radical democratization of figures and events, all made equal before the tribunal of world history, but if taken too far such leveling threatens to explode the past into a chaos of infinite individuality. As Hugo himself noted: ‘‘history neglects almost all these particularities, and cannot do otherwise; infinity would invade it’’ (187). In this light the chapter seems to offer a utopian restitution of the body of history at the molecular level of disaggregation. The prior erosion of all narratives, large and small, public and private, that traverse the year 1817, would be the premise of an encyclopedic assembly embodying the year in its totality. Hugo’s short chapter is of course unable to realize this democratic restitution, but it points figuratively to the ideal of an infinite list with no exclusions or hierarchies. Nothing structures this list, except for one signifier, the year 1817, which only draws its boundaries. Within it all is singularity, detail, but ‘‘these details, which are wrongly called small—there are no small facts in humanity, nor small leaves in vegetation—are useful.’’ For Hugo they enable the reader to put a face on the years, and more broadly on the centuries: ‘‘it’s the physiognomy of the years that make up the figure of the centuries.’’ This cumulative logic allows Hugo to paint a pointillist portrait of 1817 by regrouping a set of severed facts which jointly compose a facial imprint distinct from that of 1816 or 1818. Atomization here is not the opposite of organic unity but the necessary ground of a total restitution, which requires a prior democratic erosion of all signifying chains. Only from fragments can the historical totality be fully recovered, and only in the past’s debris can the poet divine the invisble face of earlier periods. One overriding law governs this redemptive logic: the uncompromising respect for individuality. Everything has its own face: the centuries, the years, and even the year’s atomic particles, the microevents that Hugo has unearthed from the stratum of 1817. The condition of grasping a Zeitgeist would then be to observe all its facets in their primordial singularity by first pulverizing the historical substrate and endowing each particle with its own face. To resurrect an age means to envisage a junk heap of entities and then expose the spectator to this shock of jarring faces; it means decomposing the past rather

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:56

PS

PAGE 132

Body Politics 133

than recreating an originary whole. The face of an age then crystallizes as a composite image made of a million facets, following a fractal logic of higherorder repetitions. The image of the age is less the cathderal, than the sprawling vista of Paris that Hugo surveys from its towers in Notre-Dame de Paris, a vast bewildering medley of details and observations that jointly suggest an idea of late medieval Paris. Its internal coherence is minimal, and only the recourse to a panoramic frame cements its disparate parts, just as the year 1817 binds the random news items in Les Mise´rables, but both these devices are purely empty forms enclosing scattered items. The reader is left to divine the elusive physiognomy that swims over this crowd of faces like the figure in the carpet. Everywhere we find this logic of heterogeneous synthesis at work, the attempt to divine secret figures in the sacrificial relics of the past. In describing Scott’s poetic achievement, for example, Macaulay uses a mosaic metaphor, comparing him to the apprentice at Lincoln Cathedral who had made ‘‘a beautiful painted window . . . out of the pieces of glass which had been rejected by his master.’’ Scott’s novels absorb and regroup ‘‘those fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them.’’66 Walter Pater also practices such recombination when he recreates the ideal ‘‘story of Demeter and Persephone’’ in his Greek Studies from hybrid ‘‘fragments of antiquity.’’ By colliding ‘‘what we actually possess’’—‘‘some actual fragments of poetry, [and] some actual fragments of sculpture’’—‘‘the ingenuity of modern theory’’ allows us not just to reconstitute an archetypal myth, but also to ‘‘feel our way backwards to that engaging picture of [a] poet-people’’—in other words, to envisage ‘‘ancient Greece’’ itself through an archaeological collage.67 The most far-reaching example of such recombination is no doubt the ‘‘wall of the centuries’’ with which Hugo opens La Le´gende des sie`cles. This poetic vision makes the totality of the past present in a single panoramic spectacle that condenses the debris of history into a vast wall. This wall clearly reconstructs no actual thing, since its object is an intellectual concept, history itself, even if Hugo uses organic tropes to portray this hybrid monument as a living thing (‘‘it was made of living flesh’’).68 Its building blocks are not whole beings but the chewed-up remnants of history and retain from this process a broken and disjointed character: ‘‘this wall [is] made of everything that crumbled.’’ The wall itself produces no harmonious whole but is a disarticulated ‘‘chaos of beings’’ exploding with jarring contrasts, collisions of meaning, and confusions of register. ‘‘Christ expires not far from Nero applauded,’’ and remote events are placed in surprising juxtaposition, produc-

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:56

PS

PAGE 133

134 c h a p t e r 5

ing ‘‘shadowy echoes / From one century to the next and from scepter to pennants / Where India ends up being Germany, / And Salomon is reflected in Charlemagne.’’ Hugo then witnesses an event which exacerbates the broken character of this archive: two angels pass by, one calling out ‘‘Fatality,’’ the other ‘‘God,’’ whereupon the wall shatters as if they had announced the ‘‘Apocalypse.’’ A truly universal history of course presupposes a postapocalyptic vantage point, and the poet logically opts to behold the past from the final judgment; resurrection, indeed, implies such a perspective, and it matters little whether the calamity is seen as an eschatological event or an ongoing historical process of the type that Walter Benjamin saw in Klee’s painting.69 Here, both are present: the gradual accumulation of the past’s debris, and then the wall’s second-order ruin. ‘‘The whole vision trembled like a pane of glass, / And broke, falling into pieces in the night.’’ After this explosion, ‘‘the pale vision reappeared with fissures,’’ but now no longer as that ‘‘complete, prodigious wall,’’ but as ‘‘an archipelago’’ or ‘‘cemetery’’ in which ‘‘all the truncated centuries lay scattered; no more bond; every period dangled disjointed.’’ It is from this havoc that the poet seeks to reconstruct ‘‘the human epic, rough, immense—collapsed.’’ His postapocalyptic history does not pretend to resurrect any intact beings or rebuild any integral monuments but instead internalizes universal destruction into a fragmentary epic of humanity. The new totality is a synthesis of ‘‘what remains after the earth has trembled.’’ If the poem inevitably creates a monument, then this one can only be the Tower of Babel (‘‘this book . . . is [its] remains’’), taken as a prophetic image of the apocalypse. But Hugo’s epic is less a reconstruction of the Tower of Babel than a group of cenotaphs made from its ruins, an original construction that profoundly reshuffles its broken bricks. One might posit that only vulgar Romanticism believes in the possibility of a seamless restoration. Even Thierry, in his dark epic of Merovingian times, resisted the temptation of an unbroken totality and conceded that the tales he drew from Gregory of Tours were ‘‘six . . . episodes or fragments of a history unwritable in its entirety.’’70 Both Thierry and Hugo knew that their period portraits could only aspire to present fictional totalities, and they left the cracks visible to stress this limitation. Hugo’s vision, however, illustrates more clearly the unending dialectic between fragment and totality, seen less as contraries than as the two poles of the historiographical operation, two contrasting but complementary forces that fuel the poetic labor of recombination. His stress on strange juxtaposi-

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:57

PS

PAGE 134

Body Politics 135

tions (Christ beside Nero) simultaneously reveals that the wall’s symbolic networks are poetic inventions rather than primitive articulations. The dialectic of fragment and totality not only appears in museums and novels but broadly patterns much of nineteenth-century culture, from collecting and interior decoration to antiquarianism and philology, pursuits which rely heavily on fictive recombinations of isolated items. The evolution of collection from a princely pursuit to a bourgeois hobby has been well documented,71 but it is worth recalling Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the practice in his work on nineteenth-century Paris. Though the collection emerges in the Passagen-Werk as one of many figures for the capitalist phantasmagoria, Benjamin’s portrait of the collector largely transcends this Marxist framing. As for Lenoir and Hugo, the Sammler’s point of departure is the prior fragmentation of the world and the violent reclassification of its relics: ‘‘the object must be released from all its original functions to be brought into the closest conceivable relation with others of its kind.’’72 The dissociation from use is not just a precondition, of course, but also a motivating cause, since the Sammler’s purpose is to restore the lost totality to which the fossilized relics belonged; performing a reverse disassembly constitutes ‘‘the most hidden motive of the collector,’’ whose major ambition is ‘‘to join the battle against entropy’’ (1:279). His mission is governed by the utopian ‘‘category of totality,’’ which leads him to charge each ‘‘singular thing’’ with the task of evoking ‘‘an encyclopedia of all knowledge’’ from the ‘‘period.’’ The items are thus so many magic talismans meant to redeem a shattered world; each one on its own constitutes a monad that reflects the entire collection, which in turn mimics a whole ‘‘world order’’ that it reproduces as a ‘‘magic encyclopedia.’’ The collector gazing into his display case thus resembles nothing so much as a ‘‘magician looking through it into the distance’’ as through a crystal ball (1:274–75). Benjamin then sharpens his definition of the collector by identifying the ‘‘allegorist’’ as his baroque counterpart and twin: ‘‘the allegorist occupies as it were the pole opposite from the collector’’ (1:279). Both figures suffer from ‘‘the confusion [and] dispersal . . . in which things find themselves in the world,’’ but the melancholy allegorist is more resigned to this chaos and instead of ordering it chooses to fetishize the isolated fragment as the emblem of a lost totality. ‘‘He releases [things] from their relationships and relies from the start on his interpretive gaze [Tiefsinn] to clarify their meaning.’’ His mournful depth reading of the single object stands in contrast to the more optimistic but frantic accumulation of the collector, but in the end both exemplify the same utopian assault against historical dis-

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:57

PS

PAGE 135

136 c h a p t e r 5

persal; there is ‘‘in every collector an allegorist and in every allegorist a collector.’’ Just as the collection inevitably remains incomplete, so the allegorist can ‘‘never have enough things,’’ and the two figures end up shading into each other, occupying the two poles of the dialectic of totality and fragmentation; their methods, fetishistic evocation and encyclopedic reassembly, are the two moments of a unified poetic. If the collector finds comfort in the spectacle of a lost totality, his inert contemplation paves the way for a more tangible possession and direct insertion into the reconstituted lifeworld; when the collection starts to surround the owner, invade his home, and infiltrate his everyday space as decoration, the remote world is incorporated within the horizon of the present. As artifacts are dispersed throughout the home, the pure contemplation of the past shades into its direct experience. Just as the historical novel sought to project the reader into the body of the past, so the romantic home aimed to flesh out past worlds within the domestic interior. In Nerval’s Sylvie, for instance, the narrator has squandered his inheritance to live ‘‘amid all the splendors of bric-a-brac which it was common to assemble in this period to restore the local color of an older apartment.’’73 The romantic home has here digested the collection and absorbed the museum into a modern lifestyle based on historical daydreaming. Nowadays, Gautier complained, ‘‘the least bank clerk believes he must have his medieval parlor.’’74 The eclecticism of such private hoards, in which ‘‘the antique, the Gothic, the style of the Renaissance, and that of Louis XII,’’ as Musset noted, were often combined ‘‘helter-skelter,’’ made them resemble the chaotic antique stores that supplied them, but the home also granted individual artifacts more room to breathe and interact, a chance to coalesce into meaningful networks, and a proper architectural support around which the past could crystallize. The hosts of such interiors would often themselves become supports for resurrected identities, like exotic plants nurtured in eccentric hothouses: ‘‘one encounters in the streets,’’ Musset noted, ‘‘people with beards trimmed as they were in Henri III’s time, others who are shaved, others whose hair is arranged the way it is in the portrait of Raphael, others yet in the style of Jesus’ time’’ (49). At the extreme limit, then, the past becomes flesh anew in the body of the modern spectator, fueling a resurgent romantic interest in the idea of reincarnation which at first sight seems purely exotic but actually expresses a modern anxiety of mortality. Nerval’s underworld visit to his ancestors, for instance, in Aure´lia, occurs in the same eclectic context (‘‘the costumes of every nation and the images of every country appeared at once’’) and gives him the certainty of

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:57

PS

PAGE 136

Body Politics 137

‘‘an uninterrupted chain of men and women in whom I was and who were me.’’75 Not surprisingly, antique dealers come across as diabolical figures who hold the keys to longevity, as if the occupation of gathering relics had preserved their own bodies from decay. The merchant in La Peau de chagrin certainly embodies this ideal, and the one who sells a princess’s mummified foot in Gautier’s ‘‘Le Pied de momie’’ may be her contemporary. This tale actually collapses the themes of home decoration with that of fabricating an indestructible body: no sooner does Hermonthis’s foot become a paperweight holding the poet’s own scattered efforts together than the hobbling princess appears in his dream to reclaim her foot, stolen by grave robbers despite ‘‘the efforts of an entire people to dig me a grave so deep that it would keep me intact until the supreme day when souls are to be weighed in the scales of Amenthi’’ (188). The poet’s decorative impulse thus helps to reconstitute the princess’s immortal body, even if, in an ironic ending, her father refuses his bid to marry her and join the deathless because he is not yet two thousand years old. Like Hugo’s wall and Michelet’s historiography, the antique store reenacts the final judgment—the apocalypse and the resurrection—and enables the modern consumer to domesticate these powerful events. The home armored with such bric-a-brac becomes a time capsule that shields its inhabitant against the destructive forces of history. Collectors privatize the museum’s logic of reassembly and end up organizing it around their own mortal bodies; at the other extreme, scientists approach nature and world history as a vast virtual dwelling to be restored. Their alleged self-effacement differs only superficially from the collector’s self-mummification within a capsule of objects since they inevitably also inhabit the world-museum they study and merely reflect its vast impersonality in their neutrality as observers. Scientists, in other words, are also mortal dwellers, and their reconstructions turn equally on the logic of the fragmentary body. Edgar Quinet’s geological rhetoric, for instance, presents the world as a vast open-air museum in which the imagination divines the shape of scrambled primitive landscapes. Exposing his body, the natural historian ‘‘descends to the bottom of ancient oceans peopled with monsters . . . which only exist in his thoughts . . . as in a museum.’’76 The task of ‘‘geology and botany’’ is to rescue such worlds from entropic dispersal as if by wielding a ‘‘talisman [from] the Thousand and One Nights’’ (1:43). But while the collector armors his body with material extensions, the scientist works instead in an allegorical key, using symbolic language to reinforce the imaginary integrity of the world. This idealist strategy accounts for

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:58

PS

PAGE 137

138 c h a p t e r 5

the importance of philological metaphors in scientific resurrections: the world is here chiefly rescued as a text and woven into the symbolic tissue of a salvific document. Quinet’s botanist studies ‘‘vegetal inscriptions,’’ deducing the ‘‘existence of a world’’ from ‘‘a lichen’’ (1:43). The idea of the inscription thus becomes central to scientific reconstruction, seen as a rhetoric of documentary recombination. At the same time, the inscription remains irreducibly material, grounding textual idealism in a body of evidence. It might be called a ‘‘textual fragment,’’ a class that would include any object, from manuscripts to fossils, read rightly or wrongly as an intelligible sign, as a philological piece of the resurrectionary puzzle. It is worth recalling the new prestige philology acquired in nineteenth-century Germany with the renewal of hermeneutics:77 Schleiermacher, in particular, redefined the art of interpretation as the recreation of a text’s original horizon of meaning and urged philologists to divine the lost alterity still clinging to the words. ‘‘Every utterance,’’ he wrote, ‘‘can . . . only be understood via the knowledge of the whole of the historical life to which it belongs.’’78 This meant, in practice, an effort to divine the psychological context in which an author first created a work.79 But philology, in the French context, meant more than just an ‘‘allegorical’’ evocation of the world behind the classic work, thanks in part to the teachings of Ernest Renan, who did so much to transmit the new German methods to France and to undermine the French tradition of esprit and ´eloquence. In Renan’s early treatise, L’Avenir de la science, philology emerges as a new master science that encompasses every form of historical inquiry. Its field is vast: every trace from the human past falls into the domain of philology, which serves as a new umbrella term replacing philosophy in the positivist paradigm. ‘‘The philologist’s domain,’’ he writes, ‘‘can thus be no more defined than the philosopher’s.’’80 Renan is acutely aware that the world is in a constant state of becoming and that science now falls globally under the sign of history, which ‘‘is the necessary form of knowledge of things that are becoming,’’ such as language, literature, religion, and psychology (222). But while history thus becomes ‘‘the true philosophy of the 19th century’’ (304), Renan goes on to subsume it in turn under the more universal metascience of philology. ‘‘The true philologist must be at once a linguist, a historian, an archeologist, an artist, and a philosopher,’’ since philology is less a field defined by a particular object than a ‘‘special point of view,’’ namely the broadly shared ambition to reconstruct past entities. Its scattered achievements possess ‘‘no scientific unity,’’ but they all contribute to ‘‘the restoration or the illustration

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:58

PS

PAGE 138

Body Politics 139

of the past’’ (183). Philology is thus another name for the archaeological gaze, but one that revalorizes language once again over objects. Philology thus recuperates for positive science the dream of resurrection that Romanticism had invested in archaeology. It performs the same eclectic reassembly, but using citations, inscriptions, manuscripts, and words to reconstruct lost works and languages. The painstaking labors of savants poring over indecipherable inscriptions are here revalorized as a new form of scientific heroism. Scholars consuming their lives to assemble obscure archives do culture a much greater service than all the metaphysicians and system builders of the past. Thus the interpretation of Sanskrit texts ‘‘has revealed to us in India an intellectual world of marvelous depth, richness, and variety,’’ and for Renan ‘‘this patient restitution of a world’’ is far superior to any ‘‘philosophical creation’’ (190–91). But it is important to note that, however ideal and disembodied philology may be, it still remains rooted in the groundwork of the ‘‘humble artisans’’ in paleography and archaeology who have previously ‘‘extracted from the quarry and reunited for [its] appreciation the materials with which [it] must reconstruct the edifice of the past’’ (186). Like archaeology, philology draws on Cuvier’s prestige, so that a seemingly useless work on Tibetan Buddhism possesses the same obscure but sublime merit as a monograph on a vanished insect (197). And like archaeology, philology aspires to illuminate the prehistoric dawn of mankind, to overcome by all means possible the amnesia that fatally engulfs human origins; for lack of written traces, it studies the marks sedimented in language itself, an ideal ‘‘poem’’ or ‘‘monument’’ that ‘‘harbors materials from all previous centuries’’ and before which we stand ‘‘like the artist who had to reconstruct an ancient statue from the imprint left by its form’’ (215). Language, then, like the museum, is a ready-made assemblage from which philology can fashion the hybrid fiction of a lost world. And if philology appears to abandon the mortal body for a purely ideal restitution on the page, a corporeal ontology still remains the secret nucleus of its textual bricolage. Renan’s own great work, the Vie de Je´sus, the first volume of his Histoire des origines du christianisme, testifies to this: through a critique and comparison of the gospels’ conflicting accounts, Renan fabricates a novelized biography that gives us Jesus in the flesh and blood, performing a purely secular resurrection of this ‘‘extraordinary man’’ which at once strips him of his divinity and compensates him poetically with a novelistic plenitude. Another telling example of philology as bodily resurrection can be found in Balzac’s Louis Lambert, a hagiographic novel in which a grieving classmate retells Lambert’s brief and tragic life from

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:59

PS

PAGE 139

140 c h a p t e r 5

his illegible letters. Their chaotic disarray makes this commemoration a labor of love: ‘‘all the ardor of my worship for his memory was necessary . . . to divine and restore the meaning of these five letters.’’81 The philological care lavished on the words is here inseparable from the homage that resurrects the person, as the body and letters of Lambert blend seamlessly: ‘‘never has an antiquary handled his palimpsests with more respect than I did in studying and reconstructing these mutilated monuments of sufferings and joys . . . sacred [to me]’’ (11:660). This fictional example helps expose the corporeal horizon that remains implicit in Renan’s philology: language here weaves an ideal tissue—at once text and flesh—to mourn and mimic a lost body.

The Body Metaphor In the beginning was the body: however abstract the thing subject to resurrection may be, it always derives, in some way, from a body, or only exists previously as a ghostly conception in search of an incarnation. In Thomas Hardy’s tale, ‘‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork,’’ an amateur archaeologist sinks his pickaxe into the soil of a burrow but suddenly stops when it ‘‘clicks upon a stony substance.’’82 What the earth harbors is precious, fragile, alive: ‘‘he draws the implement out as feelingly as if it had entered a man’s body.’’ The buried past is imagined as a fragile body, as if history possessed limbs and human features like a corpse in a grave. The idea of resurrection, indeed, implies an anthropomorphic vision of history and almost obliges the poet who exploits its theological language to figure the past as a dead person—who has now become subject to mourning, exhumation, and revival. In his romantic prose poem Gaspard de la nuit, Aloysius Bertrand cries out, ‘‘Dijon has arisen; he stands up, he marches, he runs!’’ when the medieval town he mourns suddenly takes shape before him.83 His desire to resurrect the ‘‘Dijon of the 14th and 15th centuries’’ leads him to embody the old Burgundian stronghold: ‘‘I had galvanized a corpse, and the corpse had arisen.’’ But if the dead body clearly promotes a religious rhetoric, the reanimated body in turn favors an erotic investment and transforms mourning into desire, the poet’s life-giving touch into an impulse to perpetuate life. The corpse, then, is usually feminized: Dumas imagines Pompeii as a kind of damsel in distress who ‘‘incessantly clamored for help, and cried day and night from the depths of her tomb . . . ‘Excavate! I’m right here!’ ’’84 In this context, the body of history emerges as a crucial metaphor because it harnesses both mourning

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:59

PS

PAGE 140

Body Politics 141

and desire, the denial of death and the promotion of life, to an otherwise unmotivated historiographical operation which now becomes centered on the production of an immortal body. The religious and erotic components also form a continuum and in practice often overlap since love constitutes their joint basis: Gautier thus names his female resurrections an ‘‘amorous evocation’’ (‘‘your desire revived me’’)85 while Michelet’s chief spiritual faculty, ‘‘the gift of tears,’’ is inseparable from what he calls his ‘‘intimate commerce’’ with the dead.86 The embodiment of the past is therefore the vital kernel around which the energies of resurrection crystallize; indeed, were history without body and real presence, the sacred and erotic impulses rooted in human mortality could hardly be mobilized in favor of a nebulous past. Embodiment constitutes the third moment, after divination and eclectic reassembly, in the poetics of resurrection. Its role can range in intensity from a vague background symbolism to a full-fledged personification. A historian might try to flesh out the past, construct it as an organic entity, or personify it fully. By fleshing it out I mean simply making it more tangible, graphic, and dramatic, as narrative romantic historians such as Thierry to Macaulay sought to do, or what Carlyle called ‘‘bodying it forth’’ in some immediacy. Beyond such basic visual presencing, the past can be conceptually embodied as an organic world whose parts, now ruined and scattered, require poetic reassembly to converge into a living whole. Lastly, imaginary agents, such as cities, peoples, and countries, can be drawn from the flux of history and represented as actual persons with a will and a destiny. The image of the state as large body is of course an ancient political topos, but in the nineteenth century this allegory often becomes surprisingly literal, as when Michelet depicts France as a living, suffering, and acting person moving through history. These three operations—fleshing out, making organic, and personifying—map out a scale of intensifying embodiment and provide the measure of an increasingly urgent historical rhetoric. At the most broad and diffuse level, the body metaphor simply makes historical recreation more vivid by fleshing out the hazy image of Enlightenment philosophical history. The historian, however impersonal, mimics the language of witnessing, anchors his perspective in space and time, and makes the past physically present. The reader is often ‘‘transported’’ to the scene, but more often the dim past acquires enough radiance and fullness to illuminate the modern armchair traveler. Embodiment here means the adoption of the novelist’s arsenal of tools and the ambition—explicit in Thierry, Barante, and Macaulay—to reconquer history from Walter Scott. This global program

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:04:59

PS

PAGE 141

142 c h a p t e r 5

also often manifests itself in explicit metaphors, most tellingly in the image of a skeletal past that needs to be fleshed out. The Notre-Dame cathedral, for instance, strikes the modern Parisian as ‘‘a skeleton, . . . a huge empty body,’’ which Hugo aspires to clothe once more in its original splendor.87 This urge to embody the lifeless edifice even acquires a literal intensity when Quasimodo fuses organically with the church like a ‘‘snail’’ filling out its ‘‘shell’’ (205). The imperative to ‘‘flesh out’’ the past here becomes absurdly concrete, but in the process exposes the program of incarnation implicit in more sober romantic historicism. The motif, it should be stressed, also resolutely secularizes the theological overtones of poetic creation; rather than endow an inert body with soul, as Pygmalion struggles to do, and more recently Balzac’s Frenhofer,88 the poetic supplement here consists in adding perishable flesh to the ruins of history; such redemption turns resurrection on its head and makes the earthly body, not Saint Paul’s glorious one, the site of true salvation. The most sustained reflection on the need to embody history, however, is no doubt found in Carlyle, who is literally haunted by the fear that unreality will engulf the past and make it ontologically inaccessible. When presenting Jocelyn’s medieval chronicle in Past and Present, he insists at length that the ‘‘England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, . . . but a green solid place.’’89 Carlyle’s anxiety leads him to project a menacing nimbus of transience over medieval England and to celebrate Jocelyn’s bright, unclouded, salvific vision: his ‘‘clear eyes’’ had ‘‘looked on the bodily presence of King John’’ (50), who had once stayed a fortnight at St. Edmundsbury and appeared ‘‘daily in the very eyesight, palpable to the very fingers of our Jocelin’’—an image that endows his eyewitness testimony with a tactile guarantee (50). Jocelyn’s eyes had touched the imposing bodies that ruled this vanished world: King John’s, Abbot Samson’s, even the bones of St. Edmund, the abbey’s patron saint. But Carlyle’s fetishistic focus on these bodies (consonant with his doctrine of hero worship) clearly also encodes his fixation on the more diffuse body of medieval England itself, the vaporous world he yearns to touch. His treatment of St. Edmund’s relics makes this poetic link between the actual and the national body quite explicit; the saint’s body has decayed, it is true, but only to reembody itself in the here and now in ever larger entities: his ‘‘Body has raised a Monastery round it,’’ one in which ‘‘the Spirit of the Time visibly take[s] body, and crystallize[s] itself ’’ (61), so that Edmund, convent, and period form a carnal trinity that underwrites Carlyle’s poetic strategy of em-

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:00

PS

PAGE 142

Body Politics 143

bodiment. When Carlyle celebrates past writers, such as Jocelyn, what he singles out is their power to embody their times; this is also the criterion by which Dante and Shakesepare are praised in On Heroes: Dante ‘‘was sent into our world to embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life; so Shakspeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our Europe as developed then.’’90 This historiographical ideal derives in turn from a philosophy of history that places the body at the heart of history. The world itself is governed by an incessant contest of ideas, religions, and practices, in which the most authentic ones invariably triumph and embody themselves in culture; and since for Carlyle history is the sum of the biographies of great men,91 every cultural innovation has its origin in an individual body, just as St. Edmundsbury crystallized around the saint’s remains. Carlyle’s doctrine of hero worship thus has a deeply corporeal basis: it foregrounds real persons, not gods or ideas, who have materially transformed the world. His vision of change also implies a form of moral Darwinism in affirming that ‘‘strength, well understood, is the measure of all worth’’ so that even though ‘‘we may censure Puritanism . . . [as a] rough defective thing,’’ nonetheless ‘‘we . . . may understand that it was a genuine thing’’ (122). Reality is in a sense its own justification, and whatever succeeds deserves its success precisely because it has triumphed: ‘‘give a thing time; if it can succeed, it is a right thing’’ (123). But lest this fact-based morality appear circular, Carlyle undoes any transparent notion of reality as a self-evident given and posits that the heroes who transform the world (an action that would seem illegitimate) are actually in closer touch with genuine reality than their fellow men; they face up to an austere and troubling truth: ‘‘it is the property of every Hero, in every time, in every place and situation, that he come back to reality; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things’’ (105). Unreality, then, does not just threaten the past, but also distorts the present, so that the hero’s greatness resides in his ‘‘instinctive ineradicable feeling for reality’’ (204). His contact with this primal body transforms him into its human extension and into an agent of reality’s endless self-transformation; in touching the real, Mohammed himself becomes a ‘‘portion of the primal reality of things’’ (40). The concept of reality as a solid, inexorable, but also elusive entity thus forms the core of Carlyle’s moral historicism, which might be called a principle of embodiment, the cult of the hard, durable, and unforgiving presence of things. ‘‘Among things, not among the shows of things, [Luther] had to grow . . . it was his task to get acquainted with realities’’ (110). The worship of heroic

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:00

PS

PAGE 143

144 c h a p t e r 5

action implies, in turn, the historian’s writerly imitation of it, since his urge to seize the past as a solid thing also reflects and prolongs the heroic ethos and further embodies its achievements in a durable record. A poetics of embodiment, indeed, follows from Carlyle’s worship of reality-centered heroes and underlies his constant anxiety that language should prove inadequate to capturing the past. One might wonder whether the vehemence of his urge to embody the past does not, in the end, transfer the erotic charge of the heroic body to history itself and transform historiography into an amorous discourse, a verbal exhumation, animation, and embrace of powerful events. Either way, the admiration for a solid body, that of the hero, of reality, or of history, constitutes the bedrock of Carlyle’s tactile ideal of representation. Carlyle’s overt fetishism of the past’s solidity also colors romantic historicism more broadly and illustrates its widespread tendency to eroticize the body of history. In archaeological writing, this is no mystery: Pompeii is figured time and again as a sleeping beauty awaiting the touch of the spade. But when Macaulay reflects on the urge ‘‘to make the past present,’’ he too manifests a corporeal ideal and recommends that historians ‘‘invest with the reality of flesh and blood beings whom we are too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory.’’92 Blood, indeed, the very substance of bodies, is arguably the vital energy that Michelet seeks to infuse into his prose, which seems to pulsate with the rythms of the body, and to turn archival ink back into living substance;93 ‘‘penetrate into the dark archives’’ of Lucerne, he invites us, and there, in an iron chest, ‘‘touch (but softly) an old piece of stained silk,’’ the blood-stained flag in which Gundolfingen wrapped himself to die at the battle of Sempach.94 This aside obviously produces a reality effect by asking the reader to verify the story, but it also incorporates the bloody flag—a hybrid object that fuses living substance and signifying surface, body and writing—into the text to promote the thrilling illusion of contact with the martyr’s body.95 Reading becomes communion, contact, jouissance—a direct transfusion of blood from ‘‘the oldest relic of liberty in the world.’’ As Barthes has remarked of Michelet, ‘‘all of history rests in the end on the human body.’’96 Such physical commerce with the past seems to fade out of the sober academic historiography of the second half of the century, but when Renan rejoices that ‘‘the perfect solidity of Egyptian history is for me a proven thing,’’ one can sense his visceral pleasure in the past’s ontological firmness.97 The ideal of solidity is pehaps less abandoned here than sublimated into the scholarly cult of positive facts, the fetishism of footnotes, and the faith in scientific rigor. The positivism of Taine,

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:01

PS

PAGE 144

Body Politics 145

Fustel, Lavisse, and Seignobos certainly thwarts the reader’s commerce with the past but does so only to deliver its body more fully to a reifying scalpel which freezes it for all posterity. It is as if total embodiment came only at the price of scientific mummification, and as if even vitality had to be sacrificed for carnal presence. Applied more intensely, the body metaphor does not just make a fugitive past more solidly present but assembles it into an organic entity. The past is seen at this level as a mutilated cadaver whose scattered parts must be joined and sutured, doctored back into a living body. Quatreme`re’s program for Roman archaeology exemplifies this organic approach to resurrection: he views the exhumation of ancient sculptures and buildings as a sort of medical operation that prepares the revival of the body of Rome and regards Napoleon’s unscrupulous plunder, which discourages new findings, as tantamount to ‘‘burying the limbs of Osiris, on the model of Egypt, in as many tombs as cities.’’98 Rome thus appears as a dismembered body whose limbs the modern Isis, archaeology, must set out to reassemble. He regards Winckelmann as the first to have undertaken such a restitution: ‘‘he succeeded in making a body of what was merely a heap of de´bris,’’ and thereby truly ‘‘reunited disjecti membra poetœ’’ (208). The old practice of restoring statues points here to a more sweeping recreation, so that the ‘‘resurrection of this people of statues’’ also extends to Roman antiquity en bloc, seen now as giant sculpture permanently anchored in its geography: ‘‘immobile in its totality,’’ Rome is ‘‘a colossus . . . whose mass . . . adheres to the ground’’ (207). Rome itself is embodied as a vast geographical organism. The same organic trope helps present the nation’s past as a body requiring the historian’s ministrations. France, for Michelet, is as much a mutilated corpse as Rome for Quatreme`re, an insight whose primal scene was Lenoir’s exhibition of the tombs of the French kings. By rescuing these vandalized monuments, Lenoir ‘‘had healed their injuries, put together their poor scattered limbs,’’99 and assembled them into a collective image of the nation. The body certainly constitutes the core of the nation’s specular self-generation here. Lenoir, for one, ‘‘had saved all the tombs . . . by covering them with his own body’’ when Saint-Denis was vandalized, according to the legend Michelet reports, pushing heroism so far as to ‘‘stain [them] with his blood’’ before healing them with a ‘‘pious and tender hand.’’ Thus baptized, these royal tombs, emblems of a hierarchical order, can be refashioned into a new national body as their serial confrontation traces the outline of this invisible organism. Lenoir ‘‘had placed them in the presence of each other . . . so that

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:02

PS

PAGE 145

146 c h a p t e r 5

they interpreted each other mutually,’’ and thus arranged, ‘‘in chronological order, . . . narrating, interpreting each other . . . they constituted for France a new religion of the past.’’ The Saint-Denis tombs and other pieces in Lenoir’s depot are the membra disjecta not just of various periods but of a nation that had not been aware of itself prior to this accumulation. Its body, never whole, first emerges from the synergy of the gathered limbs: ‘‘all these isolated figures . . . spoke with each other, within each group and between groups. The harmony increased with harmony.’’ This fortuitous dialogue literally embodies a nation that had known only a dismembered state. ‘‘That’s where I felt France,’’ Michelet concludes, celebrating the museum’s concentration of the nation’s geographically dispersed body.100 The highest degree of embodiment, personification, merely takes the organic metaphor literally: if France is a living, interconnected totality, why not ascribe personality and agency to it? The historical organism then appears as a flesh-and-blood person marching through history. The idea of a collective historical subject is by no means a romantic invention: before Hegel’s Spirit, Lessing had historicized revelation by picturing humanity as a student whom God instructs over the ages through collective experiences, and before that Pascal had figured the historical accumulation of knowledge in a ‘‘universal man’’ traversing the centuries.101 But before Romanticism such tropes were largely heuristic fictions in which humanity stars as the puppet of a providential design rather than as an autonomous agent. They were allegories illustrating a universal history, not operative concepts. Gradually, however, such figures acquired weight, opacity, and density, as the archaeological gaze turned them into carnal realities. The countless personifications of Pompeii as a reanimated urban corpse illustrate this process: as Dumas wrote, so far ‘‘we have [only] conjured forth the shades of men,’’ but now ‘‘we will conjure forth the specter of a city.’’102 This collective entity is not just an empty figure here, but appears, quite literally, as a carnal being (‘‘the traveler sees antiquity in person before his eyes’’),103 because Pompeii is filtered through the lense of a secular resurrection. The earlier philosophical fiction of a transhistorical subject ignores death, or, rather, averts it through perpetual palingenesis,104 whereas the mortality of unique cultures is actually the crucial problem for Romanticism, making their resurrection necessary and the mortal body— rather than immortal humanity—the very site of identity and retrospective redemption. Cities and nations are personified because they die; civilization, on the contrary, is a disembodied ideal, and always carries on, in the Enlightenment scenario, albeit with fits, starts, and jumps. Pompeii has to appear as

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:03

PS

PAGE 146

Body Politics 147

a person precisely because it has perished—because the romantic urge to personify stems from a contest with death. Perhaps this passage from a providential to a secular history parallels the replacement of divine monarchy by a limited human empire on earth. Hugo’s poetic homage to Napoleon in Les Orientales, ‘‘Lui,’’ seems in any case to reflect on how the advent of a purely immanent human government impacts the problem of national memory. Napoleon no longer inhabits the deathless body of the king and can give no theological guarantee of continuity but must conquer and secure a fragile past that has ceased to be the ruler’s heritage. Pompeii, significantly, features in the poem as the ‘‘supine body of a sleeping town,’’ ‘‘a mummified city’’ which the pilgrim retracing the conqueror’s footsteps also ‘‘awakens on his passage.’’105 Napoleon’s power here seems limitless; he comes across, indeed, as a ruler in command of both time and space, whose reach encompasses both geographical extension and temporal depth. The opening words—‘‘Always him! him everywhere!’’— sound the note of this double ubiquity which Hugo then fleshes out by retracing the emperor’s career. But from the perspective of Saint Helena, which Hugo turns into his crowning moment (le sacre du malheur), his spatial conquests clearly seem ephemeral, so the poem assumes the task of converting this fugitive empire into a durable mastery over history. Confined to an island, the defeated general towers instead over the centuries and cashes in his power over the living for a commanding place in history. It is only after a linear recital of his career, ending at Saint Helena—a definitive ending, in 1827, from the dynastic viewpoint—that Hugo starts to mesh time and space in order to inscribe his hero in the strictly secular memory-space of bodies. Recalling the conquest of Egypt, Hugo places him on ‘‘the great pyramid’’ gazing over the desert, his shadow awakening Egypt’s ‘‘forty giant centuries’’ from the grave. Though he ‘‘resurrects [them] as if for a battle,’’ the battle here is more a posthumous contest for fame: it is his ‘‘shadow’’ that rallies a host of dead pharaohs (rather than living enemies) to exact the homage of history. The battle is actually superfluous, for on this new battlefield, the mortal general easily defeats the immortal theocrats. When he commands, ‘‘arise! suddenly every century stands up, / Some carrying the scepter and some armed with a sword,’’ lining up before him like soldiers. These embodied centuries form a crowd of ‘‘satraps, pharaohs, [and] magi’’ around him, constituting a ‘‘court of the past’’ before ‘‘this king of time,’’ who thereby avenges the apparent victory of theocracy.106 The implication is clearly that secular memory is all there is, and that the ideal life of the monarch—as

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:03

PS

PAGE 147

148 c h a p t e r 5

posthumous divinity or dynastic succession—is a religious illusion that yields before the earthly imprint of the mortal hero. In the modern reign of immanence, the battle is fought in strictly empirical space and time, first in geography then in memory. The poem thus pays special attention to how Napoleon inscribes his memory in the world. Apart from forcing past rulers to appear once more in their mortal forms, all his actions leave durable traces and tangible marks that testify to his physical presence. Where monarchs traditionally entrust their glory to idealized chronicles, preferably immutable and chiseled in stone, Napoleon imprints his body directly on a mutable world: ‘‘thus everything . . . becomes a monument / beneath the footsteps of the ineffacable man.’’ His own actions and fleeting contact inscribe a narrative on a shifting, shapeless world, making every landscape he crosses a worldly witness to his passage: even when ‘‘he passes over the sand, his colossal foot leaves an eternal trace / On the moving brow of the desert.’’ His earthly presence is such that it endows the world with contours, shape, and memories, as if the assumption of his own mortality was what had first made secular historical time possible. A strictly perishable body, like the burnt-out volcano with which the poem ends, he fully exhausts his finite being in the here and now in this effort at incarnation. The body is all: ‘‘Lui’’ recounts the passage of a mortal comet; the final image of ‘‘the dark giant that smokes on the horizon’’ even anticipates—against the poem’s inflated promises—a final day of oblivion. But in the meantime, it hails him as a personification of the age, the body in which, and by which, the age gave shape to its own mortal identity. His hyperbolic achievements no longer express the assurance of a mythical hero but embody, on the contrary, a postreligious affirmation of human finitude. If the death of Louis XVI made a national body possible and transferred the virtues of the king’s body to the national organism, as Antoine de Baecque has shown, then Napoleon’s death in turn exposed the new nation’s mortality:107 the modern body politic forged by the Revolution lacked the divine soul that had made the monarchy such a durable edifice. The frail and fallible human institutions which men had presumptuously established without God’s assistance were laughably ephemeral according to Bonald and de Maistre’s diatribes.108 They were, of course, right: the rapid succession of regimes from 1789 to 1815 proved the nation a sickly, fitful, and mutable organism—a strictly human entity that could not have recourse to legitimation by theologico-political means. The nation was born mortal: the transcendent authority that stabilized the community had been emptied.109 The

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:04

PS

PAGE 148

Body Politics 149

question that arose in this context was how the new nation might be given a durable character, and in the 1820s a cohort of liberal historians responded by tracing its genealogy and unearthing its ancestry in the communes of the Middle Ages. But this historical legitimation merely substituted a new form of ideal continuity for the king’s immortality, grounding the community in bourgeois tradition rather than in divine right. As such, it conveniently masked the troubling contingency of bourgeois rule and sketched the first attempts to project its origins sufficiently far back to inscribe it in the cosmic order. This is the national narrative that Michelet inherits and that his epic history of popular emancipation in some respects reinforces. But it should be stressed that Michelet, more than anyone, also grasped the nation, and its past, as a fragile carnal being over which no providential authority presided. His famous claim that ‘‘man is his own Prometheus’’ boldly affirms the contingency of the man-made social order and thus also the mortal character of any political organization. Michelet’s personification of France only becomes fully intelligible in light of the passage from a transcendent order to an earthly one. As with Proust’s revelation, Michelet’s is one that might not have occurred: it was ‘‘the lightning flash of July,’’ the Revolution of 1830, that made him see ‘‘France as a living personality,’’ and though he attributes its emergence, much like Guizot and Thierry, to a long historical gestation, his sense of the rupture and novelty of the Revolution is much more pronounced.110 If 1789 and 1830 do mark the terminus of a long process, the nation’s birth also pardoxically coincides with the moment of its conception, an event in no way passively inherited from history but retroactively performed by men in the present; it was in 1830 that Michelet’s own ‘‘work . . . was conceived,’’ that he first ‘‘perceived France’’ and grasped the nation ‘‘as a soul and a person’’ (15). The personhood of France is moreover the necessary counterpart of Michelet’s major leitmotif, resurrection, because rather than denote a timeless essence unfolding through history, it implies a contingent human identity that ceaselessly dies and resurfaces in novel forms. It is true that formulas such as ‘‘France made France’’ temporalize this self-creation as if France were always a virtual given, but if the ‘‘powerful labor of the self on the self, in which France, by its own progress, transforms all its raw materials,’’ forms a teleological circle, its agent is much more a grammatical fiction than a historical essence. The rhetoric of personhood does not impose a spurious continuity, but actually reveals its absurdity, and in the stilted grammar of self-creation expresses the nation’s perpetual self-difference. With no

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:04

PS

PAGE 149

150 c h a p t e r 5

being that transcends its own incarnation at any time, it remains a fluid identity constantly torn between a fading heritage and an open future. To personify France, then, is to acknowledge its mortality, mutability, and contingency—and at the same time to make resurrection a debt to precursors rather than a narcissistic self-reflection. Nevertheless, if there is no unchanging national identity, and the outcome was not predetermined, the Revolution certainly highlights a number of figures who molded the national organism retrospectively. Michelet pays homage to them in passing as precocious incarnations of the nation’s body. With the uprising of the Jacques, for instance, and the leadership of E´tienne Marcel, France already makes an appearance: ‘‘at that point, we have a fatherland. These peasants are Frenchmen, don’t blush at them, they’re already the French people’’ (540). Fifty years later, the festive figure of Louis d’Orle´ans embodies the new ethos that arose during the Renaissance: ‘‘for the first time, upon leaving the . . . middle ages, [France] saw herself as she was—mobility, light-hearted elegance, gracious fantasy’’ (610). The essentialist overtones that color this claim are neutralized by a more pressing logic of self-creation and -discovery, since every national incarnation of this type occurs as an unforeseeable event, as a specular moment of voluntary self-recognition that undercuts any divine fiat. Michelet thus consciously subverts the dualism of biblical creation: ‘‘[France] saw herself, she adored herself ’’ (610). But the nation’s most telling embodiment in any single person occurs, of course, in the figure of Joan of Arc, in whom the transcendent religious ideal of the Middle Ages, the Virgin, suddenly descends to earth as mortal flesh: ‘‘this idea was at last found to be a person; this dream, one could touch it. The helpful Virgin . . . was on earth’’ (791). If Joan of Arc thereby in some ways repeats the Christian incarnation, she simultaneously subverts its theological origins, since she is much less the word made flesh than an embodiment of the people who appropriate the virgin birth for a secular nation. The real miracle, Michelet suggests, is actually the nation’s unaided self-conception, since with Joan, ‘‘there was a people, there was a France.’’ In bringing the Virgin down to earth, Joan embodies the very passage from theocracy to self-determination: ‘‘this last figure of the past was also the first of the age that was beginning. In her appeared at once the Virgin . . . and already the patrie’’ (791). And in her, the divine reign of grace gives way to the human administration of justice; her martyrdom in Rouen reflects Christ’s passion, but this primal scene no longer founds a transcendent order, revolting the reader instead as a miscarriage of justice which consecrates the nation whose territorial integ-

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:04

PS

PAGE 150

Body Politics 151

rity she struggled to reconquer. Instead of generating a god, her execution heralds the resurrection of the ravaged kingdom, and her body, like Saint Edmund’s, consumes itself in founding a purely earthly institution: ‘‘France was herself a woman’’ (791). Historiography here usurps Scripture to write the secular gospel of the nation’s birth—a human tragicomedy written in the flesh. As these examples show, France did not spring ready-made from the brow of Robespierre but slowly acquired form and embodied itself en route in a series of emblematic figures—E´tienne Marcel, Louis d’Orle´ans, Joan of Arc. Like a political embryologist, Michelet detects the ‘‘true beginning of France’’ almost everywhere and is careful to spell out the links between the nation’s successive states: ‘‘Jacques becomes Joan, Joan the Virgin, the Maiden’’ (540). But if he finds it poetically expedient to symbolize the nascent nation in real actors, such tropes in no way exhaust his intuition of its progressive embodiment. France is above all a geographical being, a set of towns, villages, rivers, and landscapes which nothing binds at first but their random spatial proximity, a sort of puzzle with no matching pieces. The burden of his celebrated Tableau de la France is precisely to show how these fragments converged into an organism, and it is here that he most dramatically uses the body metaphor. The piece is strategically placed between Charlemagne and the onset of feudalism, between an insubstantial empire and a new foundation. The timing here is crucial: making the birth of France coincide with feudalism (rather than with Clovis and the Merovingians) not only dismisses the monarchy as a symbolic unifier but strangely identifies the nation with its own dismemberment. Existing only as a patchwork of clashing fiefdoms and emergent regional cultures, the nation begins as an exploded body, a pile of detached and autonomous limbs. The ‘‘vast revelation of France’’ (229) only occurs gradually as these regions start to gravitate around an ‘‘excentric center,’’ the Ile-de-France, ‘‘the nucleus around which everything had to be assembled’’ (221). This integration slowly softens local differences to create a hybrid whole: ‘‘the old races, the pure races, the Celts, the Basques, Brittany and Navarre, had to yield to mixed races, [and] the frontier to the center’’ (202). This homogenization no doubt enacts a certain republican imperialism, confirmed by Michelet’s formula that ‘‘history has effaced geography’’ (227) and the idea of a ‘‘universal spirit’’ radiating from Paris, ‘‘the center of the center’’ (223), but this new nucleus is no bloodless abstraction—it is much more a concrete universal that absorbs all regions into a ‘‘living generality’’ (226) to form the self-conscious core of a ‘‘vast and power-

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:05

PS

PAGE 151

152 c h a p t e r 5

ful organism’’ (224). As such, Paris synthesizes local cultures without fully suppressing them, its role being to ‘‘diminish, without destroying, local, particular life in favor of general and communal life’’ (226). As the tableau spirals inward from the peripheral regions to Paris, and time progresses along this spatial axis, the narrative preicipitates an image of the nation’s body: ‘‘viewed longitudinally, France undulates along two organic systems, just as the human body is a double apparatus, gastric and cerebro-spinal’’ (224). If this organism still appears as hierarchical as Hobbes’s body politic because it affirms a ‘‘distribution of functions,’’ there is a new accent here that emphasizes their organic interdependence, ‘‘the solidarity of the parts’’ and the ‘‘reciprocity of assistance’’ (224). This organic character undoes the mechanical subordination inherent in the political trope and renders nonsensical the question of internal trade-offs, priorities, and sacrifices. Part and whole here form a vital and indissociable unity, so that instead of just reinterpreting an old political metaphor, Michelet suggests its historical transformation into a new reality: while ‘‘England is an empire, [and] Germany is a country, a race, France is a person’’ (226). Personhood is in no way a universal quality of states, but the outcome of long gestation, and a particular form to which the body politic might aspire: ‘‘personality, unity, it is through these that one occupies a high place in the chain of being’’ (226). Michelet is writing less a finished biography of France than the tale of its birth. Personhood, then, is no timeless identity, and the nation is no deathless god reborn successively into more refined shapes, like Lessing’s humanity, Herder’s Volksgeist, and Hegel’s Spirit. Michelet’s personified nation is an open, mutable, mortal entity that crystallizes over time; behind it lies a crowd of vaguely familiar ancestors rather than primitive avatars of itself. This stress on mortality constitutes the novelty of Michelet’s body metaphor: rather than found the epic of a transhistorical agent, the nation’s embodiment obliges it to enter the cycle of life and death and to endure ceaseless birth pangs, death throes, and mutations. France is no essence, but a fragile organism adapting to, absorbing, and metabolizing new elements—and constantly dying in the process. Death, indeed, plays a pivotal role in Michelet’s secular history: not only did the nation first surface during feudalism as a dismembered body, but its subsequent development was hampered at every turn by crises, dissensions, wars, and famines, so that the nation’s gestation reads strangely like a quartering rather than a birth. In Le Moyen aˆge, France seems to take shape in the very process of being blinded and maimed, as if its birth coincided with its sacrificial dismemberment. The key moment here is the Hundred

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:05

PS

PAGE 152

Body Politics 153

Years War, a low point when the monarchy lost control over much of its territory: ‘‘did France then exist,’’ Michelet asks, ‘‘as a political person?’’ (527). This is really a question about territorial integrity, the corporeal basis for any unified national will, since at this point ‘‘the kingdom, powerless, dying, so to speak, and losing consciousness of itself, lay stretched out like a cadaver.’’ Were France merely an allegory, its sickly body would hardly threaten its ideal existence—like a king in exile, the idea of France could flourish outside its borders—but body and being are so closely linked in Michelet’s poetics that the illness might well be fatal: ‘‘gangrene was [in the body], teeming with worms,’’ while the ‘‘rot’’ of pillage ‘‘isolates and detaches the limbs of the poor body from each other’’ (527). King Edward’s invading army cannibalizes the corpse: ‘‘after having killed and dismembered France, [England] continued to weigh on it, so as to continue sucking what little life and marrow might still be left’’ (542–43). Next, the impecunious Henry V pounces on ‘‘France, a cadaver, a skeleton, which had no more blood to suck, at most [a few] bones to gnaw’’ (715). The future nation might evidently have perished before attaining personhood. The flipside of such mortality, however, is an endless process of renewal, so that the more the nation is mutilated, the more, paradoxically, it grows and develops, in a redemptive process that only superficially resembles an idealist palingenesis. Dismemberment and rebirth here work jointly to embody the nation through a process of creative destruction, and the more an ‘‘envious Europe’’ seeks to ‘‘rally against her, and plot her ruin,’’ the more France acquires strength and personality. ‘‘Every time they thought they had killed her, . . . they would gladly have torn off her bloody limbs,’’ but surprisingly ‘‘she persists in living’’ (547). At last the tide turns in the mid-fifteenth century as the English are expelled and ‘‘the healing of France’’ begins through territorial reconquest (809). Though France only affirms itself as a ‘‘living personality’’ at the end of this ordeal, the fact that Michelet’s most explicit use of body language is reserved for this near-death experience suggests that embodiment depends on mortality and that the road to personhood passes through the loss of a transcendent identity. The new cult of the nation which Michelet would substitute for the theologico-political order of divine monarchy thus turns its back resolutely on the ideological opportunism of the liberal historians, whose support for constitutional monarchy betrays a compromise with the cosmic order of theology. To recognize France as a person in a mortal body, as Michelet does, is to refuse all transcendence and place the nation in the contingent sphere of human action. If the nation

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:06

PS

PAGE 153

154 c h a p t e r 5

founds a religion, this is really an antireligion, the community’s worship of itself in the here and now, a cult made all the more urgent by the nation’s fragility.111 Being incarnated means that no ancestral legislation, divine rule, or utopian norm secures its existence and that citizens must use their own powers to care for its health. Michelet’s way of accomplishing this duty is to resurrect the nation’s history, but this gesture, far from recalling a pedigree or a binding tradition, acknowledges the past’s absence and pays homage to ancestors precisely because they are dead.112 Historical resurrection—unlike religious resurrection—becomes necessary only in a strictly secular time. The urge to flesh out, embody, and personify the past, in Michelet as in the Romantics, ultimately has its roots in a drastic loss of transcendence which restricts all life, individual and collective, to an ephemeral incarnation.

................. 17036$

$CH5

09-26-08 11:05:06

PS

PAGE 154

six Lost Worlds and the Archive

Pompeii lies at the heart of romantic archaeology, but it was not the only vanished world that captured the period’s imagination; there were other Atlantises, Sodoms, Babels, and Troys, from Egypt to the Caribbean, from the archaic utopia to the sinful city, which enthralled a public avid for the historical sublime. Catastophes were also all the rage: the early nineteenth century liked to depict earthquakes, floods, and divine vengeance and to imagine civilizations foundering with a bang. Girodet’s melodramatic canvas of the Deluge, which shows a terror-stricken family climbing to safety, was popular with the public at the Salon of 1808, and announced a long wave of spine-chilling disasters in print, paint, and on the stage, which peaked in the 1830s with John Martin’s biblical illustrations.1 But no image illustrates the period’s fascination with historical catatstrophes better than Karl Briullov’s painting The Last Day of Pompeii (1833), which Bulwer-Lytton had seen in Milan before writing his novel and which shows panicked Pompeians huddling together, running for cover, and carrying the infirm to safety like Virgil’s Aeneas in the glow of the eruption (fig. 10). When Fre´de´ric Henri Schopin revisited the theme a little later, he outdid Briullov in melodrama by adding the threat of flood to the fire, and conflict, greed, and class to the scramble for safety—an ox-drawn cart is there seen on the verge of being toppled by a chariot carrying a wealthy patrician family (fig. 11).2 But the Romantics were not just preoccupied with the death of past civilizations; they also took a bitter pleasure in foreseeing that of their own, or of the world, as the gloomy Grainville did, for example, in a somber epic called ‘‘The Last

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:09

PS

PAGE 155

Figure 10. Karl Pavlovitch Briullov (1799–1852), The Last Day of Pompeii (1833). Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 11. Fre´de´ric Henri Schopin (1804–80), The Last Days of Pompeii. Muse´e du Petit Palais, Paris, France. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:31

PS

PAGE 156

Lost Worlds 157

Man’’ (1805),3 and the gloomier Nodier in the misanthropic prophecies he vented in his pamphlet ‘‘Of the Coming End of the Human Species’’ (1831).4 If this rampant catastrophism testified to a dark streak of Romanticism, it was kept in check by a contrary current, a redemptive dream fueled by a series of spectacular archaeological finds that captured the public’s attention. These set the drama of recovery against the tragedy of disappearance. Chief among them, of course, was Pompeii, where excavations went on throughout the century, and which rapidly became a major tourist destination, a favorite theme for novels, poems, operas, and paintings, and a motif of engravings. But important finds were made also in Egypt, Arabia, Assyria, Turkey, and Crete. Napoleon, as is well known, brought an army of savants and artists with him on his 1797 expedition in Egypt and put them to work inventorying the country’s cultural treasures, a mission that yielded the monumental Description de l’Egypte (1809–28). The dead city of Petra was another spectacular find: a Roman trading post in Arabia Petraea, carved into the cliff face and hidden in a maze of stony gorges, it was first visited by a European in 1812, when the Swiss Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817) passed through.5 Thereafter, its fame quickly spread: an English expedition arrived in 1818, followed by a French team in 1827, which published a richly illustrated Voyage de l’Arabie Pe´tre´e (1830) that revealed Petra to the world. The next big milestone was Henry Layard’s celebrated discovery of Nineveh and Nimrud (1845–47)—the French explorer Paul-Emile Botta had led the way in 1842— which produced, for the first time, a tangible image of ancient Assyria and seemed to ground parts of the Bible in solid archaeological evidence. Layard’s account of his digs, Nineveh and Its Remains (1852), was a rousing exotic tale of adventure and became a Victorian bestseller, while the treasures that Layard shipped home—the sculpted panels from the temple of Sennacherib and a pair of enormous winged stone bulls—were proudly put on display at the British Museum. The nineteenth-century romance of archaeology no doubt reached its peak with Heinrich Schliemann’s (1822–90) much-publicized discovery of Troy. A self-made man and adventurer, Schliemann was obsessed with Homer and went digging for Troy with the Iliad as his guide at the hill of Hissarlik in Turkey in 1870. There he found what he dubbed ‘‘Priam’s palace’’ and ‘‘treasure’’ in 1873 and thereafter went on to excavate Mycenae in 1876, where he believed he had unearthed the bodies of Agamemnon, Cassandra, and Clytemnestra, as well what he called ‘‘Odysseus’s palace’’ at Ithaca in 1878. Though Schliemann would be denounced later by professionals as a sensationalist and charlatan, his finds nonetheless deeply marked the

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:32

PS

PAGE 157

158 c h a p t e r 6

Western imagination, and helped ‘‘confirm,’’ as Nineveh had earlier, another mythical origin of the West. Schliemann had also intended to dig at Knossos in Crete, but the discovery of the famed ‘‘Minoan palace,’’ the site where the Daedalus of Greek myth had built the labyrinth for the Minotaur, was left to the Englishman Arthur Evans, whose revelation of Minoan civilization in 1900 closed a century of heroic archaeology. Evans not only unearthed the palace, using his own fortune, but also realized a grandiose restoration of it: he rebuilt its walls and pillars, and reconstructed its fragmented frescoes, imposing a vivid but fanciful reading on the ruins. Pompeii, Petra, Nineveh, Troy, and Knossos: these stand out, beside Egypt, as summits in the heroic age of amateur archaeology and punctuate the century of progress with impressive flashbacks that anchor it in a long history. Empires come and go, and worlds vanish, often in violent catastrophes—the Trojan war, the destruction of Nineveh, the burial of Pompeii, the earthquake at Knossos6 —but the torch of civilization is passed on, and the ‘‘lost worlds’’ that predate the modern era lie preserved in the earth, intact until future nations can pay them proper homage. Such a view, at least, informs the fascination with Greek, Roman, and biblical archaeology in this period of growth and modern empire building. Past mirrors of present glory, landmarks in a lineage of civilizations, faint promises of permanence, but also antitheses of modern civility, and disquieting reminders of fragility, these sites conveyed no simple message, but fascinated, flattered, and troubled. Whatever the lesson drawn, however, they captivated, as never before, a public mesmerized by catastrophes and awed by the resurrection of mythical worlds no one expected to see in reality.

The Rise of Lost Worlds The notion of ‘‘lost world,’’ by now a well-worn cliche´, emerges in the nineteenth century as a major myth that expresses a complex new relation to history.7 Trivial enough today to be the stuff of commerce, the recipe for formulaic films, and the source of a flourishing heritage industry, its modern ‘‘vulgar’’ forms only show that the myth patterns our culture more than ever, and deserves serious scrutiny. It may be hard to take Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas seriously, but that historical simulacrum is an heir to the Pompeian edifices built for the Crystal Palace in London and by Prince Napoleon on the avenue Montaigne in Paris in the 1850s, both of which drew on serious

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:32

PS

PAGE 158

Lost Worlds 159

studies of Pompeian architecture. Similarly, Spielberg’s dinosaur epics hark back to Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), itself rooted in a century of prehistoric imagery, most notably Henry de la Beche’s pioneering picture of a scene out of ‘‘deep time,’’ Duria antiquor (1830), ‘‘an older Dorset,’’ which showed long extinct beasts in a furious battle for survival.8 The motif of the lost world builds on two centuries of lifelike reconstructions, during which it has trickled down and shed its scientific alibi. But lost worlds, then as now, whether vulgar or refined, popular or erudite, carried the same hypnotic appeal: they are the historical ‘‘black holes’’ around which our modernity revolves.9 The envelope changes, the register shifts, but the same myth, at heart, still accompanies us, and exposes the ‘‘vertiginous spectacle’’ which grounds the modern relation to time.10 The romantic era invented the lost world, because it needed a myth that could at once express a sense of irreparable loss and miraculous recovery, of catastrophe and retrieval, of entropy and the archive. It was a fable that fused these contradictory beliefs into a single picture: the past eroded, yes, and even its traces vanished, but such loss was never absolute, for by luck, labor, or science every historical gap might eventually be filled. The strange luminosity of the lost world, its aura, one might say—at once hyperreal and spectral, overly crisp and ethereal—reflects the tension that lies at its origin. Ideal pasts and golden ages had of course enthralled minds long before Romanticism, but largely as normative models, regulative ideals lying outside of history, such as the idea of antiquity during the Renaissance, or the century of Louis XIV for Voltaire. Before Romanticism, the great challenge had been to revive a glorious past, to become identical with it once more, whereas the modern concern was not to be but to represent the past, to forge a living and durable image from an eroding record. The difference is telling: between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the vector of time, as Reinhart Koselleck has shown, became progressive, irreversible, and open-ended, as the future promised to differ from the past, and the dream of returning to a classical era grew increasingly hollow and vain.11 The lost world is never presented as a model—the utopian genre that found its classic images in Icaria, New Lanark, or the Phalanstery fulfilled that function in the nineteenth century—but as an untimely specter and an event of an aesthetic order. Its function is not to teach lessons, offer examples, or remodel the world, but to give meaning, furtively, to the unsettling temporality of change that governs the modern world. The modern perception of ruins and remnants reflect this shift: ruins

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:33

PS

PAGE 159

160 c h a p t e r 6

had not always evoked perished worlds. In the mid-eighteenth century, they became a favorite motif in landscape painting, as well as a vital ingredient to adorn wealthy estates. Diderot celebrated Hubert Robert’s ruins in his salons, and Horace Walpole placed architectural fragments on the grounds of his neo-Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill.12 Ruins were filtered through the code of the ‘‘picturesque’’: they became visual delights, ornaments, abandoned human habitats reclaimed by nature.13 An older tradition, rooted in religion, imposed a moral reading on ruins: they demonstrated the vanity of earthly power and recalled that true immortality was not of this world. A nostalgic tradition, finally, whose archetype remains the Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay, beheld ruins with regret and lamented the tragic demise of glorious civilizations. These three perspectives come together to form one last summit, as it were, in Volney’s famous meditation on the fortunes of empires in his Ruines (1791), published during the Revolution.14 These ways of seeing— picturesque, moralizing, and melancholy—do not just suddenly vanish then, but make way, slowly, for a reconstructive gaze, which reads the fragment as a cipher for an absent whole just as Cuvier had recreated entire extinct animals from mere bits of bone. The´ophile Gautier’s stories provide the exemplary illustration of this gaze: in Arria Marcella, a visit to the ruins of Pompeii and to the museum at Portici, where the hero admires the ashen imprint of a breast, trigger in his mind a fantastic resurrection of the city. In ‘‘Le Pied de momie,’’ the macabre protagonist buys a ‘‘paperweight’’—the foot of a mummified Egyptian princess—which sends him off on an imaginary journey to ancient Egypt to marry his ‘‘amorous corpse.’’15 Egypt and Pompeii were less models or lessons, less sites of mourning or ornament, than nostalgic surrogate homes, imaginary homelands that poets exiled in modernity yearned to visit. A desire for the past crystallized as a distinctly modern outlook after 1789, rooted in the sensible acceleration of time and based entirely on the idea of imaginary, playful reconstructions, opening past worlds up for serious poetic pilgrimages, idle tourism in time, or (at worst) historical pornography. The major symptom of this new sensibility is the widespread romantic fantasy of having lived ‘‘previous lives.’’ Reincarnation had been a popular topic of reflection in the Enlightenment, when figures like Bonnet, Herder, and Lessing had tried to square the doctrine of transmigration with Christianity, but their focus then had chiefly been on the soul’s future rebirth, while their romantic heirs, more skeptical of traditional forms of immortality, took a much greater interest in their past lives. The artists in Gautier’s circle, the petit ce´nacle—which in the early 1830s

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:33

PS

PAGE 160

Lost Worlds 161

comprised Nerval, Dumas, Pe´trus Borel, and Philothe´e O’Neddy, among others—took great pleasure trying to imagine their own previous incarnations and frequently also dressed the part. As Gautier would recall at the end of his life, when the 1830s had themselves become a remote idyll, Pe´trus Borel ‘‘was not contemporary; nothing in him betrayed the modern man, and he seemed to come from the depths of the past . . . to think him a Frenchman, born in this century, was almost impossible. A Spaniard, an Arab, an Italian of the fifteenth century, that was more plausible.’’16 Baudelaire gave free rein to such a fantasy in ‘‘La Vie ante´rieure,’’ a sonnet in which the poet recalls life in a splendid oriental palace. Flaubert, for his part, wrote longingly that ‘‘I’ve lived in Rome, that’s for sure, in the age of Caesar or of Nero’’ and wistfully evoked a set of attractive periods, such as le grand sie`cle, ‘‘the age of Ronsard,’’ and ‘‘the age of Nero,’’ only to exclaim in despair that ‘‘I’ve lived in all these places, no doubt, in some previous life.’’17 These fantasies are playful identifications rather than earnest metaphysical claims; they express a modern relation to history—an experience we might call ‘‘temporal homelessness’’ with Luka´cs.18 At the root of it lies the condition that Alfred de Musset diagnosed more clearly than anyone in his Confession d’un enfant du sie`cle (1836), where he argued that the malaise of postrevolutionary France stemmed from occupying the abyss between an expired past and an unrealized future. The mal du sie`cle is for Musset a strictly temporal disorder which names the breach separating the no longer from the not yet and marks the period of transition between two plenitudes. The great antimodern sensibilities from Chateaubriand to Renan all echo Musset’s gloomy analysis of the century as a ‘‘transitional age.’’19 ‘‘I found myself,’’ Chateaubriand wrote, ‘‘between two centuries, as if at the meeting of two rivers . . . regretfully leaving the shore on which I was born behind, and swimming with hope towards an unknown shore.’’20 The time is out of joint: unstable, mutable, and protean, revolution is now the norm, a long-term condition, as Tocqueville says,21 while the past (for some) and the future (for others) alone holds out the comforting image of a stable homeland. To make matters worse, the transition is potentially endless, if modernity turns out to be a regime of perpetual change, as Tocqueville also glumly forecasts in the Souvenirs written shortly after the 1848 Revolution: ‘‘will we ever arrive,’’ he asks, ‘‘or will we simply end up in a state of intermittent anarchy?’’22 The analysis of modern time as transitional time reaches a high point in Renan’s early work, L’Avenir de la science (1848–49)—another reaction to the recurrence of revolution in 1848—where Renan asserts that ‘‘life is nothing but a

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:33

PS

PAGE 161

162 c h a p t e r 6

transition, . . . a long, continuous, intolerable stretch,’’ since change has now become a metastable state.23 The sense of living in transitional time, then, defines the modern experience and is one of the major factors behind the rise of ‘‘lost worlds.’’ As utopias are to the future, so lost worlds are to the past: they provide imaginary homelands, stable and coherent worlds of experience, realms of reliable identities. The ‘‘empty, homogeneous time’’ of progress was, for many—reactionaries and utopians alike—an essentially negative experience, a time of ‘‘anomie,’’ to use the term Durkheim would coin for the psychosocial distress provoked by rapidly shifting norms, or a vulgar time of ‘‘fugitive’’ and ‘‘transitory’’ fashions, in Baudelaire’s view, from which the poet tries desperately to extract the ‘‘universal.’’24 Opposing this blank, weak, fragmented time of modernity, the myth of lost worlds stoked the fires of historical reverie. The origin of the lost world stretches back to the eighteenth century: its roots lie in a new temporal sublime discovered in geology and natural history, from where the myth enters the historical and human sphere. It is in the attempt to map the history of the earth that geologists first unsettle the biblical chronology of creation: six thousand years, approximately, had passed since creation in the traditional view—the date given was 4004 b.c.e by Archbishop James Ussher in the mid-seventeenth century—which Vico still follows in his path-breaking philosophy of history.25 The study of the earth, of its strata, mountains, and fossils, had begun to make its great age apparent and had forced geologists to abandon the view that its current shape dated back to the deluge. This had been the view of the Neptunists, who explained the earth’s topography through a single cataclysmic event, the biblical flood, and through the initial recession of the flood waters and the slow deposit of minerals suspended in them. The Vulcanists, their opponents, had retorted that ancient volcanic activity had formed the earth’s crust, but both camps agreed, in principle, that its permanent form had been fixed once and for all by an originary catastrophic event. The breakthrough came in 1785, when James Hutton, a Scottish geologist, published his theory that the earth had been shaped—and was still being shaped, every day—by constant, natural, observable causes, a doctrine that came to be called ‘‘uniformitarianism,’’ and which the great geologist Charles Lyell would champion in his Principles of Geology (1830–33).26 But the substitution of weak, steady forces for a global cataclysm, of gradual erosion for catastrophe, required a radical revision of biblical chronology. Hutton’s theory extended the earth’s six thousand years into the mil-

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:34

PS

PAGE 162

Lost Worlds

163

lions. Lyell recalls the mental impact this new time scale had on contemporaries: ‘‘the imagination was first fatigued and overpowered by endeavouring to conceive the immensity of time required for the annihilation of whole continents by so insensible a process.’’27 A deep geological abyss had opened up, which drastically shrunk the sphere of recorded history and sketched the outlines of an obscure infinity. Those who denounced the theory as an attack on religion, rightly or wrongly, testified to the severe anxiety it provoked and to the painful blow it dealt anthropocentrism; man’s wounded narcissism, as Freud would say, thereby contributed powerfully to the fantasy of lost worlds.28 The earth’s immemorial history—a large, dizzying, sublime gap in time—presents us with the first and original ‘‘lost world’’: ‘‘worlds are seen beyond worlds,’’ writes Lyell, ‘‘immeasurably distant from each other, and beyond them all innumerable other systems are faintly traced on the confines of the visible universe’’ (16). The uniformitarian theory disagrees with one notable trait of the lost world mythology: it did away with catastrophes. It opened up deep time but abolished the sudden, violent destruction of worlds. Yet there was a middle ground between biblical geology and uniformitarianism: a theory that combined long-term change with cataclysmic events. The natural historians Buffon, Bonnet, and Cuvier would espouse ‘‘catastrophist’’ theories of the earth, which acknowledged the evidence of the fossil record—that some species had vanished, others emerged, and the earth had changed—but posited that the decisive transformations had occurred abruptly, at long intervals, during violent global upheavals. In Charles Bonnet’s unorthodox theology, laid out in the Palinge´ne´sie philosophique of 1769, the biblical Genesis only records the most recent in a long series of catastrophes, and he suspects the world to be of ‘‘a frightening antiquity,’’ probably in the millions of years.29 His theory is not yet genuinely evolutionist:30 species die out during the global disasters, but are thereafter reborn, in new, mostly unrecognizable forms, yet according to a pattern imprinted at creation in a preformed germ by God.31 Bonnet’s catastrophes also remain theological events, with no natural explanation, which differ from mere earthquakes and volcanoes in that they belong to ‘‘those general revolutions of a world, which entirely change its aspect, and endow it with a new life’’ (247). Significantly, though, he multiplies the biblical catastrophe, projects it into history, and spaces it out, implying that an unknown number of worlds have perished in a violent cycle. Georges Buffon (1707–88), the author of a monumental Histoire naturelle (1749–67), also resisted evolution and uniformitarianism but acknowledged in a

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:34

PS

PAGE 163

164 c h a p t e r 6

late work, Les E´poques de la nature (1778), that the earth had a history—seven periods, to be precise—and an age he estimated at seventy-five thousand years.32 Also eager to reconcile science and faith, Buffon squared his theory with Genesis, whose seven ‘‘days’’ became periods in his symbolic exegesis of the text.33 But his periods, unlike Bonnet’s, are determined immanently, in large part, not by divine intervention but by the slow cooling of the planet from its original liquid state; in the seventh and final period, after a tumultuous history, during which the planet takes shape, cools down, oceans form, continents emerge, and animals populate land and sea, the earth settles into its definitive shape, so that man, who appears last, ‘‘only comes to take the scepter of the earth when it has become worthy of his reign.’’34 The earth’s long genesis is then over, perhaps, but it has, in the past, undergone several ‘‘great revolutions,’’ epochal changes that stretched over a vast time and forever destroyed a set of past worlds. Buffon, significantly, develops the poetic and moral impact of this biblical geology and gives birth to what we might term the ‘‘historical sublime’’: a sense of wonder and terror at the depth of time and human oblivion. Pascal’s fright, a century earlier, at the infinity of space, is here translated to time and concerns the ceaseless, relentless disappearance that fills, or more properly empties, this newly visible temporal void.35 After evoking a primordial diluvian age in which ‘‘the fish lived on our plains,’’ Buffon exclaims: ‘‘how many changes and different states had to succeed each other between those ancient times (which were nonetheless not the first) and the age of History!’’ The blow is double: if past time suddenly expands, it is also at once drained of substance: ‘‘how many buried things! how many events completely forgotten! how many revolutions prior to the memory of man!’’36 A historical sublime, rooted in immensity and loss, arises as the horizon of the past recedes to infinity and opens up a memorial vacuum. Ignorance might be bliss, but only if one ignores this condition, and here oblivion—for the first time on such a scale—becomes painfully visible, the historical equivalent of Pascal’s silence, and induces a similar sense of anguish and vertigo.37 Buffon’s immediate response is of course to deny this entropy and to reassure us that science has the power to map this vast and empty terrain: by ‘‘draw[ing] from the entrails of the earth its ancient monuments,’’ we can ‘‘rediscover the different ages of nature,’’ and succeed in ‘‘fix[ing] some points . . . on the eternal route of time.’’ Disappearance and recovery are actually twins: the sublime here provokes the fantastic, as the past, in a single breath, is both lost and found. Late eighteenth-century geology thereby invents the lost world and does so through

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:34

PS

PAGE 164

Lost Worlds 165

the fusion of three capital elements: the opening of deep time (tragic oblivion), the catastrophic destruction of worlds (historical sublime), and their scientific recovery (romantic fantastic). It is Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), the great pioneer of comparative anatomy, who will transmit this heritage across the breach of the French Revolution—an event which of course itself struck many as a great geological upheaval. * * * The Romantics, heirs to the Revolution, were born catastrophists, and needed no help figuring out what lost worlds were. The Ancien Re´gime was irrevocably gone, for better or worse, and a new world epoch had begun. Yet this last upheaval was historical, human, man-made, unlike the geological extinctions, and the destroyed world was now a human culture. An imaginary slippage has occurred; when the term ‘‘revolution’’ appears in Cuvier’s Discours sur les re´volutions du globe (1825), its function is to name natural catastophes, but it also secretly alludes to social ones. Cuvier asks the reader to imagine ‘‘that nature,’’ however idyllic, ‘‘has also had its civil wars, and that the surface of the globe has been ravaged by revolutions and catastrophes.’’38 And if ‘‘enlightened men’’ now study in ‘‘the childhood of our species . . . the nearly effaced traces of so many extinct nations,’’ the same model, Cuvier insists, also applies in geology, which seeks to discover ‘‘in the darkness of the earth’s infancy the traces of revolutions anterior to the existence of every nation.’’39 Nature and society alike have suffered revolutions. Nor is there always a clear line between them in an age when the new social sciences— Auguste Comte, notably, with his positivism—aspired to emulate the natural sciences. Was society not subject to unchanging laws, and was a social physics not a possibility? Between geology and history, deep time and human time, the analogies multiplied. Cuvier proudly presented himself as ‘‘an antiquary of a new species,’’ busy restoring the ‘‘monuments’’ of the earth’s ‘‘past revolutions,’’ a figure Buffon had also invoked in comparing the work of the ‘‘civil histor[ian],’’ who ‘‘consults titles, studies medals, and deciphers ancient inscriptions to determine the periods of human revolutions,’’ to that of the natural historian, who ‘‘must dig through the archives of the world.’’40 Buffon, too, had begun his work by evoking the specter of human disappearance and by recalling the large gaps in the historical record. History only preserves ‘‘the deeds of a few nations, that is of a very small portion of humanity,’’ while ‘‘the rest of mankind has left us no memory, none for posterity.’’ The

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:35

PS

PAGE 165

166

chapter 6

revelation of the earth’s past already suggested a human moral, then, the lesson that most of human history is an unaccountable blank. Most people and most ages have emerged from ‘‘nothingness only to pass as shadows that leave no trace.’’ Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, the discovery of ‘‘prehistoric man’’ and the light it shed on the species’ obscure beginnings will confirm the continuity, implicit in Buffon and Cuvier, between the historical and geological abyss. * * * The work of Jules Michelet (1798–1874), the great romantic historian, illustrates the transfer of the geological sublime to ancient history. In his early Histoire romaine (1831), he explicitly compares cataclysms in nature with epochal social changes and forges a romantic rhetoric of disaster that collapses nature and culture: ‘‘to the prehistorical revolutions of the volcanoes of Etruria and Latium, of Lemnos, Samothrace, and so many Mediterranean islands, there corresponds, in the history of peoples, similar upheavals.’’41 Michelet dwells at length on the triangle of volcanoes that ‘‘for three thousand years’’ have ravaged Italy: Etna, Stromboli, and Vesuvius. These natural catastrophes, however, are here inseparable from the annihilation of ancient human cultures: ‘‘they have found,’’ Michelet writes, ‘‘under the earth, the great city of Velia, the major hub of thirty towns,’’ and he goes on to mention the mirage of aqueous cities buried in volcanic lakes: ‘‘people have often seen, or believed they saw, buried cities at the bottom of these lakes’’ (13–14). This tableau of human worlds violently wiped out reaches a climax when Michelet evokes ‘‘Herculaneum . . . buried under a massive blanket ninety-two feet thick’’ (14). The scale of the disaster and the depth of the city’s burial galvanize him into a sort of catastrophist sublime: ‘‘it was almost necessary, for such a large heap to form, that Vesuvius itself should be thrust into the air’’ (14). The finale of the passage is reserved for the recent ‘‘terrifying earthquake of 1783, in which Calabria feared it had gone under’’ (14–15). The near submersion of an entire province into the sea prompts Michelet to sketch an apocalyptic tableau, perhaps savoring, like the admirers of Girodet’s Deluge, the awesome horror of the destructive sublime: ‘‘towns and villages collapsed; mountains toppled over into the plains; populations fled the highlands, taking refuge on the shore; the sea rose up and swallowed them. The number of dead is estimated at forty thousand’’ (15). Human society is here at the mercy of nature, and distinguishing the two spheres makes little sense; indeed, the

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:35

PS

PAGE 166

Lost Worlds 167

conflation of natural and human history fuels the creation of the new sublime, which the clash of scales actually amplifies. Conversely, man-made catastrophes, whose roots are essentially social, also begin to acquire a geological hue. The case of the volcano, studied in chapter 7, is telling: this image serves as a figure for the threat of revolution throughout the nineteenth century; large crowds in public places, similarly, resemble an irresistible tide or inundation. Moreover, as the perspective of the longue dure´e develops in history, social transformations come to seem, more and more, like geological processes, even like tectonic shifts.42 The modern historical sublime builds on geology and absorbs its tragic violence, large time frame, and ruinous record. Natural disasters have of course always provoked humans to interpret and justify them, but usually by theological means, as divine punishments, the type of providential reading Voltaire debunked in his indignant poem on the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon.43 Michelet’s prehistoric Italian disasters are just as secular as Voltaire’s and possess as little intrinsic meaning; yet rather than attack a naı¨ve theology or point to the evil in the universe, their new function is to elicit awe and terror at the depth of time, at the antiquity of civilization, and at the extent of human extinction. The ‘‘catastrophe’’ is sublime in a way Voltaire would reject, since it seems to trivialize suffering, but his own detheologization of the disaster, Michelet might counter, runs the inverse risk of emptying history of meaning and dishonoring past sacrifices as absurd and useless. The historical sublime does not aestheticize destruction, as modern disaster films do, for its own sake, but enlists Voltaire’s unproductive disgust in a new, purely human effort to redeem lost time. Beyond the catastrophe, this sublime exposes a hidden infinity, a secret injustice, and a modern debt. Kant had theorized the sublime as the imagination’s inability to grasp the full extent of its object, such as the infinity of space, and described it as a sort of ‘‘outrage on the imagination’’ which only procures a ‘‘negative pleasure’’;44 just so, memory struggles here in vain to embrace the enormity of the vanished past, while the mind, sensitized to the ceaseless process of extinction, looks for a secular way to justify the disaster. But justify, with a difference: by recognizing an injustice, by restituting a grievance, by unearthing a memory—the very contrary, in a sense, of justifying the disaster. The historical sublime reverses the theodicy: rather than explain away, it recalls the inexplicable; justification becomes accusation, settled meaning an open question, and the gift of eternal life an obligation, instead, to remember forgotten generations. The lost worlds of Campania, in Michelet’s Histoire romaine,

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:36

PS

PAGE 167

168 c h a p t e r 6

crystallize this sublime complaint of the catastrophist vision and simultaneously express a modern poetic insight into the structure of the present. The sense emerges that beneath the spectacle of the world—the vineyards on a hillside, the calm surface of a lake, the busy sidewalks of Paris—there lies a chain of past worlds visible to the historian’s gaze. The lost world, like most myths, comes in endless varieties—medieval, antique, prehistoric, and prehuman (to mention only spatial parameters)— but here I will focus on two contrasting cases: the underwater city and the vanished nation. These two examples—the topographic and the ethnographic—occupy two poles that jointly cover the field. The city, a concrete image, bounded in space, and the people, a diffuse, fluid lineage in time, but each, in its own way, a mythical figure of total disappearance: Atlantis and the Pelasgians. The lost city is a recurrent myth, in fiction as in archaeology, and the names of the best-known form an imaginary cultural geography: Atlantis, Pompeii, Sodom, Troy, Carthage, and El Dorado. Their sites of concealment vary, but the most compelling version, in poetic terms, is the city submerged under water, which appeals to the romantic mind as the mirage of a world preserved in the aqueous space of memory.45 As a mere allusion, the theme is ubiquitous: take Mary Shelley’s story, ‘‘Valerius, the Reanimated Roman,’’ where a traveler arriving at Cape Miseno by sea glimpses a Roman world under the waves: ‘‘through the clear water you saw the seaweed of various and beautiful colours as it grew on the remnants of the palaces of the Romans now buried under the waters.’’46 In the context of a religious journey, Chateaubriand, en route to Jerusalem, wonders where the punished biblical cities lie and locates their remains in the Dead Sea, ‘‘the famous lake that occupies the location of Sodom and Gomorrah.’’ Walking along its shores, he recalls that ‘‘Strabo speaks of thirteen submerged cities’’ and that ‘‘several travelers . . . say they have noticed the remnants of walls and palaces in the waters of the Dead Sea.’’ 47 In a poem from La Le´gende des sie`cles, ‘‘La Ville disparue,’’ Hugo evokes a preadamite metropolis, peopled with sinful giants, which suddenly crashes into the sea one day as the waterlogged base on which it rests collapses like a sponge. The punishment, like Sodom’s, may be divine, even if Voltaire would disapprove, but this moral seems more a pretext here for a voyeuristic glimpse into a world of pride, excess, and orgies. ‘‘This city,’’ writes Hugo, ‘‘was a place full of madness,’’ as he evokes its towers, bazaars, and prostitutes in vivid images before wiping the slate clean. But not all cities merit their fate, and Michelet, in a curious passage of La Mer (1861), a work

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:36

PS

PAGE 168

Lost Worlds 169

of natural history, deploys the motif to depict the marine metropolis of the coral reef. The seafloor presents a ‘‘phantasmagoria’’ and provokes a ‘‘dreamlike vertigo,’’ but it is above all the coral reef that fascinates Michelet, since it suggests the image of a ghost town abandoned by a once vibrant society.48 This is no mere metaphor for Michelet: the polyps form a polis, a ‘‘people,’’ a ‘‘common city,’’ whose major ‘‘monument’’ is the reef itself, a vast accumulation of ancestral bodies. This petrified ‘‘primary city’’ still reveals the fabric of its life in ‘‘living details’’ that are as ‘‘stunning and visible’’ as those of ‘‘Herculaneum and Pompeii’’ (137). The Atlantic myth runs like a thread throughout the century, but its most compelling expression is no doubt Thomas De Quincey’s evocation of the submerged Jamaican port town, Savannah-la-Mar, in a subsection of Suspiria de Profundis—a text Baudelaire would later translate. Savannah-laMar was destroyed by a tsunami in 1780, a disaster De Quincey interprets in traditional terms as a divinely ordained event: ‘‘God smote Savannah-la-Mar, and in one night, by earthquake, removed her, with all her towers standing and population sleeping, from the steadfast foundations of the shore to the coral floors of ocean.’’49 In De Quincey’s poetic vision, the sunken port town becomes the aquatic twin of Pompeii, preserved under water and frozen in time just like the Campanian city: ‘‘And God said—‘Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men through seventeen centuries: this city I will bury, but not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my mysterious anger; set in azure light through generations to come: for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas’ ’’ (157–58). Savannah-la-Mar, like Pompeii, perfectly embodies the romantic dream of the ‘‘lost world’’ and combines its two key traits: catastrophic destruction and uncanny preservation. The main difference, which De Quincey stresses, is the continued visibility of the aqueous city, at once exposed and untouchable, accessible and immutable, unlike its Roman twin, which began to deteriorate as soon as it was unearthed, and whose protective coat of ash was opaque. In the mythical sphere, Savannahla-Mar thereby reverses Pompeii’s drawbacks, and water proves in every way a superior medium to convey the vision of the lost world. It suspends the vanished city in a sort of liquid visual space and gives rise to a fantastic historical realm: ‘‘this city, therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating along the noiseless depths of the ocean’’ (158). Marine space becomes a figure for the visionary sphere of the imagination, which bestows eternal life on its creations, but more specifically for the memorial afterlife of everything that

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:37

PS

PAGE 169

170 c h a p t e r 6

perishes: this city ‘‘fascinates the eye with a Fata-Morgana revelation, as of human life still subsisting in submarine asylums sacred from the storms that torment our upper air’’ (158). On the seafloor, time ceases to flow irreversibly, as on dry land, and a liminal aquatic archive opens up. The moral the city exhibits, inside its watery case, where it illustrates God’s ‘‘mysterious anger,’’ is a reassuring afterthought to justify the disaster; the real lesson is not theological, but the opposite: the promise of an earthly immortality. The Atlantis that Nemo reveals to his passengers in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869), for instance, and which Verne compares to Pompeii (Aronnax reports ‘‘an entire Pompeii submerged beneath the waves, which captain Nemo resurrected before my eyes’’),50 has lost all association with punishment; it is only a fantastic museal exhibit that Nemo’s state-of-the-art science has made possible. Yet divine punishment assuages the anxiety over destruction, and the Bible’s cursed cities, from Sodom to Babel, offer a convenient prism for the catastrophist view of history. The allusion to the sins of the punished cities remains frequent, and in art and fiction the disaster usually surprises them like an unauthorized snapshot in midorgy: the Pompeians keep feasting and persecuting Christians, even as Vesuvius erupts, and Hugo’s preadamite giants go down singing (‘‘the king . . . drank while singing, and . . . did not even have time to get up from the table’’). This theological mode of explanation clearly remains a temptation, one that was no doubt strengthened in France by the Counter-Revolution, which at times saw the ruin of the Ancien Re´gime as a divine chastisement.51 Such explanations, however, remain mere residual reflexes, since the lost world is, through and through, a modern and secular myth, whose real raison d’eˆtre is the miracle of preservation. The justification of the catastrophe no longer precedes it, but occurs ex post facto, during the rediscovery, when it turns out that the destructive process has itself safeguarded the past. Thus Ame´lie Nothomb, in a recent novel, Pe´plum (1996), speculates that historically minded scientists of the twenty-sixth century, capable of time travel, purposely went back and embalmed Pompeii, after carefully studying their options, to protect a representative slice of antiquity.52 At the antipodes of the lost city, the vanished nation, or people, exercises the same fascination: not a concrete, visible entity, like the city, the lost nation embodies the intangible principle of a world more than its image; it diffuses, over time, and disseminates, across space, a set of irreplaceable traits—language, manners, laws, beliefs, and folklore—that make up the ‘‘genetic code’’ of a culture. The tragedy of peoples that have vanished from the

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:37

PS

PAGE 170

Lost Worlds

171

earth, in antiquity or in modern times, also emerges, beside the lost city, as a major theme of reflection in the nineteenth century. Extinct races, mysterious tribes, annihilated nations, exhausted lineages, ruined dynasties, the varieties, once more, of the motif are endless, but the affect they convey is identical: less tangible, certainly, than the city, the theme carries more pathos, because it directly raises the issue of human disappearance, presents us with a truncated genealogy, and radically questions even the partial ‘‘immortality’’ of the species. Augustin Thierry, for example, becomes sensible to the ‘‘neglected populations’’ of England when he sets out to chart the rise of ‘‘a single nation, a common language, and a uniform legislation’’ in his Histoire de la Conqueˆte de l’Angleterre par les Normands (1825); ‘‘the establishment of the great modern States,’’ he explains, ‘‘has chiefly been the work of force,’’ and ‘‘modern societies’’ are founded on ‘‘the debris of ancient societies, violently destroyed,’’ notably the Scots, the Welsh, the Celts, and the Britons, whose early histories Thierry proposes to reconstitute in order to ‘‘repair an injustice.’’53 Shortly afterwards, in 1831, Tocqueville gloomily predicts that the Native Americans, driven from their lands by European settlers, are a people destined to disappear: ‘‘I believe that the Indian race in North America is condemned to perish, and I cannot prevent myself from thinking that the day when Europeans have settled on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, it will have ceased to exist.’’54 The progress of civilization makes this outcome inevitable but does not, for Tocqueville, excuse it, and he shares this tragic outlook with Thierry, for whom ‘‘such a movement of destruction seems inevitable’’ and who lamely adds that ‘‘however violent and illegitimate it was initially, it has as its present result European civilization.’’55 Guilt figures prominently here, as the modern world, in its uniformity, confesses that it is based on the eradication of local differences and archaic resistances. The republican program of the French Revolution had explicitly equated nation and universality and had set out to forge, from a patchwork of ethnic groups, modern French citizens, in a process of homogeneization that Michelet at once lauded as a good republican and quietly bemoaned in his famous Tableau de la France—a text that set out to map the unified nation. This nostalgic form of guilt is the reverse, as it were, of the theological account of mass extinction, for the responsibility now belongs squarely to the survivors. But besides the guilt of modernity, and its nostalgia for its victim cultures—the reverse of the coin— the reasons for the pathos run deeper. It is Michelet, here, who provides the ideal script for the lost nation, purified of guilt and nostalgia, debt and exoticism: neither massacred tribe,

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:38

PS

PAGE 171

172

chapter 6

nor stubborn province, neither exiled dynasty, nor extinct social type, Michelet, in the Histoire romaine (1831), evokes what we might term the ‘‘Pelasgian disappearance’’ of prehistoric Greece. The Pelasgians are the ‘‘extinct nation’’ he credits with founding Italian civilization, after which they simply vanish, like an earlier geological era: ‘‘along with this old world of sunken craters and extinct volcanoes, a world of lost nations has also been buried.’’56 An ‘‘elder sister of the Hellenic race,’’ in Michelet’s words, the ancient Greeks testified that the Pelasgians had occupied the eastern Mediterranean before their arrival (Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Thucydides, and others mention them) and observed, here and there, surviving Pelasgian communities, which spoke an incomprehensible language. For Michelet, they are an ‘‘unfortunate race,’’ which once ‘‘dominated all the lands situated on the Mediterranean’’ but which has since suffered conquest and persecution. ‘‘An inexpiable malediction hangs over this people,’’ he notes—as if God had punished them— but their fate probably stems from the ‘‘contempt and hatred that an agricultural and industrious population inspired in the heroic tribes that succeeded them.’’ But it is much rather the Pelasgians who are the true heroes, in Michelet’s view, as the ‘‘principal authors . . . of Italian civilization,’’ who brought to Italy ‘‘the stone of the hearth’’ and ‘‘the boundary stone,’’ the ‘‘double basis’’ on which ‘‘the edifice of civil law’’ will come to rest.57 The massive extinction of so widespread a people touches on the geological sublime, and Michelet calls it a ‘‘fossil race’’ whose ‘‘scattered bones’’ critics have had to ‘‘exhume and reassemble’’ and suggests that the Italian branch was ‘‘struck down, no doubt in the wake of volcanic upheavals, by devastating plagues,’’ droughts, and epidemics (22). Awed, he can hardly grasp that this mythical originary nation should vanish so totally. ‘‘It is amazing,’’ he writes, ‘‘to see that a race spread over so many countries should entirely disappear from history . . . there is no other example of so complete a ruin’’ (18). This is unadulterated catastrophism, history seen as a violent, inexplicable disaster. Volcanoes provoke the extinction of the accursed Pelasgians, whose misfortune Michelet reinforces by linking them to Troy, ‘‘a great Pelasgian city,’’ whose mythical founder, Dardanus, was a Pelasgian migrant.58 The pathos of the Pelasgian disappearance transcends the two obvious explanations—the guilt of modernity and divine punishment for their sins. The Pelasgians are heroes, for Michelet, cultivators, miners, and smiths, primitive architects of Western civilization, and the tragedy of their demise hardly implicates modern Europeans. Conquered, persecuted, and enslaved by the Greeks and the Romans, warrior cultures ‘‘frightened’’ by their arts,

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:38

PS

PAGE 172

Lost Worlds 173

and resembling the merchant classes of the Middle Ages—Jews, Moors, Provenc¸als, and Lombards—they are evidently the victims of an injustice. ‘‘Rome should,’’ Michelet insists, ‘‘have recalled that its own origins were also Pelasgian.’’ Yet this is an old grievance, with no modern plaintiff, and the duty of memory that Michelet invokes, as much through the Roman failure to honor them, as through his own commemoration, has now become a free, generous, voluntary act. He identifies with the Pelasgians, of course, and no doubt sees in them the perennial figure of the people, the true anonymous hero of history that historians have so far betrayed, and his tribute to them is rooted in this anachronistic reflection.59 But this celebration is nonetheless a pure gift: an unsolicited, unexpected, absurd act of justice. Why does he, like Flaubert, who resurrected Carthage, become so sensible to the pathos of disappearance? Flaubert had confessed to Sainte-Beuve that ‘‘the curiosity, the love that drew me towards vanished peoples and religions has something attractive and moral in itself, it seems to me.’’60 And Thierry: ‘‘I felt a special affection, I confess, . . . for these neglected populations.’’61 Romantic nostalgia? The deep roots of this ‘‘obligation to remember’’ lie, in fact, in a modern fear of oblivion, in the discovery of the fragility of human records and traditions, which promises to afflict the writer’s own world as well. Volney, looking at past ruins, had already made this leap: ‘‘who knows, I said to myself, if such will not one day be the abandon of our own countries?’’62 What this anxiety shows is that the dream of immortality, as faith declines, has become lodged, once again, in history, which now furnishes a secular version of the divine ‘‘book of life.’’63 Eternal life means to be remembered—or just to haunt a trace, as a potential memory, and to exist in a latent archive. But even the virtue of this minimalist conception is challenged by the ‘‘lost people,’’ which raises the specter of a fatal entropy at work in cultural memory. The celebration of the ‘‘lost people,’’ in this context, which guarantees memory over and beyond any debt, as pure gift, free of obligations, plays a vital role in the modern economy of immortality.64 The myth of the lost world not only alters our relation to the past, but radically transforms the present itself. The world loses its solidity and selfevident presence, its surface grows thin, hollow, and translucent. In the archaeological view, the present is, as it were, a mere coat of dust on an ageold accumulation of strata, a smokescreen that conceals the past worlds beneath ours. Michelet, in La Mer (1861), sees nature as such a surface and exposes in corals and limestone the traces of a vital history: ‘‘one discovers [there] an enormous past of animal life.’’65 Paris itself, he muses, rests on a

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:39

PS

PAGE 173

174

chapter 6

base of compacted marine microorganisms: ‘‘the day that optics made it possible to perceive infusoria, they were seen building mountains, and paving the ocean. Paris is built by infusoria,’’ and ‘‘part of Germany rests on a coral sea’’ (144). The surface we walk on is deceptive, charged, stratified: this insight marks the whole romantic experience of history.66 Above the geology of Paris, its human strata also testify to the new fragility of the present. In Paris de´moli (1855), an early elegiac account of Haussmannization, Gautier describes, in the preface, the modern sense that time is layered, stratified, infinitely deep: ‘‘the terrestrial crust is just a superposition of tombs and ruins. Every man who walks steps on the ashes of his fathers.’’67 The foundations of modern buildings are all archaic, and the ‘‘present . . . walks on the past.’’ Paris is an archaeological site which exposes, here and there, the city’s previous states: ‘‘how many Parises have become stratified upon each other only since Philippe Auguste, plunging layer by layer beneath the crust on which we live today!’’ There are ‘‘eight or ten different cities’’ telescoped into the same space (iv). No step is now innocent, and a sense of temporal vertigo destabilizes the ground. In ‘‘Paris futur,’’ Gautier imagines a vertical city, a monstrous imperial metropolis in which cities are stacked in a vast urban hierarchy and which plunges deep into the ground, down to its very core, the site of a social inferno: ‘‘such a city plunges as far beneath the earth as it rises in the air.’’68 The vertigo of class and time collapse in this vertical city, whose pit teems with enslaved archaic tribes and whose towers doubtlessly harbor a modern imperial elite. Flaubert’s Carthage exhibits the same stratification and temporal vertigo and incorporates the abyss between the reader and the past in the urban topography: ‘‘the buildings were all piled on top of each other, obscuring the view in a marvelous and incomprehensible fashion. One felt there the succession of ages and, as it were, the memory of forgotten fatherlands.’’69

The Archive: Lost and Found The problem of the lost world, no mere poetic vision, directly affects the modern conception of the archive. The archive is of course as old as history—it is history, Hegel will say, conflating it with the state’s records—but this circular logic begs the question that the romantic era opens up: can the archive be incomplete, damaged, and fragile, or must History by definition be only the story of the traces the State has saved from destruction, the story

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:39

PS

PAGE 174

Lost Worlds 175

of the State, of its own self-reflection? The fear of historical entropy embodied in the lost world opens a new possibility: perhaps there are gaps in the archive, and perhaps there is an unknown history that cannot be told, which paradoxically transcends the official, extant record. The true archive would then be the nonarchive, what lies outside its own boundary as its negative shadow. This suspicion grounds many contemporary projects—Michelet’s popular history, Balzac’s novels, the philologists’ Middle Ages—and opens up a new protean conception of the archive as a pure potential: between the traces that are, and those that are clearly not, those that could be; an evershifting boundary; an existential uncertainty over the being of records. What is known now remains incomplete, but the traces that have been neglected can possibly also be recovered; at the same time, extant traces become fragile, fade, and erode. The new archive is boundless but also tends fatally toward nothingness. Between recovery and disintegration, it exists in a state of tension, inspiring both the euphoric vision of a total record and the tragic apprehension of a fatal amnesia. The lost world unites these two poles in a synthetic image, and grasps the past simultaneously as lost and found, found as lost, as pure virtuality.

The Panorama This internal conflict in the archive marks every discourse on memory in the nineteenth century. The anxiety of entropy and erosion is the passion that fuels this reflection: are the traces of humanity’s passage on earth all destined, sooner or later, to disappear? This postreligious question has left a large legacy of topoi, but here I will focus on a few exemplary figures of the archive: the panorama, the ruin, the book, and the sewer. The panorama is by no means an obvious site for the archive and suggests, much more, ideas of popular entertainment, historical spectacles, and the rise of bourgeois subjectivity.70 It has been much studied, of course, both as a literary device and as a prefilmic form of spectacle, and mostly interpreted as a triumphal display of the modern nation or ego—the spectator, alone on a peak, perfectly dominates a landscape, history, city, or battle. In literature, some famous scenes exploit this visual form of empowerment: Balzac’s Rastignac, in Le Pe`re Goriot, challenges Paris from the height of the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery,71 and Aristide Saccard, gazing over Paris from the Butte Montmartre in Zola’s La Cure´e, carves out large proprietary chunks from the urban pie with his gestures.72

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:39

PS

PAGE 175

176

chapter 6

But before symbolizing an omnipotent ego, such scenes in fact encode the opposite, a state of dispossession, or a subjective vacuum, which their visual plenitude in large part serves to mask. Against the triumphalist reading, it is worth recalling that panoramas originally express absence or loss. Take Chateaubriand’s novella, Le dernier Abencerage, in which we see Boabdil, ‘‘the last king of Granada’’—an exotic figure for the end of the Ancien Re´gime— ‘‘forced to abandon the kingdom of his fathers’’ after the Spanish reconquista.73 Before leaving, he beholds the city one last time, from ‘‘the summit of mount Padul,’’ as it stretches out below him, but now it gives rise less to the pride of possession than to the beauty of what has been lost: ‘‘at the sight of this pretty country . . . Boabdil began to shed tears’’ (180). The panorama is here radically reread as a spectacle of loss, rather than of triumphal possession, and the visual field encodes mourning, not power. As an elegiac vision, the panorama has become a phantom compensation for a reality beyond reach. It offers a mirage, spectacularly present, but designed to conceal an irreparable obscurity—the ego’s, the city’s, the nation’s. For Michelet, it is the nation: his sweeping geographic survey of the country in the Tableau de la France matches his vast effort to recover the totality of French history. For Hugo, it is Paris: the panoramic view Quasimodo enjoys from the NotreDame cathderal, and which Hugo recreates in the ‘‘Paris a` vol d’oiseau’’ chapter, serves to exorcize a lack he laments—the disapparance of the medieval city: ‘‘it was a pretty tableau,’’ he concludes, ‘‘which stretched out in every direction at once under your eyes.’’74 The tension between visual repossession and concrete dispossession reaches a peak in the famous scene at the antique store in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin. There the penniless Raphae¨l projects himself into the bric-a-brac on display and beholds in it a ‘‘panorama of the past’’ in which he plays various heroic roles. Yet the pleasure is all in the mind: you can see, but not touch, the antiquarian seems to warn Raphae¨l, as he posits an infinite modern ego based entirely on virtual possession. ‘‘The sublime faculty to make the universe appear in the mind,’’ he argues, requires that you renounce the real thing, and accept the chaste enjoyment of ‘‘an imaginary harem.’’75 ‘‘My only ambition has been to see,’’ he confesses. ‘‘And seeing, is that not knowing? . . . and knowing, is that not taking pleasure intuitively?’’ (63).76 The phantom joys of seeing, then, replace touch, weight, and reality: just so the lost world, panoramic in essence, supplants the eroding archive. The less the traces of the past subsist, the more radiant, in inverse proportion, is its empty image; the lost world is the degree zero of the archive. Yet however much the

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:40

PS

PAGE 176

Lost Worlds

177

panorama is rooted in loss, and the historical panorama, specifically, in the entropy that swallows the past, its very existence also denies that loss; the panorama is the symptom of an archival crisis.

The Ruined Ruin The ruin is an old figure for erosion and mortality, but the Romantics renew the topos through their archival perspective and produce a modern twist, what we might call the ruined ruin. Chateaubriand, once again, can serve as the prophet for this new experience: he cogently encodes his anxiety at the loss of the historical record in the metaimage of the ruined ruin. If the ruin itself gives archaeology access to an absent past, the ruined ruin, on the contrary, suggests that even the record generated by destruction can pass away. The fate of the royal tombs at Saint-Denis, which the revolutionaries destroyed in 1794, alerts Chateaubriand to the possibility of a definitive erasure. The tombs were not, of course, literal ruins but shared in their symbolism of mortality (‘‘everything [here] announces that one has descended into the empire of ruins’’) and also permitted communion with an accessible past: ‘‘under this funerary vault, it would seem that one breathed, so to speak, the dust of earlier times.’’77 But after the desecration of the Saint-Denis tombs, the historical thread has been broken, and even the memorial of the bygone monarchy has been wiped away. Chateaubriand is struck by the futility of writing about the tombs: ‘‘but where does the description of these tombs, already erased from the earth, take us?’’ The tomb, an afterimage of the dead, has itself been swept away: ‘‘they are no longer, these sepulchres! Little children have played with the bones of powerful monarchs: Saint-Denis is deserted’’ (2:101).78 The ruins are ruined. Nothing can serve to reconstruct the past any longer: such second degree ruination aptly figures the modern fear of historical loss. This anxiety is, of course, also irreducibly personal, since the elegy for the monarchy also implicates Chateaubriand’s own legacy. His father’s grave at the family castle of Combourg had also been desecrated (‘‘the ashes of my father had been snatched from his tomb’’),79 and his immense autobiography, the Me´moires d’outre-tombe, is nothing if not a written tombstone designed to resist the universal erosion at work in the world. This erosion goes well beyond the national and personal past; for Chateaubriand, who, following Rousseau, had first sought a new foundation in nature (on his American journey), the Revolution triggered a quest to find

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:40

PS

PAGE 177

178

chapter 6

the historical roots of Western civilization, in Athens and Jerusalem notably. In 1806, he thus set off on a reverse Eastern pilgrimage to behold Europe’s Greek and Christian origins. The record of this anguished quest, the Itine´raire de Paris a` Je´rusalem (1811), becomes another inventory of disillusion: its leitmotif is the second degree ruination of the past. Modern Greece, under Turkish rule, has lost not just its glory, but even the memory of that glory: ‘‘who would believe it! [The Battle of] Salamis has today been almost entirely erased from the memory of the Greeks’’ (126). The immaterial monuments of identity—the nation’s language and history—have become dead letters: ‘‘not only do they not know their history, but they almost all ignore the language on which their glory rests’’ (126). Chateaubriand stresses the enormity of this loss and his own unique value, as it were, by imagining that he alone bears this tragic awareness: ‘‘I was at that moment the only man in Greece who remembered that great man [Themistocles]’’ (126). The distressing absence of the past finds its best expression in a haunting and quixotic adventure that Chateaubriand relates: on the ruins of Sparta, marked only by ‘‘a white hovel’’ (95), he is determined to find the grave of Leonidas, and to pay homage to the virtue of the Spartan hero immortalized by Herodotus. But all his efforts to locate this tomb, as he runs to and fro, prove vain, and he at last lets out an anguished cry: ‘‘I screamed with all my power: Leonidas! No ruin repeated this great name, and Sparta herself seemed to have forgotten him’’ (99).80 Ancient Greece, like the French monarchy and Chateaubriand’s own family, has no visible resting place, no material index to commemorate its body—the grave has perished after the hero. The absence of traces provokes such deep anguish that Chateaubriand tries paradoxically to record even this void in his memory and to preserve, in a sense, loss itself: ‘‘it was August 18, 1806,’’ he notes with precision, ‘‘at nine o’clock in the morning, that I went alone, along the Eurotas, on a walk that will never be effaced from my memory’’ (103). An impossible wish to remember emerges from the acknowledgment of loss, and the modern historian is condemned to drawing traces of lost traces, second degree traces, doubly hollow, to counter the material erosion of the record.81 The past’s ruins are ruined: ‘‘the ruins of Argos no longer respond to the glory of its name’’ (111).

The Book This predicament gives rise to a modern scriptural program: convert the erased material traces into ideal written ones. The book becomes, as Hugo

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:41

PS

PAGE 178

Lost Worlds

179

had seen, the paper Ark that safeguards a nation’s patrimony, and in NotreDame de Paris (1831) he of course enacts this whole-scale transfer of a ‘‘book of stone’’ into a ‘‘book of paper.’’ The famous ‘‘ceci tuera cela’’ (this will kill that) chapter marks not just the fatal shift from architecture to print as a medium of cultural memory in the late Middle Ages, but more subtly the memorial function that Hugo accords to literature (ceci sauvera cela). The novel’s origin is a mysterious word, ananke`, which Hugo himself ostensibly saw on the cathedral’s wall: inscribed there long ago by an unknown hand, and now slowly fading, it drives the novel’s quest to intervene against time’s destructive work: ‘‘the man who wrote that word on the wall has vanished [s’est efface´],’’ Hugo writes. ‘‘The word has in turn vanished from the wall of the church, the church will perhaps soon vanish from the earth,’’ but Hugo’s novel squarely brakes this entropic process, constituting the ‘‘fragile souvenir’’ which ‘‘this author dedicates’’ to Quasimodo.82 Body, inscription, church: these three vehicles of memory vanish progressively, until the book at last intervenes to halt this broadening tide of erosion. Shortly after Hugo, Thomas Carlyle marveled at the power of books to preserve entire worlds after their destruction: ‘‘in Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.’’83 Books provide a providential record of the life of nations now reduced to ‘‘ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks.’’ Their power is properly magical: ‘‘no magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books’’ (138). The salvific power of the book is certainly not new. The biblical ‘‘book of life’’ refers, of course, to personal resurrection, and the res gestae tradition of antiquity immortalized the deeds of kings and heroes. But modern writers invest the book with a much broader and thinner memorial capacity: the power to record, render, or transcribe the image of entire civilizations. The personal immortality that ancient historiography and Christianity had promised is replaced, during the eighteenth century, by the impersonal perennity of nations, cultures, and collectivities. There emerges, in this context, the myth of the book that would provide the total representation of a culture— Homer’s epics, Dante’s Middle Ages, to be sure, but also Hugo’s medieval Paris, and Balzac’s modern encyclopedia of France.84 A great work would be the ideal distillation of a world, capturing it forever in words. Hegel’s philosophy of history is the theoretical formulation of this vision of the book as the collective record of a culture, since Hegel believed that every historically

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:41

PS

PAGE 179

180

chapter 6

significant event was inscribed in an archive; nothing, indeed, could be left out, since importance was tautologically conferred by recording itself. Whatever was left out was by definition irrelevant: ‘‘the time periods . . . that have elapsed for peoples before the writing of history, may have been filled with revolutions, migrations, the wildest changes,’’ but these are nonevents, belonging to peoples who have no ‘‘objective history, because they have produced no subjective historical narratives.’’85 It is by writing one’s history that one acquires a history, and this only occurs, Hegel points out, when an emerging State begins to keep administrative records and thereby lays the groundwork for the narrative of its own formation. The State is the only true subject of history, the only authentic sphere of events,86 and world history, in recounting the rise of the modern State, shows how Spirit gradually finds its highest expression and at last realizes the ethical ideal of freedom in a political form. In Hegel’s tautological view, the State and the archive are one, mere reflections of each other, and the recorded history of a nation constitutes its exhaustive self-portrait. Hegel’s circular answer to the archival crisis suggests the existence of a philosophical epic—such as his own Philosophy of History—which would record, without leaving any residue, the essential stages of Spirit’s march across regions and periods. But this abstract philosophical faith, which too quickly abolishes the question of amnesia, could not reassure the culture at large, which found comfort in the solid records of concrete works—ancient epics, historical reconstructions, or homegrown recording projects that captured the world as it sped by. A telling enterprise, in this regard, is Louis Se´bastien Mercier’s (1740–1814) pioneering long-term chronicle of Paris, the Tableau de Paris, published in the years 1781–88, which drew inspiration for its novel anthropology—fresh, journalistic sketches of everyday life, types, manners, professions, and public places in Paris before the Revolution—from the destruction of past civilizations: ‘‘Thebes, Tyre, Persepolis, Carthage, and Palmyra are no more,’’ he wrote, even their ruins are fading: ‘‘the traces of the sites they occupied have even become indistinct.’’87 Unlike the edifying poetry of ruins, this modern discourse of loss laments a gap in knowledge, and a mutilation of memory: ‘‘Oh ancient cities of Asia, which are no more! vanished empires! generations whose names are even unknown to us! famous Atlantises! and you, nations who have breathed on this globe, the surface of which is incessantly disturbed, tell us what were your arts! Must everything perish?’’ (1:982).

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:41

PS

PAGE 180

Lost Worlds

181

Mercier echoes Chateaubriand’s anxiety before the nonexistent tomb, but the scandal here is reflexive and epistemological and concerns instead the limits of knowledge. Does a full record of the human adventure exist? Is it necessarily spotty, broken, and incomplete? The abyss of a silent past suddenly opens up: ‘‘our gaze plunges into the historical world,’’ he writes, ‘‘for four thousand years, but no further.’’ Even so, all we see ‘‘of this world are the summits, which are surrouded by clouds that obscure our gaze, . . . [and] a prodigious mass of events escapes us’’ (1:982). Given such entropy, would it not be wise to make a record for the future? Long before Hugo, then, Mercier had grasped the book as a durable cultural record, immune to the erosion of buildings and monuments. His own Tableau de Paris was conceived as an invaluable Ark-archive for posterity: ‘‘escape, my book,’’ he prayed, ‘‘escape from the flames or from the barbarians,’’ hoping that it would outwit the entropy of empires. ‘‘Tell future generations what Paris was’’ (1:981). A rich nineteenth-century tradition of urban chronicles takes its cue from Mercier’s archival initiative.88 Yet is not the book, in the end, also vulnerable, as prone to destruction as body and building? Given the violence of history, it can only lay a doubtful claim to immortality: ‘‘And the accumulated works of man, which he believed he could immortalize through the precious discovery of the printing press, will they perish in the end, since fire, despotism, earthquakes and barbarism destroy even the finest leafs on which the useful ideas of genius have been imprinted?’’ (1:982). Books, of course, face a more formidable foe: they live only as long as tradition calls them to our attention and thus paradoxically rely on the fragility of human memory.89 ‘‘Most Poets are very soon forgotten,’’ Thomas Carlyle noted. But even canonical works belong to a contingent cultural memory, always open to revision: ‘‘not the noblest Shakspeare or Homer of them can be remembered forever;—a day comes when he too is not!’’90 Hugo’s ‘‘monument in print’’ is thus no safer from erosion than churches, graves, and ruins and finally fails the memory test. Moreover, against Hegel’s equation of the memorable with the recorded, many recall the infinite areas of darkness that multiply around the written word. Thus the Norse Edda is just the tip of the iceberg, for Carlyle, of an unknown millennial culture that ‘‘no man will now ever know: its Councils of Trebisond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses, Dantes, Luthers, are sunk without echo in the dark night!’’ (21). The book of Norse myths only reveals a gap in our knowledge, the fact ‘‘that [there was] such a history.’’

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:42

PS

PAGE 181

182 c h a p t e r 6

The Sewer A nagging doubt eventually casts its shadow over every form of durable record as the century progresses; nothing withstands time. The notion that all societies have left indelible traces is exposed as a naı¨ve myth, and a deepening memory crisis undermines the belief that any ‘‘universal history’’ might be written. With the discovery of prehistory, from 1840 to 1860, and the deep hazy world of ‘‘fossil man,’’ a vast realm of amnesia glides into view; but even known civilizations could erode and leave behind large blanks in the acknowledged texture of history—such as the Assyrian empire, which Botta and Layard had excavated at midcentury, ‘‘an entire civilization whose final vestiges one might have believed annihilated.’’91 In this context, a new mythical figure of the archive emerges: the garbage dump. If neither books, nor monuments, nor the imagination can prevent the past from perishing, then it is time to change focus and pay attention to overlooked debris. Archaeologists, indeed, had begun to look at prehistoric kitchen middens in Denmark in the mid-nineteenth century and had sifted through mounds of discarded shells for clues about early human life; similar pioneering research on kitchen rubbish had taken place at the Swiss lake dwellings in the 1850s.92 Far from simply a progress in method, the willingness to look at garbage signals a serious shift in mentality, a threshold crossed in response to the threat of amnesia. The literary text that best registers this expansion of the archive is Hugo’s Les Mise´rables. Hugo’s epic novel features a famous episode in the sewers: while Paris is in the grips of an insurrection, Jean Valjean carries the wounded Marius to safety via the underground sewer network. But the sewer is much more than just a nasty Gothic backdrop, mythical labyrinth, or surrogate Hades here; it also constitutes a sort of symbolic encyclopedia, a site where all the telltale debris of Paris has amassed over the ages into a repulsive record. The sewer, by storing a deposit of the waste and trash the city evacuates, transforms what society destroys into a priceless archive. While ‘‘political economy only sees detritus there,’’ Hugo insists that ‘‘the sewer is the conscience of the city.’’93 ‘‘In this livid place, . . . all things appear as they are’’ (3:321). Though the sewer embodies the ceaseless decay of material culture, this very metabolism, through a sort of poetic alchemy, here turns into its opposite—the creation of a secret cultural conservatory. Waste becomes conservation, and elimination a paradoxical form of record, as Hugo turns erosion on its head. In Hugo’s mythopoetic vision, the sewer stands for the promise that

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:42

PS

PAGE 182

Lost Worlds 183

every blank in official history might be filled by consulting this archive, which exposes the naked truth: ‘‘this jumble is a confession. No more false appearances here, no touch-ups possible, the rubbish is stripped bare, total exposure’’ (3:322). The genuine history to be recovered here is of course the silent voice of the vanquished, which emerges from under the official myths and repressions. ‘‘History passes through the sewer,’’ Hugo writes, thereby forging the countermyth of a total historical record: ‘‘the Saint-Bartholomews filter through the pavement cracks drop by drop. The great public assassinations, the political and religious butcheries, all pass through this basement of civilization, pushing their corpses along’’ (3:322). The Dantesque sewer is even peopled with the anguished shades of the perepetrators, now expiating their crimes, ‘‘scratching the stones and trying to do away with the traces of their actions’’ (3:323). But the traces, Hugo insists, persist, indelible, as if this phantom archive had come to absorb the function of omnniscience and judgment once accorded to God. The passage ends with a triumphant evocation of the power of ‘‘philosophy’’ to reconstruct true history: ‘‘In the erasure of things that vanish, in the dwindling of things that evaporate, [philosophy] recognizes everything. It reconstructs the mantle from the rag, and the woman from the patch of cloth. From the cesspool, it rebuilds the city; from the mud, it divines the manners’’ (3:323). Instances of this archival fantasy abound, across genres, but Michelet’s vision of the seafloor in La Mer as a fantastic record of the earth merits mention here beside Hugo’s sewer. The earth itself is worn down, erodes, and produces waste, which settles over time into submarine strata, so that the sea, once the earth’s womb, also becomes its durable cemetery.94 In ‘‘the superimposed layers’’ of the seafloor, ‘‘the history of the globe’’ is legible ‘‘in gigantic registers where the centuries accumulate and openly exhibit the book of time’’ (56). For Both Hugo and Michelet, then, it is waste, the very substance of destruction, which preserves memory. The dialectic of amnesia and recollection has pushed the archive to this limit.

All or Nothing The tug-of-war between memory and forgetting, to which the motifs above testify, finally gives rise to two extreme and irreconcilable visions: the myth of a total archive, on the one hand, and the acknowledgment of universal erosion, on the other. Either every being and event leaves a full record, or

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:43

PS

PAGE 183

184 c h a p t e r 6

nothing at all survives. The archival theory that haunts Mercier and his heirs tends to allude, for material support, to the great modern example of integral preservation: Pompeii and Herculaneum. To Mercier’s radical doubt concerning the full survival of the historical record, the myth of Herculaneum and Pompeii offers a soothing balm, a largely imaginary guarantee that future catastrophes will leave such rich archaeological deposits. The Vesuvian cities that show us ‘‘their paintings, their sculptures, their arts, and domestic utensils’’ provide a reassuring ‘‘image of what our cities will become in turn’’ (1:982–83). The value of his own Tableau de Paris is bound up with this archaeological logic, since he foresees the time when the future antiquaries of Paris will delight in ‘‘a dictionary that we perhaps look down on today’’ (1:984). Michelet, we saw, compared his coral reefs to Pompeii and Herculaneum, and Lyell, in an otherwise sober text, suggested that volcanic eruptions might preserve ships and drowned men ‘‘throughout entire geological epochs . . . like the houses and works of art in the subterranean cities of Campania’’ (320). Hugo and Chateaubriand also both cite the myth, and Renan, discussing the apparent absence of Assyrian remains, states that ‘‘the wind of the desert has amassed hills of sand’’ over them, ‘‘under which antiquity has stayed intact just like Pompeii beneath the ashes and Herculaneum under the lava’’ (411). In the nineteenth-century memory crisis, Pompeii functions, quite clearly, as a reassuring myth of survival, the guarantee of a durable archive. At the other extreme, the discourse on memory flatly denies, in a sober realist about-face, that human records or remains survive for any length of time. It pessimistically acknowledges that the archive is as mortal as men and tries stoically to bear this condition with a grin. Lyell, for example—and it is often the same writers who embody both extremes—also voices the law of disappearance: ‘‘of the many hundred million human beings which perish in the course of every century on the land, every vestige is usually destroyed in the course of a few thousand years.’’95 Their cultural legacy, no less than their bodily remains, quickly fades from human memory, as Carlyle recalls when discussing the nameless benefactors who have advanced civilization; revising the traditional view of historical agency, he writes that we are not chiefly indebted to famous figures, because ‘‘the inventions and traditions, and daily habits that regulate and support our existence, are the work not of Dracos and Hampdens, but of Phoenician mariners, of Italian masons and Saxon metallurgists.’’96 These nameless agents are our true cultural heroes, but have left only a vast blank, an obscure epic of silences: ‘‘well may we say that of our History the more important part is lost without recovery’’ (50). The

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:44

PS

PAGE 184

Lost Worlds

185

architectural record is just as vulnerable, as the debate on patrimony and restoration from Hugo to Ruskin made clear. For Ruskin, who violently opposed the restoration practice of Viollet-le-Duc and favored letting buildings die gracefully, the fragility of the human record was never in doubt: ‘‘the power neither of emperors, nor queens, nor kingdoms, can ever print again upon the sands of time the effaced footsteps of departed generations.’’97 The universal law, for buildings as for human memory, was irreversible decay, and any effort to halt it was vain: ‘‘it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything . . . the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.’’98 There is no redemption here: for Lyell, at least, the sea had often ‘‘preserved . . . mortal remains . . . in subaqueous strata [for] entire geological epochs’’ (319), and Carlyle had softened the scandal of amnesia by admitting a silent cultural debt,99 but for Ruskin the law of loss holds unhindered sway, and in his antirestorationist polemic, the nineteenth century finally articulates its basic fear as a fatal fact—history is irretrievable loss, dispersion, and the erosion of all records. Hugo penned another fable that can serve as a countermyth here to his providential sewer: it is ‘‘The Epic of the Worm,’’ from La Le´gende des sie`cles, written the same year that Les Mise´rables was published (1862). This long poem presents the boastful monologue of a worm, a proud creature with a Manichaean outlook, which compares itself to God. ‘‘The universe,’’ it says, ‘‘supports two all-powerful Beings, God who makes the worlds, and the worm which destroys them.’’100 The worm’s speech spells out the uncompromising law of erosion that affects all living things, which must, in the end, die and decay, because the ‘‘corruption’’ that holds sway in the earthly realm is nothing but the principle, in the worm’s unorthodox theology, of material decay at work in the world: ‘‘the world lies over this being and has it in its roots. And that being is me. I am.’’ In the worm’s ontology (‘‘except for me, nothing is real’’), only decay can claim to exist eternally, and the platonic hierarchy of being is turned on its head as mutability itself becomes the only solid nucleus. Nothing truly is, except the worm, the deathless hinge of a world in flux: ‘‘I am. You are not, fire of the eyes, blood of the veins . . . you assassinate me in vain, for I am reborn under my vault.’’ The poem evidently recycles the religious vanitas motif, on one level, but it exploits this topos to express a new entropic vision of history. ‘‘This life is made of disappearance,’’ we hear, but the sense has been secularized, modernized, shifted to historical time, for we are now in a strictly Kantian cosmos of transient empirical

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:44

PS

PAGE 185

186 c h a p t e r 6

entities: ‘‘I will forever abolish from everything in my grasp the number, the space and the time.’’ It is telling that Hugo inserts the ‘‘Epic of the Worm’’ in a large fragmentary epic that purports to reconstruct the world’s history through legend. In the prologue to La Le´gende des sie`cles, ‘‘The Vision that gave rise to this book,’’ Hugo concedes that history and destruction are coterminous and that no expenditure of poetic labor can mend the past, restore the body of history, or redeem it through a total resurrection. The ‘‘wall of the centuries’’ that the poet beholds is made of debris, gaps, fragments, and jagged bits, chewed up by time. ‘‘All the centuries lay there, broken up in bits, without connection. Every period dangled, in disarray, and none was without fractures or lacunae.’’101 Rejecting his own romantic credo, the poet now refrains from posturing as the savior who can mend a broken history and admits instead that his vision cracks like a broken mirror: ‘‘the whole vision trembled like a pane of glass and broke, falling apart in the night into bits.’’102 The poet’s gift of divination is powerless to halt this process of archival dispersion: ‘‘it was no longer that prodigious wall, complete . . . [but] the pale vision reappeared with fractures.’’ Hugo’s epic retelling of universal history has acknowledged the limits of restoration and ends up incorporating gaps, silences, and blanks in his Babelian book, which offers us brief flashes from the ruinous ‘‘wall of the centuries’’ rather than a seamless history: This book is the frightening remnant of Babel; It’s the sinister Tower of Things, the edifice Of good and evil, of tears, mourning, and sacrifice, Which once gazed proudly on the far horizon, But now lies broken into hideous fragments, Toppled, scattered, and lost in the dark valley. It’s the epic of humanity: rugged, huge—and ruined. (1:70)

History and the Trace The Imprint The implicit conflict between complete oblivion and total recall remains unresolved in this binary formulation. A rigid antithesis, this major polarity in nineteenth-century historical consciousness is only overcome when the idea

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:44

PS

PAGE 186

Lost Worlds

187

of the trace or imprint intervenes to make destruction and preservation resonate against each other.103 In philosophical terms, the trace is an indentation that marks the violent passage of time over beings and things. The work of destruction thereby generates the chronicle of its own actions: the hollow of the trace constitutes a negative imprint that points both to what once was and to what destroyed it. The trace also combines the loss and survival of the origin in a single index, as Georges Didi-Huberman has noted, who asks if ‘‘the process of imprinting implies contact with the origin or loss of the origin?’’104 There is an intimate commerce there between life and death, between the living original and the inert copy, which can lead to an inversion of values such that death masks and live facial imprints negate their models: ‘‘an imprint of a living person tends to deaden the resemblance, while one made of the dead seeks to preserve something of the resemblance of life’’ (64). The imprint, for Didi-Huberman, has a ‘‘circular’’ structure, in which ‘‘the play between contact and loss is combined with the play between the still living and the already dead’’ (64). The difficult distinction between trace and imprint reflects this ambiguity: the trace is a violent imprint, while the imprint is a gentle trace, one destroys, while the other preserves, one is action, the other reception—but both ultimately shade into each other. It is this ambivalence that allows them to overcome the stark alternative between entropy and memory and to open a space where erosion itself, as in Michelet’s sea and Hugo’s sewer, produces the archive, where the destruction of the world coincides with its preservation. The role of the imprint in historical thought, though rarely remarked, and much less theorized, cannot be overestimated. We can distinguish four stages in the historical appropriation of the term here: the monumental, the proper, the subjective, and the expressive. Reflection on the imprint no doubt goes far back, but Wilhelm von Humboldt is surely among the first to apply it to historical discourse. In ‘‘The Study of the Remnants of Antiquity’’ (1793), he refers to the monuments of antiquity as ‘‘a true imprint [Abdruk] of its spirit and its character.’’105 Monuments are obviously only first-degree imprints, the codified traces that humanity has left of its interaction with nature, not the inarticulate traces that time will eventually impress on these monuments. It is involuntary marks that constitute the imprint properly speaking, the archaeological trace which unites absence and presence, destruction and preservation. Accounts of Pompeii teem with examples of such ghostlike traces, notably the chariot tracks in the streets that so impressed vistitors. Mme de Stae¨l noted that ‘‘the groove of the wheels is visibly marked

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:44

PS

PAGE 187

188 c h a p t e r 6

on the street,’’106 and Dickens was equally struck by such imprints: ‘‘the chafing of the bucket-rope in the stone rim of the exhausted well; the track of carriage-wheels in the pavement of the street; the marks of drinking-vessels on the stone counter of the wine-shop.’’107 Taine, contemplating these same chariot tracks, divined in them the economy of a slave-owning society. While Humboldt’s imprints are conscious, man-made signs, the Pompeian imprints are involuntary, legible marks, accessible only through interpretation in hindsight. These tangible marks give rise in turn to a third imprint—the psychic impression the past stamps on the mind of the historian. Taine thus compares Michelet’s ‘‘moral’’ sensibility to the past to the ‘‘physical’’ receptivity of a photographic plate: ‘‘the capacity to suffer and rejoice like that upon contact with the past is to the mind what the chemical coating is to the luminous plate on which it is spread. One retains moral imprints, the other physical imprints.’’108 The historian is himself the soft surface on which history reflects its violent process, making ‘‘the gift of the historian’’ resemble ‘‘the art of the photographer.’’ This relay of imprints, from agent to world, from past to present, and from matter to mind is incomplete without one last impression that gives expressive form to the past—be it plastic or textual. Hugo thus boasts in La Le´ge´nde des sie`cles that ‘‘the poems that compose this volume are nothing but the successive imprints of the human profile’’ over the ages.109 He then extends the mask metaphor to represent periods more generally: the poems are ‘‘imprints taken now on barbarism, now on civilization, almost always live from history . . . [and] molded on the masks of the centuries.’’110 The imprint has here completed a circle, running from a world modeled on a culture’s Geist to the projection of this spirit in artistic form, a process whose authenticity is guaranteed by the indexical contact with the origin. The imprint, then, much more, perhaps, than the old eyewitness testimony, provides the modern historian with a metaphysical guarantee of the past’s reality and reproducibility. Carlo Ginzburg has shown how the rise of forensic science provided a new ‘‘evidential paradigm’’ for historical truth in the nineteenth century,111 and this paradigm—the study of clues and traces—also underpins the modern dream of an enduring archive. The imprint does not just give more reliable testimony than discourse, but it also resolves the aporia of annihilation and documentation and suggests that all destruction may finally coincide with trace formation. The trace paradoxically links violence to survival. As such, it represents a later stage in the science of reconstruction: while ruins and fossils embody

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:45

PS

PAGE 188

Lost Worlds

189

absence, the trace marks a second-degree absence, the hollow left after the original has completely disappeared. Its power to connect the violence of history with preservation, the erasure of life with its inscription in memory, gives the trace a symbolic function in the reflection on the archive. Hugo tellingly invokes a violent imprint to authenticate his own poetic recreations: ‘‘it is not forbidden the poet and the philosopher to attempt to do with social facts what the naturalist attempts with zoological facts . . . the reconstruction of the monster after the imprint of the nail or the dent made by the tooth’’ (61). The tooth and the nail: these weapons of incision point at once to the destruction of life and to the creation of redemptive traces, to a dialectical imprint that unites loss and recovery. It is precisely such tooth marks that opens the gate to the world of prehistoric beasts in Jules Verne’s paleontological odyssey; in Voyage au centre de la terre (1864), an anchor pulled out of an underground lake bears strange incisions, which the adventurers conclude are the tooth marks of an extinct marine monster: ‘‘yes! these are clearly the imprints of teeth that are incrusted in the metal! The jaws which they adorn must possess an enormous force!’’112 This episode marks a threshold in the novel and heralds the actual resurgence of extinct beasts along with the unequivocal entry into fantasy; not only do the tooth marks signal this resurrection, but the support itself, the anchor, has perhaps itself roused the beast from its eternal slumber (it ‘‘probably troubled some animal in its reteat’’ [227]) and thereby reversed the vector of violence. The effect resurrects the cause, or the victim revives the killer. The dark subterranean sea of the Voyage stands here as a figure for the past’s opacity, much like the earth’s crust, and the dialectical imprints it yields are allegories of the modern archive.

Body of Evidence The dialectical imprint—Hugo’s and Verne’s tooth marks—betrays a monstrosity at work in history, but it may be less pressing to revive the monster than the bodies it has devoured. The body, however, is the great absentee in the archive: made of corruptible flesh, it is the first thing to vanish. However, if teeth can make incisions in flesh, the body can, in turn, leave its own durable imprint on solid matter. This is the uplifting lesson that archaeology draws at Pompeii, where the victims left tell tale hollows after decaying inside their tombs of ash. Mme de Stae¨l had mused over ‘‘the remains of a woman’’ which were still ‘‘adorned with the jewelry that she had worn on the holiday

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:45

PS

PAGE 189

190 c h a p t e r 6

troubled by the volcano,’’ but few bodies were so well preserved.113 Her ‘‘dried-up arms no longer filled the bracelets of precious stone that she was wearing’’—she was a thinning body of evidence (300). Moving beyond the reliance on such material remains, and exploiting, for the first time, the negative trace of the body, the archaeologist Fiorelli pioneered the use of body molds at Pompeii in the 1860s: he would ‘‘pour plaster into the hollows left by the corpses of the Pompeians . . . [so that] the plaster would render exactly the image of the dead.’’114 Rarely have the invisible cavities left by historical violence been so eloquently visualized, or the absence of the body after death been so hauntingly materialized. Fiorelli’s molds offered proof that the actual traces of historical catastrophe could be used to resurrect the bodies of the victims. Already before Fiorelli, literature had, as it were, anticipated this method of negating absence, since The´ophile Gautier’s story of a Pompeian woman who comes back to life, Arria Marcella, also took its cue from a body cast—the all-too-famous imprint of a woman’s breast on volcanic ash found in the villa de campagne. This relic was on display at the Museo Borbonico in Naples, and was a big favorite with tourists; it is the fetish that fuels the protagonist’s erotic reverie: ‘‘What he examined with such attention was a piece of petrified black ash carrying a hollow imprint: it resembled the fragment of a mold for a statue, broken during casting; the practiced eye of an artist would easily have recognized in it the outline of a marvelous breast and a side as pure in style as that of a Greek statue.’’115 The impact of historical violence on a perishable surface could hardly receive a more melodramatic illustration: ‘‘the lava, after cooling around the body of a woman, retained her charming contours . . . [and] this noble form, reduced to dust almost two thousand years ago, has come down to us’’ (238). Human flesh triumphs over the lava and ash that destroyed it. Gautier’s tale might be said to exemplify the new stage in historical thought marked by the trace: while documents and monuments had once been the main form of testimony to the past, now the marks and traces left by bodies—the perishable occupants of the past—give rise to an unlikely form of resurrection: ‘‘the curve of a breast has survived through the centuries when so many empires have vanished without leaving a trace!’’ (238). The perishable endures: that is the paradox of the trace, which archaeology, by inverting and filling it out, can flesh out once more. No doubt Gautier pushes this process to its far limit in another of his morte amoureuse stories, Le Roman de la momie, in which a team of Egyptologists finds an ancient footstep in the sand of an Egyptian tomb, left by a departing priest when the tomb was

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:46

PS

PAGE 190

Lost Worlds

191

sealed. This index is the primal trace from which the novel will conjure the life of the princess Tahoser and the specter of ancient Egypt. The paradox of preservation can go no further: the substance that retains the footprint here, dust, is itself a prime symbol of mortality and therefore performs a sort of historical miracle. ‘‘The dust, as eternal in Egypt as granite, had molded and retained this footprint for over thirty centuries.’’116 Undifferentiated matter, the final product of erosion, is the very medium that preserves the most fragile of memories: ‘‘this faint trace, which a breath might have swept away, has lasted longer than civilizations, than empires, than religions even, than monuments thought to be eternal’’ (44). There is no better example of the dialectical imprint than this ancient footstep in the dust: it unites total entropy with the miracle archive and inverts the hierarchy of flesh and stone.

Integral Preservation of the Past The concept of the trace defuses, in large part, the nagging fear that entropy will swallow every memory and allows the utopia of preservation to find expression in a number of forms. The lost world was only a mythical entity, a poetic hypothesis, but thanks to the modern vision of the archive as a residue of traces, the integral survival of the past becomes a real possibility. The dream of a total archive develops as a quasi-theorized entity in the course of the century and firmly secularizes the divine ‘‘book of life,’’ which, from antiquity to the Enlightenment, had bound the archive up with the belief in the afterlife and God’s omniscience. This theological archive has now become strictly earthly and come to refer unequivocally to the innerworldly survival of historical memories.117 The precise form it takes, however, varies over time, and usually reflects its ideological context; here I will isolate three distinct moments to show how the archive evolves over the century: the romantic archive, the positivist archive, and the modernist archive—or the ideal, the real, and the mental. The foundational myth for all these archives, of course, is archaeology, and more specifically the coincidence of destruction and preservation at Pompeii. The world at once ruined and saved by the volcano is a perfect allegory for the utopian archive. Schiller’s 1804 poem on the Campanian cities, ‘‘Pompeji und Herkulanum,’’ is an early expression of this archaeological dream; as the cities return to life before the poet’s gaze, he asks if ‘‘there is life in the abyss? . . . does what has vanished return?’’118 The integral preservation of Pompeii prompts the poet to affirm jubilantly that ‘‘nothing

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:46

PS

PAGE 191

192

chapter 6

is lost’’ (nichts ist verloren) and that the earth immortalizes human life: ‘‘the earth has safeguarded [everything] faithfully.’’ Pompeii becomes a figure for the imperishable imprint of the past. Carlyle even compares a rediscovered text, Jocelyn of Brakelond’s twelfth-century chronicle, to the magic archive at Pompeii: beneath the rude crust of ‘‘Monk-Latin,’’ he detects ‘‘the ideas [and] the life-furniture’’ of a lost world ‘‘covered deeper than Pompeii with the lava-ashes and inarticulate wreck of seven hundred years.’’119

The Three Archives The quasi-mystical faith in the unreality of entropy at the heart of the archive is best on display in its early, romantic formulation. There the belief that the past endures openly embraces speculative claims and posits the existence of a sphere beyond the empirical world, an ideal realm, no longer divine, like the dwelling place of souls, but not fully earthly either, where past events accumulate. Hugo’s visionary ‘‘wall of the centuries’’ provides a concrete image of this hypothesis, but its clearest expression occurs in the speculations of Chateaubriand, Gautier, and Nerval. What type of existence, if any, can be attributed to perished things? This becomes an explicit question for Chateaubriand, especially when he confronts the dead; bones and ashes may be standard figures of death and vanity, but they also provoke a new question here, a concern with the form that memorial survival might take. When Chateaubriand recounts, in a famous passage, the exhumation of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI in 1815, he at first recites his habitual lesson on earthly ambition—the return of the living as of the dead monarchs is a ‘‘vain restoration of the throne and the tomb’’—but then moves beyond this ‘‘self-evident . . . vulgar moral’’ (835) to a more modern speculation.120 Himself the author of a posthumous work, a literary tomb carved in imperishable words, he wonders if the dead live on in some twilight domain: ‘‘is everything emptiness and absence in the sepulchral region? Is there nothing in this nothingness? Are there no beings there, no thoughts of dust? Do these bones not possess some unknown mode of life?’’ (835). This is not a question about the afterlife, about the soul’s future abode, but about ‘‘the mode of life’’ of bones, by which Chateaubriand means the intangible mass of a person’s experiences during life, and suggests that our least monumental traits, our deeds, feelings, beliefs, and perceptions, might leave some ideal residue. Do people’s subjective experiences survive somewhere? ‘‘The things they have dreamed, be-

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:46

PS

PAGE 192

Lost Worlds 193

lieved, and hoped for, are they, too, like themseleves, ideal entities [ide´alite´s] swallowed up pell-mell along with them? Dreams, futures, pleasures, pains, freedoms and slaveries . . . are you the perceptions of a moment, perceptions that vanish with the dead skulls that engendered them?’’ (835). There is no clear affirmation, but a poetic intuition of the ide´alite´s that a person’s experiences leave behind. No longer otherworldly, or underworldly, this record resides in an ideal sphere and points to the tacit new conception of history developed in Romanticism: the past is a secularized kingdom of death and constitutes an archive of ghostly memories. Nerval works this tentative idea into a full-fledged mystical doctrine. In his preface to Faust, he cites Goethe’s meditation on ‘‘the infinity . . . of the past’’ approvingly and seconds his belief in its perpetual existence. There exists a latent chronicle of all events, accessible, Nerval claims, to the ‘‘eyes of the soul,’’ just as God can see the entire course of time in a synchronic tableau: ‘‘for [Goethe] as for God, nothing ever dies, or at least nothing is transformed but matter, and the centuries of the past are preserved whole in the state of spirits [intelligences] and shades [ombres], in a series of concentric regions that embrace the material world.’’121 An ideal sphere, distinct from the earth, harbors a virtual replica of the entire course of history and shelters the ideal beings that Chateaubriand wondered about: ‘‘there, phantoms still perform or dream of performing the actions which the sun of the living once illuminated’’ (1:503). History goes on replaying itself, in a sense, in an ideal sphere, where the fugitive moments of lived time recur forever. This mystical historicism clearly compensates for a perceived material entropy, and Nerval admits that it is ‘‘consoling to think . . . that nothing dies that has struck the intelligence, and that eternity conserves in its bosom a sort of universal history’’ (1:503). This theory grounds the possibility of a poetics of resurrection, which would be based less on the deceitful fancies of poets than on an ontology of ideal entities. Nerval argues that the immortal form of every creature ‘‘must exist in the immensity of space or on the planets, where these souls retain a form perceptible to the gaze of other souls’’ (1:506). This rhetoric suggests the afterlife, but the ‘‘forms’’ in question are the ideal translations of a person’s past history—the image of their life reenacted eternally by a phantom self. It is this historical anchoring that opens up the possibility of resurrecting the past by ‘‘condensing’’ matter once more within these ‘‘immaterial molds,’’ thereby endowing them ‘‘with a visible existence of greater or lesser length’’ (1:506). Nerval perhaps had in mind the necromantic magic of the alchemists,

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:47

PS

PAGE 193

194

chapter 6

who had boasted that dead plants and animals could be recreated from their ashes, but in practice, in the nineteenth century, resurrection was content to prove its claims by poetic and plastic means—as Nerval himself did, for instance, in ‘‘Isis,’’ a story that recounts an antique costume feast at Pompeii. But Gautier’s tale of Pompeian rebirth offers a more sumptuous illustration; his mortes amoureuses stories all rely, more broadly, on the theory of latent historical survival, but in Arria Marcella he spells out the doctrine in terms clearly indebted to Nerval: ‘‘Nothing dies, everything exists in eternity; no power can annihilate what has once existed. Every action, every word, every form, every thought that has dropped into the universal ocean of things creates ripples that keep expanding all the way to the borders of eternity.’’122 Material death is only the harbinger of a new spectral existence, outside of time and caught in an orbit of eternal repetition: ‘‘the material embodiment only vanishes before the gaze of the vulgar, and the spirits [spectres] that grow detached from it go on to people infinity. Paris continues to make off with Helen in an unknown region of space’’ (266). What Nerval called the ‘‘condensation’’ of these specters, which restores their visible shapes once more, occurs in Gautier’s poetics through an act of ‘‘amorous conjuring,’’ in which the necromancer erotically invests a female ghost. Arria, the Pompeian, is thus the romantic twin of Galatea: ‘‘one is never truly dead,’’ she says, ‘‘until one is no longer loved; your desire has brought me back to life’’ (266). Nerval and Gautier have thus jointly given conceptual form to what remained a mere intuition in Michelet’s enterprise (who admitted that he ‘‘loved death’’),123 the mystical historicism that grounds romantic historiography. This mystical faith is not, of course, a widely held or tenable theory, even less so for historians than for poets, and remains a romantic myth; but as the new positivist outlook ousts the romantic reliance on the sympathetic imagination, and Michelet gives way to Renan and Taine, genius to laborious research, and intuition to facts, the concept of a total record, instead of vanishing, takes on newer and more scientific alibis. In place of Nerval’s ideal forms, the myth resurfaces in the forensic fantasies of a purely materialistic modern science. Everything leaves a trace, materially speaking, and this conviction, which gave rise to the modern detective story, also founded the theoretical possibility of reconstructing all action.124 My examples of this ‘‘empirical’’ archive are taken from fiction, which supplies mythopetic illustrations that make the point better than the more guarded statements of scholars—though the same ideology no doubt buttresses the positivist historians. Hugo’s sewer in Les Mise´rables provides a total record, but one that

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:47

PS

PAGE 194

Lost Worlds 195

differs substantially from Nerval and Gautier’s: the flawless archive is here solidly situated in the materiality of a foul and muddy deposit. Already in Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo had seen the cathedral as a symbolic precipitate of history and called it ‘‘the deposit left by a nation,’’ the enduring archival ‘‘residue’’ that an age leaves behind after ‘‘the successive evaporations of human society.’’125 It is Jules Verne, however, who takes the step beyond Hugo’s late romantic archive to create a full-fledged image of the total empirical record. Inspired by paleontology and geology, he turns his Voyage au centre de la terre into the discovery of an underground encyclopedia of natural history. The buried strata through which his heroes descend contain an uninterrupted chronicle of life on earth—an inventory of species so wellpreserved, indeed, in some cases, as to be still alive although currently extinct. The ‘‘record’’ is of course the sum of the scattered observations made during the journey, which are nothing but up-to-date science, lifted from modern textbooks, and arranged into an exhibit along a narrative and spatial axis.126 One emblematic episode condenses again into a single page the encylopedic dream that Verne has disseminated across the novel. Lidenbrock and his nephew stumble upon a marvelous ‘‘plain of bones,’’ a hidden treasure trove exposed through the rock by ‘‘a violent elevation of the lower layers’’: ‘‘A plain of bones appeared before our eyes. It resembled an immense cemetery where the generations of twenty centuries mingled their eternal dust . . . there, over three thousand square feet, perhaps, the entire history of animal life was accumulating, a history hardly recorded in the more recent soils of the inhabited world.’’127 The utopian character of the find is evident from the poverty of the actual bone collections which it overshadows: ‘‘our feet noisily crushed the remains of these prehistoric animals, and the rare and fascinating fossils for which the museums of the great cities compete’’ (255). The current state of knowledge is perhaps sorely defective, but Verne’s novel holds out the promise that the earth, in its folds, harbors an infinite chronicle of its births and deaths. Nothing is lost. This imaginary cornucopia of fossils gives material form to the myth of the total record and locates it scientifically in the earth’s stratifications. Verne shapes the record, moreover, into an educational exhibit, a modern museum display of the table of species: ‘‘[Lidenbrock] found himself before a priceless collection of Lepotherium, Mericotherium, Lophodions, Anoplotherium, and Megatherium . . . of all the antediluvian monsters piled up for his personal satisfaction’’ (255). The earth is here a book, whose stony pages, more durably than Hugo’s cathedralbook, infallibly records the course of life above the surface. Elsewhere in

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:47

PS

PAGE 195

196

chapter 6

Verne, as in Michelet, the seafloor safeguards a similar register. Modern science has not just made us masters of nature but also allows us to reconstruct its history, step by step, from the origin down to our own appearance. The encounter with ‘‘fossil man,’’ indeed, is here a pivotal scene and puts ‘‘man’’ symbolically at the center of the earth as the meaning of this history. But how solid is Verne’s forensic fantasy? The limits of positivism and its ambition to collect a comprehensive set of facts need not be rehearsed here; if the infinity of facts does not frustrate the project, then the fragility of the record must, in the end, undercut this ideal of totality. But would not a record immune to material erosion reinstate the archive? Indeed, toward the end of the century, a new displacement occurs, as the archive is resituated in the ideal sphere of the mind. The mind constitutes a far more delicate recording surface than the earth, and theorists of the psyche are quick to stress the indelible character of its impressions. From De Quincey to Proust and Freud, there arose a myth of memory which transposed the dream of a total archive into the ideal realm of the mind. In the idealist outlook—which stages a return, in the form of psychology and phenomenology, after the reign of positivism—the mind’s perceptions are indeed the true locus of events, the subjective scene of reality, so that the true archive can only be accessed through an archaeology of memory. Thomas De Quincey’s picture of the mind is perhaps the most prescient formulation of this idea: while meditating on the way a palimpsest preserves different scriptural strata, he reads it as a figure for the mind’s construction. ‘‘What else,’’ he asks, ‘‘than a natural and mighty palmpsest is the human brain?’’128 The superimposed layers of text, showing only the latest addition, resemble the brain’s temporal architecture: ‘‘everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before’’ (144). But just as the palimpsest preserves its effaced texts, so the brain, though it seems to forget, retains a trace of all its impressions: ‘‘in reality not one [layer] has been extinguished’’; they all survive unsconsciously in ‘‘the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain’’ (144). Anticipating Freud, De Quincey then credits forgotten childhood events, from the deepest memorial stratum, with the power to traumatize the unsuspecting adult: ‘‘the deep deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child’s hands were unlinked for ever from his mother’s neck, or his lips for ever from his sister’s kisses, these remain lurking below, and these lurk to the last’’ (146). These primordial traumas are ‘‘immortal impresses,’’ which no ‘‘alchemy’’ could ever ‘‘scorch away’’ (146). Freud soon gives scientific legitimacy to De Quincey’s belief in the per-

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:48

PS

PAGE 196

Lost Worlds

197

manence of unconscious memory. This permanence, a central tenet for Freud. is aptly enough expressed through his habitual use of archaeological metaphors. In a famous image, he compares the history of the mind to the genesis of the ‘‘eternal city,’’ recalling that excavations have shown Rome to be several cities superimposed in succession. This figure illustrates the idea ‘‘that in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish—that everything is somehow preserved and . . . can once more be brought to light.’’129 After showing how the various phases of Roman habitation can still be discerned beneath the modern-day city, Freud suggests that ‘‘psychical entities,’’ much like long-lived cities, also function as archaeological sites ‘‘in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away.’’ The latent layers endure: ‘‘all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one’’ (18). Freud explicitly backs an idealist theory of the archive here: he suggests that his figure is inaccurate, because urban preservation, after all, is very imperfect—since fires and disasters ceaselessly destroy bits of the urban fabric—while the mind alone is able to ensure ‘‘that everything past is preserved’’ (19). The archaeologists’ Rome, Verne’s earth, Hugo’s sewer: none of these material archives can approximate the mind’s efficacity as the perfect recording device. The ‘‘immense edifice of the past,’’ as Proust tells us, really rests on a mere fragrance that reawakens our ‘‘involuntary memory.’’ The fin de sie`cle psychologizes the myth of the archive and closes the century-long cycle that began with the romantic inquiry into the ‘‘mode of life’’ of bones. With Maurice Halbwachs’s critique of Bergson, finally, this utopia of memory dissolves under the skeptical gaze of sociology; memory does not restitute the past with filmic fidelity, and what it might present as an immediate recollection is in fact an illusory social reconstruction: ‘‘to reproduce is not to rediscover: it is, rather, to reconstruct.’’130 To sum up: the nineteenth century faced the anxiety of erosion for the first time since antiquity from a purely secular standpoint, and its response to the closure of the theological horizon was a utopian archive, which, in all its shapes—romantic, realist, and modernist—now constitutes one of our major secular myths. It is worth pointing out, in conclusion, that the dream of the archive does not only apply to the past but relates equally to anxieties about the evanescence of the present. The concern with the erosion of memory is rooted, after all, in that instinct of self-preservation which nineteenth-century biologists saw as the deepest impulse of living beings. The world of industrial capitalism was not reassuring in this regard: the present itself, caught in the flux of progress, had acquired a spectral provisionality and begun to swim in

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:49

PS

PAGE 197

198

chapter 6

the nostalgic aura of its own perpetual decay: ‘‘the form of a city,’’ as Baudelaire put it, ‘‘changes more quickly than the heart of a mortal.’’131 The primordial loss that structures the archival dream is thus the passage of the present itself. It is only logical that the preservationist anxiety should fold back on the contemporary world and that modern writers should strive to leave a seamless record of their own age to future generations: museums, collections, archives, encyclopedias, restored monuments, panoramas, paintings, and novels. While Walter Scott had aimed to ‘‘preserve[] some idea of the ancient manners of which I have witnessed the almost total extinction,’’132 his realist successors, updating his project, transferred its concerns to the vanishing present. Balzac stressed the archival purpose of La Come´die humaine in advertising it to the public as a cultural history of the present. His self-presentation as the ‘‘secretary . . . of French society’’ backs up his documentary claim to ‘‘write the history forgotten by so many historians, that of manners,’’ a project that derives its importance from the value it will have for future historians: ‘‘I would produce for nineteenth-century France that book which we all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, and Persia have unfortunately not left us on their civilizations.’’133 Balzac’s encyclopedic chronicle of the present is ultimately rooted, then, in a desire to immortalize the ephemeral and to record the fleeting fashions, customs, and mannerisms of his period—an ambition Baudelaire would famously theorize in Le Peintre de la vie moderne as the core of modern aesthetics. Balzac thereby realizes deliberately what Mercier, fifty years earlier, had fancied might one day befall his Tableau de Paris: a chance rediscovery that would magically inflate its value, like that of the ‘‘manuscripts in the houses of Herculaneum and Pompeii . . . [which] chance . . . has delivered to us.’’134 Mercier had understood that ‘‘such-and-such a dictionary . . . which we look down on today will one day be greeted with enthusiasm.’’ This had justified the hope that his ‘‘neglected brochure’’ might one day acquire documentary immortality. Fifty years after Balzac’s statement, Maxime du Camp could still publish his great work of Parisian archaeology in the same spirit; in Paris: Ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie (1893–96), he echoes his predecessors and draws urgency from ‘‘that law of inevitable destruction which governs all things human.’’135 Du Camp appears to have envisaged the future destruction of Paris in a melancholy mood brought on by his own aging: ‘‘he suddenly took to . . . musing that one day even this city, whose enormous breathing he could hear, would also die, just like so many capitals of so many Empires have already died.’’ Paul Bourget sums up Du Camp’s project in exactly the

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:49

PS

PAGE 198

Lost Worlds

199

terms Balzac had used, recalling the value that ‘‘a faithful tableau’’ of Pericles’ Athens, Caesar’s Rome, or the Alexandria of the Ptolemies would have acquired over time: ‘‘he perceived clearly the possibility of writing the book on Paris that the historians of antiquity had not written on their cities’’ (144). From Mercier to Du Camp, via Balzac, a major strand of modern literature sets out expressly to create an enduring encyclopedia of modern civilization and to immortalize, in stark contrast to the ancients, its most superficial and fleeting aspects, what Balzac termed ‘‘the underside of history’’ (l’envers de l’histoire) and which Baudelaire elevated to artistic dignity by finding in it an expression of the eternal.136 That paradoxical equation—art grasps the eternal through the ephemeral—seemed plausible to Mercier only on the ideal horizon of a future archaeology. In Balzac, however, the trivial and the eternal meet, interact, and fuse already in the act of composition. The poles of documentary and artistic value become inextricable in La Come´die humaine, just like ‘‘poetry’’ and ‘‘commerce’’ are for his characters. His art lies in observing as no one else does, and his documentary impulse, conversely, invests his formally sloppy work with an unexpected vitality. Art and archive join hands and unite dialectically in Balzac’s realism, which does not so much immortalize a text as a culture; while Mercier had used the age value of culture to promote his own work, nineteenth-century realism, on the contrary, puts the work in the service of immortalizing a culture. The Paris of today already shares the fate of Rome, Carthage, and Pompeii—it is vanishing under our eyes—and must urgently be transposed into lasting art in real time.

................. 17036$

$CH6

09-26-08 11:05:49

PS

PAGE 199

seven The Uses of Archaeology

Archaeology was not just a vehicle of knowledge in the nineteenth century, for it also lent itself to pragmatic applications: social, political, and artistic practices often tapped into the rhetoric of archaeology in order to make progress. But the use of archaeology immediately raises a political question: was the past not earmarked as a fiefdom belonging to royalists and Catholics, and had Chateaubriand not staked the Counter-Revolution’s claim to it in Le Ge´nie du christianisme (1802)? Moreover, had Nietzsche not warned that the siren song of history paralyzed life and argued for an empowering amnesia?1 Nonetheless, liberal thinkers also turned massively to history during the Restoration to chart the nation’s political progress. It is impossible, in the end, to assign clear-cut political values to the historical turn, which colors the entire spectrum of opinions, infiltrates countless sciences, and broadly nourishes cultural production. The rhetoric of archaeology emerges as a sort of period grammar in which the most contrary agendas can be articulated.2 Rather than define its politics, then, it would seem more productive to identify some overarching functions, and in this chapter I isolate three broadly shared uses centered on the yearning for renewal. The condition of transitionality—of living in limbo between past and future—which Musset had diagnosed was a broadly shared malaise that fueled calls for regeneration across every ideological divide. The ambition to renew modern culture could turn to archaeology for inspiration in three major areas—aesthetic, social, and political revival—and it is with these three domains that the present chapter is concerned. It is clearly impossible to treat this question exhaustively, and my approach is rather to spotlight three revealing instances of

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:22

PS

PAGE 200

The Uses of Archaeology 201

archaeological renewal: in the aesthetic domain, first of all, by examining the Pompeian palace built in Paris in the 1850s; social rejuvenation, second, as it came to be manifested in the call for an infusion of barbarian blood; and radical political upheaval, third, as expressed in a pervasive volcanic imagery reminiscent of Pompeii. These three exemples suggest the pragmatic force that archaeology possessed for much of the century, but also point, in their various limitations, to the contradictions and eventual exhaustion of archaeological rhetoric as a viable source of renewal after World War I, when the romantic formula of ‘‘back to the future’’ had worn thin and was falling apart.

Against History It is important to recall that history was by no means a self-evident vehicle of renewal in the early nineteenth century and that counterrevolutionary nostalgia initially monopolized the reference to the past. The medievalizing style troubadour that had first taken shape among Ancien Re´gime intellectuals was eagerly adopted by exiled aristocrats who helped make it a dominant style during the Empire.3 Chateaubriand’s celebration of the Middle Ages in Le Ge´nie du christianisme evidently draws inspiration from this current, as does much of Hugo’s early royalist poetry, such as the ode he wrote on the coronation of Charles X (1825) and his attack on the ‘‘Bande noire’’ (1824), which assimilates these heritage merchants to the mobs ‘‘who chased the kings from their violated tombs.’’4 It was not immediately evident how history might be recuperated for a liberal agenda, which at first saw little in it but a reminder of tyranny and long resisted Romanticism as a politically suspect aesthetic.5 Before the July Monarchy, when art historians such as Ludovic Vitet began to claim Gothic as an indigenous, national style, monuments too clearly stamped with feudal memories were likely to provoke visceral disgust in progressive quarters.6 Louis-Se´bastien Mercier gives a telling example of this attitude in the article he devoted to the ‘‘Demolition of the Petit Chaˆtelet,’’ in which he hails the destruction of this ‘‘gothic’’ prison as a victory for progress: ‘‘this old edifice had something hideous, [it was] a barbarous monument from the century of Dagobert.’’7 A monumental eyesore that reminded him of arbitrary rule, it had now at last ‘‘yielded its terrain to the public way,’’ or cleared the ground for a public sphere and the demystification of the horrors of the past: ‘‘the half-open vaults, the subterranean prison

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:22

PS

PAGE 201

202 c h a p t e r 7

cells . . . seemed to reveal to the frightened eyes of passers-by the victims swallowed up in their darkness’’ (1:1305). We are far here from Hugo’s sacralization of heritage, and in 1780 such monuments still provoked inconoclastic impulses too strong to fall under the protective umbrella of patrimony—a concept that would only emerge in response to revolutionary vandalism. Mercier focuses exclusively here on the symbolic liberation involved in the destruction: ‘‘may the last traces of barbarism be erased in this way by the vigilant hand of a wise government!’’ This cry sums up one strand in the Enlightenment’s relation to heritage. The iconoclastic excesses of the Revolution do not immediately disqualify this attitude, which persists long into the Restoration among liberals hostile to the fascination with Gothic. The journalist Paul-Louis Courier, for instance, denounced the nascent heritage movement and wittily defended the ‘‘bande noire’’ years before Hugo’s attack on the vandals; in a letter to Le Censeur from 1819, he described them as ‘‘people who don’t assassinate but destroy,’’ who ‘‘dismantle large properties . . . to sell them off in detail.’’8 Such misdeeds, however, ‘‘hurt nobody, and benefit everyone,’’ since by purchasing idle land they sell it back to hard-working peasants, create jobs, and raise cash; and since ‘‘vice comes from laziness,’’ these alleged vandals are really a godsend promoting ‘‘work, production, wealth, and order.’’ To the tearful nostalgic he replies categorically that progress and conservation cannot be reconciled and that the living can only prosper at the expense of the dead: ‘‘monuments are preserved where men have perished.’’ Indeed, it would be wrongheaded to call the exploitation of old buildings a desecration, when finding new uses for them actually cleanses them of dubious memories: ‘‘are the stones of a convent profaned, are they not rather purified, when they serve to build the walls of a peasant’s house?’’ At the outset, then, the turn to heritage was a partisan weapon, and for liberals the road forward seemed to pass through Nietzsche’s vital forgetfulness. But soon liberals, such as Guizot and Thierry, would discover that a detour through the past could provide vital credentials for bourgeois rule, and republicans, like Michelet, would find proof there of man’s Promethean labor of self-emancipation.9 Even so, the nationalization of the past practiced by the new bourgeois regimes from the July Monarchy to the Third Republic often left a bitter aftertaste, and while this residue was usually eclipsed by triumphalist teleology, there were historians who recorded their ambivalence. Michelet, notably, wrestled honestly with the past’s dangers: ‘‘we have invoked history, and now it is everywhere; we are besieged, choked, strangled

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:23

PS

PAGE 202

The Uses of Archaeology 203

by it; we march bent over from its weight . . . the past kills the future.’’10 Refusing to justify history retrospectively from the standpoint of a happy conclusion (in a gesture of circular legitimation), Michelet, for whom the Revolution remains an unfinished affair, is much more attuned than his peers to past injustices and reluctant to glorify the march of history. Teleology, for one, does not excuse past suffering, and what should be celebrated is much less the epic of bourgeois ascendancy than a nameless popular force still at work in the present: ‘‘in the name of history itself, in the name of life,’’ he defines the historian’s task as one of rescuing and prolonging the energies that had once given rise to ‘‘original thought and fruitful initiatives’’ (261). Where the liberals would exorcise the past, in Michel de Certeau’s formulation, to clear a space for bourgeois rule—thereby using genealogy cleverly to neutralize the unacknowledged threats of history—Michelet rejects any such self-serving rupture between past and present: just as the future remains wide open for him, so the past has in no way been superseded but contains the suspended trajectories of ‘‘unfinished [lives] which [still] demand closure’’ (263). Michelet thus registers an ambivalence in his relation to history which has often been repressed in liberal ideology: the past is no closed book in his historiography but the name for a series of inherited forces—both creative and deadening ones—which remain locked in a struggle to determine the future. Michelet’s receptivity, however, to a living past would remain a marginal attitude, and what would prevail, outside the strictly genealogical narrative, was a strategy of exposure and containment—an updated version of Mercier and Courier’s campaign of erasure and purification. Augustin Thierry had crafted a model for this procedure in his gory Re´cits des temps me´rovingiens (1833–37), which reveled in the brutality of the Frankish conquerors, no longer depicted as the chivalrous fathers of a glamorous nobility but as a greedy lot of butcherers; history could henceforth shine its beacon into the most unsavory crannies of the past, and such exposure could only be therapeutic and edifying. Unlike Mercier, however, whose impulse was to obliterate such memories, and unlike Courier, concerned chiefly with their use value, the discourse that arose with the heritage turn of the July Monarchy found it more astute to contain the horrors of history by public exhibition. A poetic translation of this program in its most developed form can be found in Les Mise´rables, where Hugo presents Bruneseau’s exploration of the Paris sewer network as a medical and pedagogical figure for the disinfection of the past. Unhealthy secrets fester in this Gothic maze: ‘‘one seemed to recognize,

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:23

PS

PAGE 203

204

chapter 7

here and there, notably under the Palace of Justice, the hollows of old cells carved out of the sewer itself.’’11 In its labyrinthine detours (‘‘tortuous, creviced, unpaved’’ [3:329]) this ‘‘gothic cesspool’’ (3:335) clearly symbolizes the insalubrious aspects of the nation’s past as a blind alley of horrors: ‘‘nothing equaled in horror this old cavern of wastes, the digestive appartus of Babylon,’’ haunted by a modern Minotaur, ‘‘that enormous blind mole, the past’’ (3:330). Bruneseau’s expedition does decide to wall up some of its more appalling holes, but its overall response is less simplistic and turns on illuminating and sanitizing the sewer. When he stumbles into a ‘‘shapeless mired rag, [he] examine[s] it under the lantern’s light’’ before neutralizing its contagious force with a forensic label: it is ‘‘a piece of Marat’s shroud’’ (3:328). After science has exposed it, the evidence can be left intact as a harmless exhibit: ‘‘they left this rag where it was, without destroying it’’ (3:329). The path to modernization consists here in cleansing the past in the solvent of knowledge, and in this manner the explorer ‘‘had the whole network disinfected and sanitized’’ (3:329). The ‘‘sewer of Yesterday’’ undergoes a utopian conversion to become ‘‘clean, cold, straight, [and] correct’’ (3:330), a transparent underworld open to police scrutiny (3:331). Repression and erasure give way to an omniscient gaze that contains any toxins which may still emanate from unresolved historical crises. The panoptic regime Foucault identifies in Surveiller et punir extends its power here to a menacing past and enlists historical research in the broader hygienic mission of social sanitation. The past, for progressives, remains a threat, but the best way to confront it is to publicize its horrors. Threat or promise, however, insalubrious crypt or precious resource, the past has now come to occupy the threshold between present and future and constitutes a necessary rite of passage for all reformers.

Aesthetic Regeneration The artistic crisis of modernity is deeply tied to the new historical consciousness that arose with the archaeological gaze. The perception of the past as a stratification of unique periods inevitably raised the question of the style proper to the nineteenth century, but paradoxically there seemed to be no contender. It is as if the power to historicize art had deprived modernity of a proper identity. A leitmotif lamenting the loss of a national ‘‘physiognomy’’ runs through Romanticism; for Musset, ‘‘our century has no forms,’’ no recognizable style: ‘‘we have imprinted the mark of our time neither on our

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:24

PS

PAGE 204

The Uses of Archaeology 205

houses, nor on our gardens, nor on anything else.’’12 With the waning of authorities that set the artistic agenda, an anarchy of heterogeneous styles has emerged: ‘‘France,’’ writes Balzac, ‘‘wears the coat of Arlequin,’’ and everyone, ‘‘seeing only their own color, thinks it is the dominant one.’’13 More often than not, these ‘‘colors’’ are styles borrowed or inherited from the past, turning the ‘‘coat’’ into an ugly patchwork of outdated fashions: ‘‘we have no moeurs, if, by that term is meant the particular habits of a people, the physiognomy of a nation. We have our coats from the Revolution, our boots from the Empire, our carriages from England, and our cuisine from the Restoration.’’ For Balzac, the aftermath of the Revolution boils down to a postapocalyptic wasteland: ‘‘we live as if amid the debris of an earthquake’’ (2:744–45). Musset denounces the impotent eclecticism of his age with equal vehemence: ‘‘we are marked by every century but our own, something unheard of in earlier periods; eclecticism is our style.’’14 Illness and cure coincide in this artistic crisis: lacking a proper physiognomy, the century turned to historical styles for guidance but thereby also exacerbated its sense of hybridity and spinelessness. Poets revived ancient forms, Balzac channeled Rabelais, Viollet-le-Duc restored Gothic buildings, the neo-Pompeian painters sought refuge in antiquity, and everyone dreamt of writing a modern epic. But if the temptation to recycle past styles was a malady, it was also a cure, the obligatory path through which much creative energy had to pass to generate novelty. Hugo’s novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, is a case in point: its nostalgic revival of medieval Paris stems in part from the modern physiognomic crisis: ‘‘today’s Paris,’’ Hugo complains, ‘‘has no general physiognomy’’ but is a mere juxtaposition of ‘‘samples from many centuries.’’15 To depict the picturesque city of 1482 was certainly a way of escaping a modern world too ugly but also too new, complex, and slippery to capture, and yet this detour yielded a great romantic work that retrospectively gives the period a unique character. Had Hugo slavishly copied medieval models, the result might have resembled Balzac’s Contes drolatiques—an unreadable stylistic anachronism—but in choosing to transpose a world of experience rather than its dated style, Hugo renewed the novel. It is as if a powerful content, the strong identity attributed to late medieval Paris, had been tapped to forge a strong new style, as if art could be energized by opening itself to history. If classicism had reached a dead end by sticking blindly to formal rules detached from any cultural content, then the path to renewal had to pass through a transformative contact with culture, an encounter that could variously take the form of national history, modern bour-

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:24

PS

PAGE 205

206 c h a p t e r 7

geois life, folklore, or uncontaminated popular experience.16 Content came first: art would acquire form, character, and vitality directly from the life it recorded. The past was not the only resource, but it was, at the outset, the most accessible one—and the most urgent one after the revolutionary rupture. Just as a mine’s resources grow harder to extract over time, so efforts to tap the past’s energies required ever more sophisticated tools. By the 1850s, the historical novel had been depleted, realism was triumphing, and Michelet’s ‘‘people’’ seemed the most promising new resource for art to exploit; history, however, was not fully abandoned, but required a far greater artistic investment. It is at this point that using accurate archaeological data became crucial for historicist art, which could only release the dormant energies of the past using high-resolution imagery. The assiduous research that went into Flaubert’s Salammboˆ (1862)17 and George Eliot’s Romola (1863), not to mention Renan’s philological ‘‘novel,’’ Vie de Je´sus (1863), shows how earnestly writers turned to archaeology. But nothing shows more clearly how archaeology could become the very lifeblood of art than the Neo-Grec school of painters, whom Gautier dubbed the Pompeiists and championed in his criticism over Courbet’s realism.18 Spanning almost the two decades of the Second Empire (1848–65), the school’s ringleader was Jean-Le´on Ge´roˆme, whose first Salon painting, Jeunes grecs faisant battre des coqs (1847), recalled Joseph-Marie Vien in its subtle blend of classicism, genre painting, and disingenuous eroticism; the work elicited high praise from Gautier, who found the ‘‘cocks epic and Olympian,’’ if only to mask his enthusiasm for the equivocal encounter of the half-clad ‘‘virgin and ephebe.’’19 Accuracy was, for Gautier, a key quality, and his later endorsements would hinge on Ge´roˆme’s ‘‘ethnographic sense,’’ ‘‘detailed erudition,’’ and ‘‘archaic exactitude,’’ just as Gustave Planche would take Thomas Couture to task for his lazy approximations in the Romains de la de´cadence (1847): ‘‘without studying the ruins of Pompeii and the museum of Naples . . . it was certainly not possible to penetrate . . . the secret of ancient beauty.’’20 Ge´roˆme’s follow-up, the Inte´rieur grec (1850–51), was more openly crude and scandalized viewers as a poorly masked brothel scene, but at least it had the merit of exposing the school’s delicate mix of erudition, charm, eroticism, and antiquity. This was incidentally the formula Chasse´riau would put to use in the Tepidarium (1853), a Pompeian bath scene in which a group of female nudes pose suggestively in the absence of any troubling male gaze (fig. 12). Archaeology here borders on pornography and gives

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:25

PS

PAGE 206

The Uses of Archaeology 207

Figure 12. The´odore Chasse´riau (1819–56), The Tepidarium: Room in Which the Women of Pompeii Went to Relax and Dry Off After the Bath (1853). Photo: G. Blot. Muse´e d’Orsay, Paris, France. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

voyeurism the alibi of erudition, but its function cannot be reduced to that; it would be truer to say that eroticism—rather than vigor, faith, virtue, or beauty—is the particular commodity these artists struggle to extract from the past. Gautier, one recalls, found statues more exciting than real women and wrote many stories about ancient beauties (Arria Marcella, Tahoser, Cleopatra) as if the fantasy of commerce with long-dead princesses were his strongest artistic stimulus. As for Chasse´riau, he had been to Pompeii in 1840 and had drawn the baths; he had even sketched the outlines of carbonized victims in the basement of ‘‘Diomedes’ villa,’’ and ‘‘kissed the painful traces’’ of the woman he fancied the model for the famous breast imprint.21 On his drawing, he had noted: ‘‘the composition is absolutely to be painted’’ (545), so that the Tepidarium could be read as a utopian recovery, twelve years later, of the cindered women whose outlines had haunted him.22 The work’s eroticism would thus be less gratuitous, more a claim about the need to enlist desire to conquer death. The spectator’s gaze would be harnessed to the project of affirming beauty’s power over death. The Neo-Grecs’ eroticism emerges in this light as a key ingredient in the effort to renew art archaeologically: just as desire revives the mortes amoureuses, these, in turn, briefly energize an impotent art that has rejected realism.

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:39

PS

PAGE 207

208 c h a p t e r 7

Archaeology and renewal, Pompeii and mortality, are indeed closely tied in neo-Greek painting. The major Neo-Grecs had all visited Pompeii: Alfred de Curzon (1851), Jean-Louis Hamon (1853), and Jean-Le´on Ge´roˆme (1844). Ge´roˆme’s famous gladiator painting, Pollice verso, drew largely on Pompeian findings, and both Curzon’s Un reˆve dans les ruines de Pompe´i (1866) and Hamon’s Les Muses a` Pompe´i (1866) conveyed the town’s imaginary impact on their art. With the Second Empire, moreover, interest in Pompeii revived as a new imperial lifestyle sought past models in which to mirror its taste for leisure and luxury. If the Neo-Grecs had ‘‘drawn inspiration from the frescoes found at Pompeii and Herculaneum to paint little Greco-Roman scenes of manners,’’ it was perhaps, as Larousse said, because these reflected ‘‘the types and attitudes of a certain Parisian sphere.’’23 Thomas Couture’s De´cadence des Romains (1847) had anticipated this trend, making Gautier detect ‘‘a fine Greek contour’’ in this work ‘‘borrowed from the artists of Pompeii and Herculaneum.’’24 Gustave Boulanger would later go on to distill the essence of the imperial dream in his picture of the Pompeian palace (1860), before exhibiting La voie des tombeaux a` Pompe´i in 1869. Napoleon III even bought Edouard Sain’s pastoral tableau of the excavations, Fouilles a` Pompe´i (1865) (fig. 13), while the state acquired Chasse´riau’s Tepidarium (1853). Pompeii thus made a comeback as a source of artistic renewal for a sort of gilded, decadent classicism during the Second Empire, a phenomenon Edmond About sums up nicely in his Salon de 1866, where he reminds Hamon that in 1857 he had urged him to ‘‘rediscover . . . the spirit of the Pompeian painters,’’ but that for failure to heed this advice ‘‘his talent [had] suffered a rather long eclipse.’’25 With the Muses a` Pompe´i of 1866, however, ‘‘a capital composition, . . . his best,’’ Hamon ‘‘has gone back to dip his brush once more in the divine dust of Pompeii,’’ and ‘‘a breath of eternally youthful paganism has come to revive and fortify his art.’’26 About even reads this work allegorically as a wake-up call for modern art, from which the muses have fled in shock: ‘‘it is very probable, indeed, that the Muses, so maltreated over the whole earth, need to seek refuge at times in this poor little sacred corner.’’ Pompeii’s great appeal is not purely artistic, moreover, or rather stems from the central role art allegedly played in patrician life. Pompeii comes to embody a rich, ornate, utopian lifestyle in which art ennobled everything, ‘‘where all the buildings, public and private, [are] built, decorated, and furnished by Art itself.’’ The ethos of imperial life found a ready-made blueprint in the suave interiors of Pompeii, where ‘‘the enraptured spirit plunges into a sort of moral bath’’ and finds ‘‘a more leisured, happy, and intelligent

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:40

PS

PAGE 208

The Uses of Archaeology 209

Figure 13. Edouard A. Sain (1830–1910), Excavation at Pompeii (1865). Muse´e d’Orsay, Paris, France. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

existence than our own.’’27 In his review of the Muses, Fe´lix Jahyer chimed in that ‘‘the least column [there] . . . suggests the idea of an incredible civilization,’’ and claimed that ‘‘anyone possessing an elevated soul [and] an artistic spirit loves to be transported amid the ruins of these model cities.’’28 This brings us to the most ambitious attempt to tap Pompeii for aesthetic renewal during the Second Empire: Prince Napoleon’s Pompeian mansion on the avenue Montaigne. The prince, also known as Plon-Plon (1822–91), had ordered what Viel-Castel referred to as a ‘‘toy temple’’ to be built for his mistress, the actress Rachel, a plan executed from 1855 to 1860; the homage was fitting since Rachel had been instrumental in ushering in the postromantic vogue for antique drama.29 This was not the only such vanity project at the time: Ludwig I of Bavaria had earlier constructed a Pompeianum in Aschaffenburg in 1842 (which Ga¨rtner, the architect, had modeled on the House of the Dioscuri);30 the founder of La Presse, Emile de Girardin, had moved into a neo-Greek house in 1844, which count Choiseul-Gouffier had constructed as far back as 1812 on the model of the Erechteion; and Ferdinand de Lesseps had raised a Moorish Pavilion on the avenue Montaigne, not far from prince Soltykoff ’s Gothic mansion (1848). For the less

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:55

PS

PAGE 209

210 c h a p t e r 7

prodigal, theme rooms proved a more affordable way to advertise their sumptuary tastes.31 Such princely displays of cultural capital no doubt reflected and to some extent also overlapped with the international rivalry at the world fairs, where the imperial powers staged their colonial trophies and historical pedigrees; it is not unlikely that the Pompeian Court at the Crystal Palace (1851)—Digby Wyatt’s eclectic but scrupulous transposition of a few select Pompeian dwellings—had captured Plon-Plon’s fancy.32 The prince had initially entrusted his pet project to Jacob-Ignace Hittorff, who had then passed the commission on to the young architect Alfred Normand, who went on to carry it out. Normand’s palace drew freely on such typical Pompeian dwellings as Diomedes’ Villa and the House of Pansa and featured, among other rooms, an atrium, an impluvium, a triclinium, a cubiculum, a library, a museum, a study, a winter garden, and an incongruous Turkish bath, which Gautier, who had hailed the palace as ‘‘a rigorous restitution, . . . a deeply learned archeological treatise written in stone that can be inhabited,’’ indulgently conceded as an ersatz for the Tepidarium (figs. 14 and 15).33 In place of Augustus, a statue of Napoleon I brandishing the code civil stood proudly in the impluvium, while a pair of busts honoring Napoleon III and the empress decorated the winter garden; in the museum, Rachel’s bust featured prominently as a Tragedy and a Comedy. The paintings for the palace had been provided by Ge´roˆme (on Homeric themes) and Se´bastien Cornu (illustrating Hesiod’s theogony), the emperor’s personal friend and future director of the Campana Museum.34 Unfortunately, Rachel, the muse of the palace, died in 1858, before it had been completed, and in 1859 Plon-Plon married the devoutly Catholic Clotilde de Savoie, who refused to inhabit this pagan tribute to his mistress. The palace thus came to be reserved for Prince Napoleon’s intimate soire´es and parties for a few years, until his relations with the emperor deteriorated so badly that he left France for Switzerland and decided to sell the villa in 1866.35 It was at that point saved from destruction or inappropriate commercial use by a joint rescue purchase mission that included Arse`ne Houssaye, Jules de Lesseps, count Beauregard, and count Quinsonas, who for a time opened it to the public as a museum. Houssaye then actually lived in the palace for a few years, from 1866 to 1870, until he grew alarmed to find that ‘‘the Parisian in me gave way to the archeologist’’ and decided to ‘‘shake off the shroud of the past and become a citizen of Paris once again.’’36 The palace was thus appropriately abandoned during the fall of the Empire, even though it would be inhabited once more from 1875 to 1891 by a new owner, count Palffy, before the diamond merchant

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:05:55

PS

PAGE 210

Figure 14. Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg (1810–75), Interior of the Library of the Pompeian Palace (1866). Bibliothe`que nationale de France.

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:12

PS

PAGE 211

Figure 15. J. Laplanche, View of the Pompeian Palace of Prince Napoleon: The Atrium (1863). Bibliothe`que nationale de France.

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:30

PS

PAGE 212

The Uses of Archaeology 213

Jules Porge`s acquired it and razed it to the ground to make space for a private hotel.37 During its heyday, in the 1860s, the Pompeian Palace was often understood to be a symbolic expression of a modern imperial lifestyle; because it allied luxury, refinement, antimodernism, and Roman references, it seemed to hold up a polished patrician mirror to the vulgarities and frivolities of the ‘‘imperial feast.’’ Despite the tensions between the prince and the emperor— and Je´roˆme had resigned his official functions after angering his cousin by voicing democratic sentiments in a speech in Ajaccio in May 186538 —the Palace only embodied all too well Napoleon III’s dream of reproducing imperial Rome, as well as an intellectual turn toward aristocratic aestheticism. Louis-Napoleon and Euge´nie had actually been present at the antiquethemed inauguration party on February 14, 1860, when Emile Augier’s scabrous play about a wealthy Greek courtesan, Le Joueur de fluˆte, had been performed; this was a play the Come´die Franc¸aise had initially censored when it was first staged in 1850, forcing Augier to cut some ‘‘verses marked by a premeditated vulgarity’’—the words are Gustave Planche’s, who also vented his dismay at the play’s distressing blend of ‘‘elegant and poetic image’’ with ‘‘vulgar reality’’ in the Revue des deux mondes.39 That mix could well stand as an emblem for the jarring combination of the sublime and the ridiculous, the dignified and the shady, which kept undercutting the Empire’s efforts to embellish its prosaic realities. Unlike Louis-Philippe, who had made the monarchy bourgeois, one might say that Napoleon III tried in vain to ennoble the nascent reign of industrial capitalism. Count Quinsonas would remember the inaugural evening sarcastically in a satirical pamphlet from 1869, in which, after lambasting the emperor for his catastrophic political mistakes and tarring the ‘‘princes of finance’’ as philistines for refusing to buy the endangered palace, he went on to sneer that ‘‘Augustus and Livia, I almost said all of Mount Olympus, the whole imperial court, in a word, enjoying a performance of the Flute Player, might [at that point] have had the illusion of being transported to Caesar’s palace before the Capitol.’’40 The sheer effort required to produce this illusion, and the laborious, fragile, almost comical result, are well on display in Gustave Boulanger’s painting of the rehearsal for Le Joueur de fluˆte and Gautier’s dramatic monologue, La Femme de Diome`de (1860) (fig. 16). Gautier and Augier are there shown coaching Pierrette Favart and Madeleine Bromon, all of them wearing ancient gowns and striking lesiurely poses in the ethereal light of the impluvium, as two rapt bystanders who could pass for slaves look on from the sidelines near the tutelary

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:30

PS

PAGE 213

214 c h a p t e r 7

Figure 16. Gustave Boulanger (1824–88), Rehearsal of ‘‘The Flute Player’’ and ‘‘The Wife of Diomedes’’ in the Atrium of Prince Napoleon’s Pompeian House in Paris (1860). Photo: Daniel Arnaudet. Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

statue of Napoleon I. This fiction of patrician life, aesthetic reclusion, and elite sociability is made incongruous by the mannered poses, which only exhibit too clearly the soft slouching bodies of the modern bourgeois. Robert Rosenblum notes that they have ‘‘totally lost contact with the contemporary social and political realities that had invigorated the image of antiquity under the Revolution and the Empire,’’ but it is perhaps more accurate to say that the Rome depicted here is the later decadent Empire, filtered through the utopian lens of aestheticism.41 Indeed, accounts of the Pompeian palace and of Pompeii itself during the Second Empire tend to articulate the dream of a rich, refined, and leisured life light-years removed from the noise of democratic crowds and to treat Pompeii as a laboratory for the fabrication of this utopia. Hippolyte Rigault, for instance, felt that ‘‘the timely problem that had been proposed—to adapt the Roman style to our modern needs—had been resolved with a lot of art and taste by the architect.’’42 This solution may in fact be a godsend for the Second Empire, which Rigault feels could use a vigorous new style to express its political identity: ‘‘maybe, in the era we have entered, the natural model we should reproduce are the ruins of Pompeii.’’ Are there not

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:37

PS

PAGE 214

The Uses of Archaeology 215

‘‘great affinities . . . between the life in 1857 and the houses from the time of the first Ceasars?’’ (84). Gautier could not agree more: ‘‘one cannot imagine to what extent this disposition is elegant and rational, how well it is suited to the exigencies of modern life.’’43 This surprising suitability is something of a paradox, however, because what these neopatricians value in Pompeii is precisely the countermodel it offers to democratic life. A visit to Pompeii, writes L’Artiste, has the power to ‘‘make you forget modern life absolutely’’ and to ‘‘transform you into a contemporary of Cicero and Virgil,’’ even to make the moderns seem out of place.44 When the antiquarian marquis de Nadaillac commented on ‘‘the last municipal election in Pompeii’’ and admired how the evils of ‘‘universal suffrage’’ had been corrected there (by the exclusion, that is, of ‘‘the servile population’’), he gushed about ‘‘this happy people’’ in whom ‘‘the joie de vivre dominated every passion’’ and noted that the Pompeian palace ‘‘could give Parisians a very exact image’’ of their ‘‘luxury and easy life.’’45 The Goncourts in turn admired in Pompeii a civilization in which art had touched every aspect of life: ‘‘nothing scorned by art; even everyday things ally the poetry of form with utility.’’46 It was precisely this utopian fusion of art and life that modernity had severed: ‘‘all that killed by progress, industry, etc . . . art today has a name and place in society; it has a role, rights, duties; it is no longer a thing unaware of itself, guiding the fingers of every worker.’’ Key to the modern use of Pompeii to forge an imperial style was the abandonment of aesthetic distance for a playful adoption of ancient lifestyles. Alexandre Dumas had already boasted that to write Caligula (1837) he had ‘‘established [himself] in the House of the Faun,’’ and lived there ‘‘during eight days . . . touching antiquity with my finger.’’47 But what had been, for Dumas, a writerly experiment quickly became for Gautier the thrill of a surrogate identity, and in his guidebook vaunting the villa’s powers of enchantment, he wrote that once inside ‘‘you expect to see a host in a toga, speaking Latin or Greek, come to meet you.’’48 This was the same vicarious identification he had experienced at Pompeii, where he encouraged tourists to take imaginary possession of the dwellings: ‘‘visiting them,’’ he wrote, ‘‘one restores them mentally, one lodges one’s fantasy there, and one says involuntarily: there I’ll put my bed, here my library, there my paintings, further off my rare flowers’’ (10). A scenario to which Rigault added the dream of entering ‘‘on a litter, on the robust shoulders of four Liburnian slaves.’’49 For Arse`ne Houssaye, who ‘‘occupied [the palace] for almost a year,’’ this dream became a reality,

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:37

PS

PAGE 215

216 c h a p t e r 7

and he could ‘‘fancy that [he] was living a bit like a Roman in the times of the Caesars.’’50 This frivolous appropriation encodes a form of historical pornography— not unlike Ge´roˆme’s Inte´rieur grec—in which the past is instrumentalized as a private playground for the amusement of a beleaguered elite, but on a more serious level it manifests the use of history to fabricate an aesthetic alibi for the regime. The artistic renewal that the Neo-Grecs drew from Pompeii cannot be dissociated, in the end, from a widespread intellectual fear of democracy, from the aristocratic dream of a new aesthetic order, and from the project of legitimizing the Second Empire. In his guide to the palace Gautier calls Paris the ‘‘capital of the world’’ and boasts that the ‘‘imperial adventure’’ (l’e´pope´e impe´riale) is embellishing the city every day; exhibit number one here is the Pompeian palace, close to the rond-point of the Champs Elyse´es, itself the epicenter of the new imperial capital.51 With the Second Empire, then, Pompeii attains a new summit, after having boosted neoclassical painting and romantic archaeology, but its special appeal at this moment lies in the utopian image it offers of a patrician aesthetic order—and in the imperial mirror it holds out to Paris.

Social Renewal: Barbarians and Miners The dream of renewing art through archaeology was clearly inseparable from a broader yearning for social regeneration. If Pompeii could be harnessed to renew academic painting and imperial architecture, it was largely because it provided an imaginary model for a new bourgeois aristocracy. Artistic and social renewal were here continuous, one expressing and working to enact the other; the same imbrication of artistic and social ideals obviously marks much of the modern period (which obeyed, from the outset, Louis de Bonald’s dictum that ‘‘literature was the expression of society’’) from David’s austere republican virtues to the troubadour style to the juste milieu painting of the July Monarchy. However, as historians gained a newfound prominence as social prophets beside the poets, the program for renewal could pass increasingly through direct evocations of the past. The idea that strength could be sought in the historical depths of the nation quickly spilled beyond the counterrevolutionary agenda as the conviction spread that the nation was a historical being. With Guizot’s vigorous promotion of a heritage politics during the July Monarchy, the past had at long last became nationalized, and

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:37

PS

PAGE 216

The Uses of Archaeology 217

the nation historicized. While this as a rule meant mapping a convenient political narrative on the past—reading the absolute monarchy, for instance, as a great equalizer that paved the way for the Revolution—which turned the regime of choice into a necessary product of history, and thus also dissolved all historical conflicts in the great reconciliation of the present, the past was not always liquidated to produce such self-serving demonstrations. Indeed, it was often perceived to be a subterranean force, a massive invisible presence, which continued to inflect, for good or bad, consciously or unconsciously, the actions of contemporaries, or which provided the urgently needed energies for social regeneration. That attitude was, of course, generally conservative, from Burke to Barre`s, but this was not a mathematical truth, and the idea that history might serve as a vital reservoir for the present could also plausibly form the centerpiece of a progressive agenda. This was the case, notably, with Michelet, and in this section I wish to look more closely at a key image for his vision of the past as an active force of social transformation: the image of the barbarian. The barbarian emerges as a central, recurrent, and conflictual motif in the social thought of the nineteenth century. It is by no means new and obviously derives from Greek and Roman history, evoking in particular the primitive tribes on the periphery of the Roman Empire which sped up its collapse, as well as the stage between savagery and civilization in Enlightenment anthropology. This largely negative image grew a lot more complex after the Revolution, when writers like Chateaubriand used it both to vilify revolutionary mobs and to romanticize Frankish warriors, and it could just as well denote the people as the early aristocracy. The theme, in particular, of renewing a decadent social order through an infusion of barbarian blood started to gain fresh currency among a broad range of social critics who all viewed the barbarian as an embodiment of vital and archaic strengths. Carlyle, for instance, celebrated the instinctive hero worship of rude and simple peoples, notably Nordic pagans, in contrast to the enlightened skepticism of civilized men, and yearned for ‘‘the depth and opulence of true social vitality [which] lay in those old barbarous ages.’’52 His doctrine of hero worship was really a lesson in neobarbarian ethics: ‘‘it is that way with all barbarians’’ (90), he affirmed, in their ‘‘childlike greatness’’ they see the world as it is, ‘‘not veiled under names and formulas,’’ and unfailingly honor their heroes.53 But if Carlyle’s barbarians remain distant models, they are more and more often dramatically present, at least in France, as an unruly people clamoring to occupy their rightful place in the modern city. Yet whether a past ideal or a

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:37

PS

PAGE 217

218 c h a p t e r 7

present threat, the barbarian was essentially an archaeological phantasm, and this for three overlapping reasons: as a figure from the past; as a primitive on the ladder of civilization; and as a repressed element in modern society. History, evolution, and class joined forces to locate a largely symbolic barbarian in the murky depths that lay just beneath the civilized order; this figure might alternately be a disruptive force in the modern psyche, a volatile social stratum, or a wind blowing from the past—or all three bundled together in the confusion of an exalted metaphor. Either way, the barbarian had ceased to be a remote memory to become a force smoldering just beneath the crust of the modern world, one which required either an urgent strategy of containment or a productive form of engagement. In France, after the Revolution, the barbarian quickly came to designate the violent irruption of the people on the political stage, most prominently in counterrevolutionary rhetoric.54 Thus Chateaubriand filtered the storming of the Bastille through the lens of Roman upheavals: ‘‘amid these murders, they wallowed in orgies, as during the troubles in Rome under Otto and Vitellius.’’55 The riotous mob here consists of ‘‘happy drunks, . . . prostitutes and sans-culottes [who] began to rule’’ (160), a scandalous image destined for a long afterlife in the antidemocratic rhetoric of the century, from Flaubert’s satirical rendering of 1848 to Taine’s revolutionary mobs and Le Bon’s elitist dissection of crowd psychology. Aggravating this image was the ideological assimilation in the course of the century of the ‘‘dangerous classes’’ with the ‘‘laborious classes,’’ of crime with the urban proletariat, which Louis Chevalier has studied and Euge`ne Sue’s rhetoric in Les Myste`res de Paris well illustrates: citing Cooper’s ‘‘savages,’’ Sue promises the reader ‘‘some scenes from the life of other barbarians’’—thieves and murderers—who happen ‘‘to be in our midst.’’56 But this bleak image of a neobarbarian people also turned out to be a malleable weapon that could be reshaped to serve very contrary purposes. The motif ’s deep ambivalence surfaces in Nerval’s portrayal of his bohemian friends in Sylvie as decadent sophists who waste their time on rhetorical fireworks as the revolution builds up on the horizon; these ‘‘brilliant, lively, stormy, often sublime spirits—such as one always finds in periods of renewal or decadence’’—occasionally cast anxious glances into the street to see ‘‘if the Huns, Turkomans, or Cossacks weren’t at last coming to put an end to these arguments of sophists and rhetoricians.’’57 Nerval’s humorous ambiguity finds a much more tortured echo in Alfred de Vigny’s Daphne´ (1837), an unpublished sequel to Stello (1832), in which the aristocratic poet stages the same characteristic scene of intellectuals gazing

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:37

PS

PAGE 218

The Uses of Archaeology 219

down into a turbulent street. Stello, the poet, and the Docteur Noir here contemplate the angry mobs that sacked the Archbishopric in 1832 before throwing its books into the Seine. This act of vandalism strikes Vigny as a tragic cultural erasure comparable only to the burning of the library at Alexandria. He winces at the ‘‘joy of destruction’’ the crowd exhibits before the drowning books: ‘‘it was one of the greatest amusements in those days, among this part of the People, to see the books coming from the ˆIle SaintLouis bump into the pillars of the bridge.’’58 The Docteur Noir assimilates them to barbarians, and examines one vandal closely to see ‘‘if he had the blood of Arabs or Huns in his veins’’ (283). This scene would seem to deny the neobarbarians any redemptive power: the reckless crowd is just lashing out blindly at blameless books, annihilating ‘‘the poor remains of a past that gloriously traversed the ocean of barbarian centuries’’ only to founder ‘‘in the city of lights’’ (285). Democracy, in other words, is here wreaking havoc in a vibrant aristocratic tradition, just as mass literacy had opened the floodgates of ‘‘industrial literature’’ in Sainte-Beuve’s dire assessment.59 But this polemic denigration is immediately complicated. Vigny’s central theme in Daphne´ is actually the regeneration performed by barbarians. After this frame narrative, the book recounts the fate of Julian the Apostate, the emperor who tried to reinstate paganism as the religion of Rome in the fourth century, and whose tragic failure resonates with Vigny as a vain but glorious effort to safeguard a refined aristocratic culture. The temple of Daphne´ embodies the immemorial accretion of wisdom, beliefs, and customs which it is the function of tradition to pass on: ‘‘it’s the elixir of life, . . . distilled slowly by every past people for every future people’’ (365). In a scene that recalls the sacking of the Archbishopric, a mob of ‘‘Christian barbarians’’ here attacks the precious temple with all the fury of conviction: ‘‘they rushed toward the temple of Daphne´, that masterpiece of grace, . . . [and] demolished and burned in one hour these marbles worshipped for so many centuries’’ (383). However, this ironic echo inevitably recontextualizes the criminal vandalism of the frame tale; hindsight tells us that these ancient barbarians had helped found Western Christianity and infuse new blood into the ailing empire. Even Julian’s head priest admits that only Christianity now has the power to inspire genuine faith in this skeptical age: ‘‘the Barbarians . . . have a naı¨ve, youthful, and honest fear of the new dogma of the Christians’’ (367). Paradoxically, these destroyers might thus turn out to be the most fitting guardians of antiquity’s treasures, which could survive, transformed, in the youthful vigour of their new beliefs. Like all ‘‘religious dogmas,’’ this faith

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:38

PS

PAGE 219

220 c h a p t e r 7

too can serve as a crystalline shell to ‘‘preserve the few wise precepts that nations create and transfer to one another’’ (366). Somewhat incongruously, then, the head priest here accepts the defeat of paganism in the name of a salvific translatio studii which ensures, however much is lost, some degree of cultural continuity: ‘‘if they keep [their faith] pure, this dogma will be the only one in truth which can save the treasure of the world.’’ Julian finally agrees, and pours a libation to honor ‘‘the Preserving God, whoever he may be’’ (367). He and his priest both come to terms with the catastrophe and somewhat improbably adopt the long view of it as a necessary rejuvenation of tradition. Barbarian blood does regenerate, then, and catastrophe can be a blessing in disguise, but Vigny is reluctant to apply this model to the modern masses. On the one hand, these ‘‘Barbarians of 19th-century Paris’’ (386) clearly reenact the destruction of Daphne´, but while this earlier iconoclasm had the historical alibi of Christianity, the modern vandals form a ‘‘pagan procession’’ (385) against a Christian monument, reversing Julian’s aristocratic resistance to Christianity. The novella runs aground on an insoluble dilemma: it can either unconditionally affirm an aristocratic custodianship of culture and reject Rome’s Christian renewal; or affirm the timeless message of Christianity and acknowledge the role barbarians play in renewing a society’s beliefs. Caught between pure negation and candid faith, defensible Christian iconoclasm and reprehensible neopagan vandalism, Vigny’s barbarians present the poet with an insoluble contradiction, which perhaps explains why he chose not to publish Daphne´. The comparison of ancient and modern barbarians seems to raise too many distasteful political questions. Michelet’s strategic use of the barbarian motif can best be understood in this polemical context. His entire historiographical enterprise is in fact based on an archaeology of regeneration, and he unambiguously identifies the archaic barbarian with the untapped vitality of the people. It is in Le Peuple (1846), especially, his attempt to give voice and name to this unsung hero and to counter the romantic focus on ‘‘ugly’’ and ‘‘exceptional’’ cases (meaning Sue and Balzac), that Michelet most clearly celebrates the chthonic energies of the people. In the important dedicatory letter to Quinet, he consciously appropriates the term for his populist project: ‘‘often nowadays the rise of the people, its progress, is compared to the invasion of the Barbarians. The word pleases me, I accept it . . . Barbarians! Yes, that is to say full of new sap, living and rejuvenating. Barbarians, that is to say travelers marching towards the Rome of the future.’’60 Michelet here turns the aristocratic insult on its head, and draws the unsavory lessons implicit in Vigny’s analogy. He

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:38

PS

PAGE 220

The Uses of Archaeology 221

also thickens the image: the barbarians are the people, but they also denote the historical depths of the nation, the stratified experiences of countless generations which have formed a vital reservoir. The nation’s social hierarchy and historical strata here overlap in the perspective of a symbolic archaeology: ‘‘in nationality, it is just as in geology, the heat lies beneath’’ (141). Renewal occurs not from the top down but radiates upward from ‘‘men of instinct and inspiration, without culture’’ (138), whom the historian must symbolically exhume from both oblivion and oppression. Even the modern people are buried under the ‘‘foreign accretions’’ (154) of a perverse industrial order that disfigures their pure and vital instincts, so that despite being their contemporary, Michelet has to unearth their authentic essence rather than the deceptive image which has captured his romantic colleagues: ‘‘today, still, I am digging . . . I would like to reach the bottom of the earth . . . [in order] to find, while descending beneath this cold and sterile soil, the depths where social warmth recommences, where the treasure of universal life lies in safekeeping’’ (155). Michelet’s barbarian imagery thus conflates two axes, social hierarchy and historical depth, and projects both of these on a geological stratification. This symbolic configuration allows him to blur the depiction of the people with the retrieval of buried historical forces and to invest the people with the historical momentum of a long Promethean struggle. Archaeology thus becomes a technique for tapping a ‘‘warmth’’ trapped as much in the nation’s past as under an oppressive industrial system. A fatal error, in this perspective, is to renounce the past, as the Revolution had done, confusing the ideas of progress and rupture—as if history were linear rather than cumulative, a diachronic sequence rather than a dynamic whole. Not that the Revolution was an error, far from it, but it tragically failed to see its own historical character: ‘‘rather than renounce the past, it would have had to vindicate it instead, to seize it and appropriate it’’ (236). The past was paradoxically on its side: ‘‘with the authority of reason,’’ it also had ‘‘that of history, and of our whole historical nationality’’ (236). Michelet even comes strangely close to the hated Burke in claiming that by trusting ‘‘abstract reason’’ the Revolution ‘‘doubted itself, abdicated, and expired’’ (236). But where Burke sung the praises of a consecrated political tradition, Michelet, of course, turns the conservative idea of continuity on its head by calling for an archaeology of popular culture. What must be exhumed and cultivated is a neglected internal barbarism: ‘‘how many half-effaced things there are in our popular customs,’’ he exclaims, which seem ‘‘vulgar’’ but are really ‘‘barbarian,’’ and as

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:38

PS

PAGE 221

222

chapter 7

such preserve the ‘‘primitive inspiration’’ and ‘‘wisdom [of] a forgotten world’’ (157). For all his populism, however, Michelet cannot imagine that popular culture might be able to impart its vitality directly to the nation; the worker poets, for instance, have unfortunately taken to aping Lamartine, while Be´ranger’s lyrics are crowding out the ‘‘old village songs’’ (159). The people cannot speak, but elite voices cannot take their place: a proper interpreter is necessary, and Michelet is careful to inscribe the historian’s role in his program for national regeneration: ‘‘to regain faith in France, to find hope for the future, it is necessary to study our past, to rediscover our natural genius’’ (238). Michelet of course thinks himself perfectly qualified to be this mediator, and his letter to Quinet proudly spells out his working-class credentials as the son of a printer (‘‘before making books, I composed them materially’’ [58]). Having pulled himself up by his bootstraps, as it were, his roots remain popular even though education has given him a voice, making him that optimal and improbable mediator, an articulate barbarian.61 He thus addresses Quinet as ‘‘we other Barbarians,’’ those who ‘‘possess much more vital heat . . . [than] the upper classes,’’ and whose own books, steeped in ‘‘the blood of the people,’’ constitute the much longed-for popular works that can bring ‘‘life and rejuvenation’’ to France (72). For all the self-deception involved here, and despite his presumption to speak for the people, Michelet nonetheless invents a kind of radical barbarian archaeology which suggests that society must be renewed from below by the release of repressed historical energies. If this program was open to appropriation by ideologues of every stamp—and nationalism is already present in Michelet—this should not obscure the radically novel role it imagines for modern barbarians. Carlyle’s celebration of the Odin-worshipping pagans was hardly an apology for the people, and his barbarians were rhetorical examples safely trapped in the past. Michelet’s, on the contrary, despite his sentimental paternalism and deafness to their actual voices, were the ‘‘dangerous classes’’ which hygienists, philanthropists, economists, statisticians, policemen, and state officials were busy trying to contain. In this sense, Michelet’s praise of the barbarian marks a milestone in what Jacques Rancie`re has called the ‘‘distribution of the sensible,’’ that is, the invisible social architecture that governs how figures and voices are perceived.62 What is most radical about Michelet’s barbarian archaeology, however, may be its refusal to erect a wall between past and present. If Michel de Certeau is right that all historiography, even at its most resurrectionist, makes

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:38

PS

PAGE 222

The Uses of Archaeology 223

the dead speak only to reaffirm the abyss between living and dead and in order to institute the present through an exorcism of the past, then Michelet’s poetics posit a deeply anomalous form of continuity. His is not the genealogical kind that traces ancestries and sutures apparent ruptures (as revolutionary historiography did), and which, despite using the past as legitimation, happily vaporizes the prehistory of the present; nor is it the Burkean continuity of time-tested traditions, inherited passively, which impose their inertia on dangerous innovations. It is, rather, a force radiating from unresolved struggles, unrealized aspirations, and unfinished projects, a historical momentum that has built up over time into a vast potential. This is a latent force which, to some degree, carries on a subterranean labor but remains invisible, and thus risks being overlooked by progressives focused on the future. Marx came close to acknowledging it in his image of the revolution as an ‘‘old mole’’ sapping the bourgeois order, but his mole did not so much figure the secret agency of the past as an ironic take on Louis-Napoleon’s victory as a providential symptom of the revolution.63 The past, in Marx’s view, weighed too much ‘‘like a nightmare on the minds of the living’’ (146) to provide any true momentum and usually confused the task at hand by furnishing a gallery of false identities from Rome and 1789. His deep suspicion of any ‘‘relapse into the past’’ (148) only highlights the originality of Michelet’s archaeology and nonlinear conception of the past as a realm of active tectonic forces. But Michelet was not alone in conceiving the past this way. His rare sensibility found an echo in the mythopoetic structure that Hugo outlined in Les Mise´rables to illustrate the continuing agency of the past. Hugo there transposed history into the synchronic image of society as a vast mine, thereby forging a figure that helps explicate and comment on Michelet’s intuition. The chapter ‘‘The Mine and the Miners’’ (III.7.1) inherits the conflictual model of history found in Thierry, Guizot, and Marx, in which societies evolve through struggle (clashing classes, nations, or races), but projects this linear labor into a vertical architecture. The great flashpoints of history are all condensed into proper names—Calvin, Luther, Voltaire, Robespierre, Fourier, Jesus—who occupy their own niches in a mine which, part factory, part platonic cave, part cultural memory, serves to fabricate the future: ‘‘beneath the social edifice . . . there are cavities of all sorts. There is the religious mine, the philosophical mine, the political mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine,’’ and each uses its own tools, such as ideas, numbers, and passions.64 On one level, the image just transcribes a triumphal history of enlightenment and pays homage to the intellectual heroes of hu-

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:39

PS

PAGE 223

224

chapter 7

manity by installing them in an underground pantheon: civilization thereby recognizes its debt to a select group of dead miners, and the present—the surface—is understood as the product of their disinterested labors. However, the work, in Hugo’s image, carries on even in the present, even though ‘‘society hardly has any notion of this excavation which leaves its surface intact but transforms its organs.’’ This work constitutes ‘‘a vast simultaneous activity’’ that ‘‘slowly transforms the above from below, and the outside by the inside,’’ and in which all the ‘‘floors’’ labor concurrently to produce ‘‘the future.’’ When Hugo writes that ‘‘utopias march [cheminent] beneath the ground,’’ he is referring to the durable impact—the latent action, potential energy, and long-term effects—of explosive ideas. His mythical image telescopes historical time into an eternal present of process. Just how far the mine dissolves progressive, sequential time can be gauged by the way it blurs oblivion and novelty: deep down, ‘‘at the threshold separating the indistinct from the invisible, one can see other shadowy men, who perhaps do not yet exist.’’ The past survives within the present as vital organs within an archaeological social body. Like Michelet, Hugo uses archaeology to collapse past and present, the living and the dead, politics and history, and to open up a sphere of anachronistic action that Georges Didi-Huberman—speaking about the anachronism of artistic images—has termed a pre´sent re´miniscent permeable to the past.65 But where have the barbarians gone? Hugo has not forgotten them. But he has relegated them to the most airless depths of the mine. To the progressive utopian mine that refashions society corresponds, in the next chapter, a dystopian mine into which it threatens to collapse: ‘‘at a certain depth, the excavations are no longer penetrable to the spirit of civilization,’’ and ‘‘monsters [become] possible’’ (2:304). Here Hugo places ‘‘the cavern of the blind,’’ a destructive stratum below the thinkers where ignorance, poverty, and selfish appetites have created a bedrock of hate. This compartment perpetually undermines the utopian work above and favors ‘‘the collapse of everything’’: ‘‘it does not only mine, through its hideous fermentation, the current social order; it mines philosophy, it mines science, it mines rights,’’ even the ‘‘revolution.’’ At this depth, the mine undermines itself, and subversion shades into criminality: ‘‘this [last] cavern . . . is simply called theft, prostitution, murder, and assassination,’’ and the goal of the others is strictly ‘‘to suppress it.’’ This topographic split of the mine into criminal and utopian caverns is noteworthy in many respects. For one, it reflects Hugo’s own political

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:39

PS

PAGE 224

The Uses of Archaeology 225

ambivalence and shows the price he pays for taking on the ‘‘social question’’ of misery; this openness is achieved only by distinguishing the peuple from the populace, the people from the mob, a good and a bad people, a move that cleverly preempts the charge of idealization, allows Hugo to balance compassion with repression, and confronts misery with a stark moral choice: social conditions might favor crime, but the alibi of victimhood no longer carries any currency. Moreover, this split complicates the symbolism that structures Hugo’s mine and superposes the axis of class on the temporal vector, making depth symbolic of both the archaic and the abject; this superposition is perhaps not logically coherent, since it would make Jesus rub elbows with crooks, but it is symbolically coherent insofar as enlightenment increases with time and elevation into the educated classes: thus ‘‘the Encyclopedia, last century, was a mine, almost open to the sky.’’ Hugo, then, like Michelet, conflates history and class and strategically blends the forward thrust of history with a discourse of social elevation, linking reform with historical momentum. The class vector certainly carries different connotations in Hugo, for whom the dark lower caverns must be enlightened from above (‘‘destroy the cavern of Ignorance, and you destroy the mole of Crime’’), while Michelet would illuminate all of society from below. Hugo’s image loses some coherence, in fact, because his dual mine makes light move in two directions—up from the utopian mine and down into the cavern of ignorance—but globally it offers a striking mythopoetic translation of Michelet’s tectonic history. The incoherence of Hugo’s social mine stems from his refusal to grant his barbarians the redemptive force of his intellectual heroes; the idea of illumination from below only admits a certain past and class. Hence the anxious rhetoric Hugo deploys to sever all continuity between the two caverns: ‘‘the last quarry . . . [has] no relation whatsoever with the higher floors’’ and ‘‘knows no philosophers.’’ All gradation disappears on this categorical threshold: where ‘‘disinterest’’ reigns above, here only ‘‘personal satisfaction’’ motivates men, and the idea of ‘‘progress’’ is unknown. Hugo seems to be obliged to set up a rhetorical firewall to avert the dangerous consequences of his radical image. He has to draw a thick line between subversion and anarchy, reform and destruction, lawful aspirations and criminal greed. But how successful he is is another question. The distinction between organic change and social collapse is challenged by revolutionary transformations, which Hugo, citing the early Christians, seems to condone: in Rome, the catacombs, ‘‘those dark hotbeds of primitive Christianity, only waited for a

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:39

PS

PAGE 225

226 c h a p t e r 7

chance to explode beneath the Caesars and flood humanity with light.’’ Light and dark are inseparable here: in ‘‘this sacred darkness, there is a latent light . . . all lava starts out being night.’’ The risky kinship that his topography denies would seem to be confirmed by this imagery, which locates the energy for reform in a realm of dark, inscrutable passions. Archaeology, indeed, shades into geology as Hugo unearths the mine’s explosive potential and notes that ‘‘volcanoes are full of shadows capable of flaring up.’’ A geology of revolution is thus implicit in his myth, which points unwittingly to the revolutionary force of barbarians but then recoils in horror before this dangerous recognition. What Michelet calls warmth and love, Hugo ends up denouncing as hatred and ignorance, denying the link between the mine and the volcano and structuring his mythical archaeology accordingly.

Political Upheaval: Volcanoes The ambiguity of Hugo’s mine points to a third use of archaeological rhetoric: besides favoring artistic and social renewal, the earth also harbors energies for a radical political regeneration. Though the political uses of the past are endless and evidently include the historical iconography that successive regimes deployed, the motif that interests me here is the link between revolutionary upheaval and subterranean forces. The archaeological imaginary has its own logic and compels us to dig ever deeper, from ruins to mines to volcanic depths, and to test the shifting meaning of renewal in the process. As the metaphor acquires more depth, the renewal in question becomes more profound and touches not just on style, or on social vitality, but on the political organization of humanity. Revolution would be consistently figured throughout the nineteenth century as a volcanic eruption, as a violent force surging from the depths of society and history. The image is problematic: for one, the Revolution itself, despite its use of Roman references, saw itself as a rupture with history; secondly the volcano would seem to belong more to geology and nature than to a social archaeology. Nonetheless, as Hugo’s mine shows, archaeology and geology coexisted in an uneasy continuity that drew the volcano into the historical sphere—but how, why, and to what effect needs to be examined. Were revolutions natural catastrophes or avoidable social upheavals? Pompeii to some extent conflated the two: the victim of a literal eruption, its fate was also moralized as a punishment and read allegorically as an image of the barbarian invasions that would inundate Rome.

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:39

PS

PAGE 226

The Uses of Archaeology 227

Pompeii thus became an implicit paradigm, sometimes cited, often just allusively present, for the volcanic reading of modern revolutions. Perhaps the most poetically compelling identification of revolution with volcanic eruption occurs in Michelet’s History of the French Revolution (1845– 53), where the groundswell of 1789 is depicted as a chthonic outcry that surges up from the earth after centuries of repression. In an allegorical landscape, this complaint shoots up like ‘‘an immense summit’’ from deep inside the ‘‘bowels of the earth.’’66 This unsuspected mountain, ‘‘a mass escaped from the central heat,’’ emerges from its prison like a ‘‘dark witness to the agonies of the inner world’’ (1:58). The subterranean origin of this popular upheaval serves as an emblem for both the social hierarchy and the historical accumulation of suffering and points to the congruence of class grievances and past oppressions. Michelet fully exploits the natural sublime to depict this advent of social justice: ‘‘what were then the subterranean revolutions of the earth, and what incalculable forces fought each other inside it, which made this mass raise the mountains, pierce the rocks, split the marble strata, and shoot forth to the surface!’’ (1:58). Notwithstanding this euphoric image, the volcanic trope comes fraught with a number of ambiguities. For one, the eruption is at once a geological event and an archaeological revelation, a destructive break and a healing release; it combines the idea of a radical rupture with the restoration of a lost vitality. Michelet’s encoding of the Revolution as a resurrection makes it a return as much as a break, not to any given historical state, evidently, but to an age-old longing for justice. Carlyle, on the other hand, prefers to stress disruption and violence: ‘‘poor Legislators; with their Legislature waterlogged, volcanic Explosion charging under it!’’67 The volcano is inherently ambiguous and can just as well signify resurrection as rupture, vitality as destruction, as if the archaeological imagination, at a certain depth, had attained a limit where it no longer found stable meanings, reassuring identities, or reliable forces, but a magma in which all distinctions, traditions, and genealogies dissolved and a monstrous nature took man’s place. The archaeological quest for an origin, for a ‘‘central heat,’’ thus carries a risk of alienation with it; such, at least, was the impact of two dehumanizing findings of the 1850s—prehistory and evolution—which testified to the risks of depth excavation. The archaeology of identity can turn into the revelation of an inner monstrosity. Hugo’s conviction that ‘‘humanity is identity’’ then runs aground on the ‘‘birth of monsters,’’ or rather his idea that ‘‘all men are of the same clay’’ turns out to equate identity with a state of pure instinctual

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:39

PS

PAGE 227

228

chapter 7

indifferentiation.68 Archaeology, at this point, undoes itself, uncovers an explosive substratum of seething forces, prehistoric instincts, and irrational needs, a depth at which memory fades into the bedrock of oblivion and the dead no longer contribute to national regeneration. This mine then becomes a volcano. ‘‘History has effaced geography,’’ Michelet stated at the conclusion of his Tableau de la France, claiming that ‘‘little by little man’s own power disengages him, uproots him’’ from nature’s fatal influence.69 But this dominant nineteenth-century view also masks a persistent anxiety after the Revolution, a troubling continuity between geology and history legible in the volcano. In Corinne, for instance, Mme de Stae¨l finds that rich cultural memories lie buried in the volcanic countryside of Naples, ‘‘the place in the world where volcanoes, poetry, and history have left the most traces.’’70 But extracting the memories from this soil turns out to be a delicate operation: ‘‘if you strike this ground,’’ Corinne discovers, ‘‘the subterranean vault resonates; it seems as if the inhabited world is no more than a surface ready to crack open’’ (350). Under the memories deposited in the ground lies a threatening abyss: ‘‘the countryside of Naples is an image of the human passions: sulphurous and fertile, its dangers and pleasures seem to emanate from these fiery volcanoes . . . [that] growl like thunder beneath our feet’’ (350). Human nature, in other words, provides a link between geology and history and projects the blind forces of the earth into the social order. The eighteenth century had, of course, located a natural sublime in the volcano and seen it as a freestanding image of the human passions, but history had not yet troubled this innocent specularity, something the Revolution would soon change.71 The amateur studies of Vesuvius that Lord Hamilton had conducted as consul in Naples, devoting his curiosity and leisure to recording the volcano’s moods, would soon acquire a retrospective innocence. When Cuvier, in 1812, wrote about geological catastophes, he could no longer ignore their newfound symbolic resonance, and in his work the earth’s ‘‘great catastrophes’’ and ‘‘revolutions’’ acquired an eery human pathos; nature now directly threatens life: ‘‘countless living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes . . . [and] their races have perished forever.’’72 But its disasters are also inseparable from human tragedies: with a large landslide, entire ‘‘cities, . . . rich and peopled cantons find themselves buried under a fallen mountain’’ (60–61). Geological time and human time join forces in Cuvier’s catastrophism, which comes close to politicizing nature as a mirror of history.73 The threat Mme de Stae¨l sensed in the landscape thus soon becomes

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:40

PS

PAGE 228

The Uses of Archaeology 229

more explicitly historical. The descriptive poetry of Jacques Delille (1738– 1813), whose didactic work, L’Homme des champs (1800), seems idyllic enough, acknowledges the new threats veiled behind nature’s beauty.74 When Delille confronts the volcano, its sublimity takes on the color of a modern historical fascination and seems to blend the memory of Pompeii with the recent horrors of the Revolution. The good earth has first been denatured into a destructive mother who ‘‘from her own bowels / Vomits a boiling flood on her fruits and flowers.’’75 Delille quickly interprets this hostile nature as an image for the furies that inhabit the human psyche: Etna becomes an ‘‘all too striking emblem of the turbulent fires / Burning ceaselessly in the soul’s volcano,’’ and which wreak havoc on society when they ‘‘suddenly leave . . . the abyss of the heart.’’ Delille does not explicitly mention the Revolution, but the volcano’s devastation provides a mournful reminder of its aftermath: ‘‘these calcified rocks, this blackened earth, / Everything recalls the scene of a great fire.’’ But Delille resists naming the event and instead transposes it into a remote mythical catastrophe that dried up floods and wiped out peoples, as if he felt compelled to cloak the trauma of the Terror in the amnesia of a prehistoric legend. Delille thus pleads ignorance before the disastrous event: ‘‘ancient times knew it, the present does not,’’ even if ‘‘the terror of this great plague still endures.’’ The Terror, precisely, despite Delille’s amnesia, has here imprinted its ghostly memory on the scene, as is clear when he turns to consider the future exhumation of a lava-coated city: ‘‘One day, perhaps, one day the people living here / Where the horrible volcano unleashed its fire’’ will strike buildings with their ploughs and unearth a ‘‘profound monument of men and arts.’’ This Pompeian image inevitably doubles as an allegory of the Ancien Re´gime which lies buried under revolutionary ash. The arenas, palaces, and temples Delille imagines underground reflect the lost glories of the monarchy, and the macabre frozen bodies (‘‘weightless simulacra, ready to crumble apart’’) underscore the sudden interruption that instantly fossilized the culture of the Ancien Re´gime.76 Michelet would make this Pompeian allusion explicit: describing the ghostly silence of the villages during the Festival of the Federation, he noted that ‘‘he who, at noon on July 14, 1790, would have passed through these deserted villages without seeing the countryside, would have taken them for so many Herculaneums and Pompeiis.’’77 Vigny would later exploit this same image in Stello and compare the jailed aristocrats awaiting the guillotine to the ‘‘smothered families of Pompeii and Herculaneum.’’78 Later yet, in ‘‘Les Oracles,’’ a poem commemorating the 1848 Revolution, Vigny casts the dying July Monarchy as a ghostly subterranean regime

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:40

PS

PAGE 229

230 c h a p t e r 7

clinging to its ‘‘Vanities’’ and ‘‘Hatreds’’ like ‘‘the bodies found upright in the Roman ashes, hidden under Pompeii’s cellars.’’79 The oracle’s curse seems to transfix them like fossils in eternally grandiloquent postures, ‘‘eyes fixed, mouth open, and hand extended, still seeking in the air their lost speech.’’ What Delille suggests, then, and Vigny here demonstrates, is that the volcanic motif absorbs a postrevolutionary historical imaginary of terror, sudden extinction, and petrification which the myth of Pompeii had so far only figured apolitically. Volcanic soil henceforth figures the mute but ever-present threat of revolution in the nineteenth century. Hugo’s cavern of anarchic passions might at any moment tear through the social foundation. The invigorating powers of memory and the galvanizing force of archaic passions might also end up obliterating society: Roman memories could impart strength, but it was impossible to ignore that the barbarians had wiped out the empire. If the barbarian hordes were the vital substratum on which European nations had been built, they were also a deadly eruptive force, more volcanic explosion than memorial infusion. Dumas compares them to a vast lava flow: ‘‘then came the barbarian flood which, like a new lava, covered not only the dead cities, but also the living cities.’’80 Shortly before the July Revolution, LouisPhilippe, who had just attended Portici d’Auber’s revolutionary opera, La Muette, famously pronounced that ‘‘we are dancing on a volcano.’’ This prophetic phrase would come to be endlessly repeated, modified, and in due course applied to the July Monarchy itself. As a hotbed of revolutionary upheavals, nineteenth-century France could well have made the motto its own. In 1848, Renan dismissed the rampant social speculation of the period in such terms, calling its utopian enthusiasms an effort to ‘‘reason on the crater of a volcano.’’81 In his memoir of the period, Toqueville sneered that ‘‘we are falling asleep on a volcano,’’ while Flaubert noted more crudely that ‘‘we are dancing, not on a volcano, but on the plank of a latrine.’’82 Echoing these metaphors, Carlyle depicted the Revolution as an eruption of grievances that tore through the fabric of the feudal order: ‘‘the accumulation of offences is, as we say, too literally exploded, blasted asunder volcanically.’’83 The German historian Leopold von Ranke figured the derailment of the French Enlightenment into political violence in terms of a volcanic perversion: ‘‘how were the ideas, which Europe had greeted as therapeutic, humane, and liberating, suddenly transformed before its eyes into horrible devastation! The volcanic fire, from which a nourishing, quickening thaw of the soil had been expected, inundated it with terrifying outbursts!’’84 As Hugo had feared, the promised

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:40

PS

PAGE 230

The Uses of Archaeology 231

regeneration from below can turn bleakly destructive. Instead of imparting Michelet’s vital heat to an ossified society, the volcano blasts it to bits, unleashing a primitive horde in the form of the modern mob. In The Last Days of Pompeii, Bulwer-Lytton times the eruption to coincide with a bloodthirsty mob’s arousal during a gladiatorial show: ‘‘the people had been already rendered savage by the exhibition of blood . . . Aroused, . . . they forgot the authority of their rulers. It was one of those dread popular convulsions common to crowds wholly ignorant.’’85 When the archaeology of memory turns into a geology of passions, the discourse on the past abandons the reassuring rhetoric of excavation for an imagery of catastrophic upheaval that derives from natural history. Nature and history, indeed, are less theoretical opposites or antagonists in an epic battle than the two kindred masks worn by the past, which can alternately warm the world or blow it to pieces. For Michelet, in the Histoire romaine, history and geology shade into each other: ‘‘to the prehistoric revolutions of the volcanoes of Etruria and Latium, of Lemnos [and] Samothrace, . . . correspond similar upheavals in the history of peoples.’’86 Nineteenth-century writing on Pompeii would be strongly marked by the volcanic association of natural and political crises. The texts that sift through the city’s ashes often bear the imprint of contemporary hopes and fears, so that however natural the eruption of 79 c.e. had been, observers quickly yielded to the distorting pressures of their own concerns. Already in 1820, Shelley, in his ‘‘Ode to Naples,’’ had read the subterranean ‘‘thunder’’ as the roar of advancing liberty and explained in a note that Pompeii for him reflects ‘‘the enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the proclamation of a Constitutional Government at Naples.’’87 Shelley here folds the modern resurrection of Pompeii into the mythical eruption, enlisting two contrary motifs to symbolize the imminent advent of liberty: ‘‘Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be, / Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free.’’ More often, however, the rumbling has less euphoric overtones. During the Second Empire, Ke´ratry, while admiring the ‘‘electoral posters’’ of Pompeii, noted casually that the city ‘‘was buried in the middle of an electoral crisis,’’ as if the eruption were a groundswell accompanying the popular passions unleashed by a political campaign.88 The oft-cited legend that Spartacus had sought refuge from his Roman pursuers in the crater of Vesuvius further cements this mythical conflation of eruption and social passions. Renan certainly associates these, and in his article commemorating the ‘‘18th centenary of Pompeii’’ (1879), regards the volcano as a dangerous Titan oppressed by an Olympian social order: ‘‘the old giant truly took on grandiose, mythological

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:40

PS

PAGE 231

232

chapter 7

proportions,’’ Renan mused; ‘‘the attitude, almost human, of the gaping monster . . . suggest[s] the idea of a living being with its furies and passions.’’89 But rather than seek refuge, as Delille had done, in a mythical past, Renan makes it historically concrete and finds in its sublime power the reason why ‘‘Greeks and Italians devoted prayers and sacrifices to these capricious and volatile beings’’ (1058)—a capriciousness in which one detects a distorted image of a popular sedition. This link becomes more explicit when Renan fancies that the ‘‘eruptions’’ and ‘‘earthquakes’’ of the first two centuries c.e. ‘‘had exercised an action on the history of humanity’’ (1058). Impressionable minds had been unsettled by such spectacles and turned into ripe ground for millenarian fantasies: these disasters ‘‘troubled the imagination, and, joining forces with Jewish ideas about an imminent end of the world, produced the idea of a conflagration in which the old world had to perish on account of its crimes’’ (1058–59). That is indeed a subversive thought should it provoke anyone to hasten the end by political means, and Renan seems to become conscious here of his own antipopulist fears before Vesuvius; ‘‘judicare seculum per ignem,’’ he exclaims, before adding: ‘‘dangerous words, which should not be too much repeated! Since, by speaking too much of such things, one sometimes gives the people the idea of realizing them’’ (1059). So present is the specter of popular insurrection, then, eight years after the Commune, that Renan cannot behold an ancient volcano without imagining the political action of the masses. As Renan’s anxieties show, the spectacle of Pompeii touched a contemporary nerve, and it is not surprising that it came to serve as a ready-made example for modern observers of that incorrigibly revolutionary city, Paris, which had erupted in 1830, 1848, and 1871. Though Pompeii had initially been an emblem of traumatic rupture, evoking the end of the Ancien Re´gime, it progressively came to signify a current threat, a somber and expectant atmosphere, especially so during the Second Empire in an ironic reversal of its naı¨ve Pompeian dream. The Goncourts thus often resort to the motif to capture the oppressive malaise that hovers over Paris, embalming the city in the thick silence of a moribund regime: ‘‘returned at four in the morning,’’ they note on July 9, 1857, ‘‘Paris dead, silent, and shut down.’’90 Only policemen are out: ‘‘this petrified city, which makes you think that one day this city will die. The city sergeants passing by in the distance look like the guardians of some Pompeii.’’ This is an observation they will recycle in their 1860 novel, Charles Demailly.91 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, similarly, senses an ‘‘anxious solemnity’’ during a solar eclipse in Paris which bathes the city in the

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:41

PS

PAGE 232

The Uses of Archaeology 233

vacant, haunting light of ‘‘the city of tombs.’’92 But this morose image implies that modern Paris might be worth mourning, something that is not so certain under a regime whose glory always borders on the ridiculous. After visiting a brothel that foreign attache´s have lauded as a ‘‘dream from the Thousand and One Nights,’’ but which the Goncourts compare to a dentist’s practice, they feel disheartened enough to throw the cheap debauchery of modern Paris overboard: ‘‘come on, if tomorrow Montmartre erupts [ve´suve] and one were to unearth Paris like Pompeii, oh! the astonishment, when the Priapeion of the rue Joubert would emerge from the ashes!’’93 No doubt the sumptuous spectacle of Roman orgies on display in Fe´licien David’s 1859 opera, Herculanum, also held the mirror to the imperial feast, even if its melodramatic pairing of a debauched queen and a Christian maiden did not insist on any modern lessons.94 Only a few years later, Flaubert would also desublimate the motif and sketch the outlines, in a letter to Jules Duplan of 1865, of a scatological ode that would portray the ‘‘strike of the vidangeurs.’’ He there gleefully forecasts a mock-Pompeian catastrophe: ‘‘the shit would boil in the overfull cellars and make the houses burst,’’ and the final aesthetic payoff of this fecal eruption would be ‘‘a tableau of Paris buried under the shit, like Herculaneum under the lava.’’95 This punishment primarily targets the wellfed bourgeois, of course, and fills Flaubert with more joy than fear, but its root cause is still a strike, and the workers’ symbolic refusal to labor in the excremental pit of the social order. For Flaubert, too, the people are a sleeping Titan, prone to exploding without warning. As these examples show, Pompeii slowly acquired a strange contemporaneity and became a crystal ball in which the fate of Paris seemed to swim unsteadily. Far from providing a simple metaphor for the demise of civilizations, such as the Ancien Re´gime, and a poetic model for the retrieval of eroding memories, Pompeii had at last cast its shadow over modern Paris. The picturesque surface of the city concealed an unruly magma. No critic has been more attuned to this pervasive anxiety mining the urban idyll than Walter Benjamin, who cogently located Vesuvius in the imaginary geography of the nineteenth-century capital: ‘‘Paris is in the social order the counterpart to what Vesuvius is in the geographical order. A dangerous, threatening mass, an ever active June of the Revolution. But just as the slopes of Vesuvius have turned into edenic orchards thanks to the covering layers of lava, so art, festive life, and fashion flourish on the lava of the Revolution like nowhere else.’’96 Benjamin’s image distills all the ambiguity of the motif: the volcano nourishes, but it also kills; current vitality may stem from the afterglow of a past eruption; and though violence lies in

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:41

PS

PAGE 233

234

chapter 7

the past, it could erupt again at any time. It is as if the very mainsprings of culture, the heat Michelet sought to excavate, were stored up in an explosive substratum too primitive to belong to memory, culture, or history itself, as if the thing most necessary to humanity—the subterranean sun Jules Verne’s explorers sought to conquer and name—were a dark, raging force eluding all capture. ‘‘One fears what goes on in the depths of the earth,’’ Mme de Stae¨l had noted, ‘‘and one feels that strange furies make it tremble under our feet.’’97 Her volcano is not one from which a Promethean humanity might snatch a torch to light its way, but an ‘‘evil genius who counteracts the designs of Providence’’ (338). At the deepest stratum, then, lies a radical principle of rupture, a violently destructive force that both surreptitiously animates culture and periodically erupts into history with catastrophic consequences.98 When pushed to its limits, the barbarian archaeology of such nineteenth-century prophets as Carlyle, Michelet, and Hugo inevitably reaches this stratum, and there its mirror melts or reflects back only a terrifying alterity that grounds human history. In the end, then, the volcano undoes the entire archaeological project and exhumes an alien force that cannot be temporalized, humanized, or molded, a somber death drive that secretly inhabits Michelet’s vital heat. The earth’s archival utopia, maternal virtues, and clamor for justice fade into a night that abolishes identity and negates the logic of history. Perhaps this reversal finds its clearest expression in Proust, who at the end of the long nineteenth century grafts an ironic vision of rupture on its tradition of redemptive historicism. In Le Temps retrouve´, which addresses the method of recovery that informs the entire Recherche, he marshals an impressive battery of geological and volcanic images to stress the epochal rupture that grounds the myth of resurrection. World War I is of course now the great threshold that the Revolution had been a century earlier for the Romantics; it marks the end of a glittering era, the extinction of a culture, and the traumatic expulsion from a lost paradise: ‘‘it was one of the most fashionable ideas to say that the prewar era was separated from the war by something as profound and seemingly durable as a geological period.’’99 The Dreyfus Affair seems to Brichot to belong to ‘‘prehistoric times’’ (34). The cast of the Recherche is metamorphosed overnight into curious relics of natural history: Saint-Loup becomes ‘‘a species so rare . . . that one would have liked to possess him for an ornithological collection’’ (9) and now inspires an ‘‘admiration’’ that is ‘‘half worldly, half zoological’’ (10). The cataclysm of the war confirms the distressing continuity between nature and history which archaeology had ex-

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:41

PS

PAGE 234

The Uses of Archaeology 235

posed; to ward off its horrors, Proust resorts to a geological sublime to embellish the disaster; France and Germany, like two tectonic plates, collide to spectacular effect: ‘‘they . . . were giant assemblages, the quarrel took immense and magnificent forms, like the surge of an ocean with a million waves trying to break the ageold barrier of the cliffs, like gigantic glaciers trying to crack the frame of encircling mountains with their slow and destructive oscillations’’ (79). The catastrophe can also no longer be contained in the past, but reveals an ever-present threat that eludes neutralization by historical reason, an ineradicable germ of destruction coextensive with civilization itself. The war now shakes the confidence that nineteenth-century progressives had been able to extract from the Revolution and foreshadows the future extinction of the human species: ‘‘people habitually go about their pleasures,’’ Proust muses, ‘‘without dreaming that an irremediable and very probable catastrophe might be decided in the ether’’ which would deplete the oxygen on earth. ‘‘There would be no more humanity, nor animals, nor earth’’ (79). Noteworthy here is the cosmic origin of the event, which, like the geological cataclysm, lies beyond human control; the counterrevolutionary ideologues who had earlier disparaged the belief that men could control their own destiny are here avenged, but with a vengeance, since the cosmic disaster, as Mme de Stae¨l had seen, also excludes the idea of a providential design. Despite his pessimism, however, Proust also occupies a final summit in Cuvier’s catastrophist tradition. He enlists, one more time, the complex Pompeian motif to depict wartorn Paris as a casualty of the German war machine. ‘‘How many resemblances one finds! . . . Tomorrow we might have the fate of the cities of Vesuvius’’ (114). Echoing the myth of a divine punishment of Roman orgies, he imagines the recent festivities of Parisian high life as ‘‘the last days of our Pompeii’’ (113). The frivolous gestures he has recorded in the Recherche might then also be immortalized by a more deadly memorialist, the German volcano, as if the war, like a ghostwriter, had secretly collaborated in Proust’s archival enterprise: ‘‘if only the lava of some German Vesuvius (their marine weapons are no less terrible than a volcano) were to surprise [the Parisian revelers] while dressing and eternalize their gestures by interrupting them,’’ the children of the future, Proust suggests ironically, might learn from illustrated books how Mme Mole´ put on a ‘‘last layer of makeup before going to dine at a sister-in-law’s place’’ (113). Such mortuary images would provide, like the Recherche itself, a set of irreplaceable ‘‘documents for future historians’’ (113), and transfigure the vulgar, everyday frivolities of the belle ´epoque into precious relics. Destruction would not just

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:41

PS

PAGE 235

236 c h a p t e r 7

paradoxically preserve this decadent culture, but also glaze it with the uncanny aura that had made ordinary Pompeian trinkets so fascinating. However satirically Proust envisages this archive, it obeys an undeniably redemptive logic, placing him squarely in romantic tradition of resurrection a` la Michelet. But if the Recherche ends with a redemptive recovery, Proust, unlike Michelet, has attained an ironic awareness that all resurrection secretly confirms the death of the past and presupposes a definitive rupture: ‘‘the true paradises are the ones that have been lost’’ (177). The belle e´poque is now as remote and insubstantial as the petrified world of Pompeii. If Romanticism had enlisted the volcano in its salvific project, the reverse to some extent happens here, namely that writing, like the catastrophe, ironically fixes and petrifies a living world as if representation unwittingly doubled the work of death. This is not, once again, Michel de Certeau’s historical exorcism, a clearing operation, but a reflection of the aporias of archaeology, which at its deepest level unearths a force that disrupts all continuity. While Proust’s writing, like Michelet’s, counteracts mortality by repairing the torn fabric of time, it simultaneously traces the slow work of death within time itself, restricting its own powers of recovery to the ideal sphere of the artwork. No one gets younger in the Recherche, while France, in Michelet’s script, only gathers more steam. The vitality that energized historicist time has been unmasked as a death drive that inevitably also contaminates writing. Archaeology can no longer rejuvenate the world, in this scenario, but at most embalm the past and fix its image forever in a mortuary monument. The heat radiating from the ground can now only be read as the afterglow of a historical catastrophe. Continuity has become a thing of the past.

................. 17036$

$CH7

09-26-08 11:06:41

PS

PAGE 236

notes

introduction 1. The´ophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin [1835–36], 50. 2. Balzac, ‘‘Avant-Propos’’ [1842], in La Come´die humaine. 3. Gautier, ‘‘Une visite aux ruines’’ [1871], in Paris et les Parisiens, 629. 4. Ernest Renan, L’Avenir de la science [1890], 261–62. 5. For a history of the discipline itself, see Eve Gran-Aymerich, Les Chercheurs de passe´; Alain Schnapp, La Conqueˆte du passe´; and Annette Laming-Emperaire, Origines de l’arche´ologie pre´historique en France. 6. Ernest Renan, L’Avenir de la science, 216. 7. Cf. Charles Newton, ‘‘On the Study of Archaeology’’ [1850]: ‘‘Geology collects and prepares for the physiologist . . . the extinct Faunas and Floras of the primaeval world,’’ just as ‘‘Archaeology glean[s] . . . obsolete and rare forms of speech . . . that they may form evidence in the great scheme of modern Philology’’ (3–4). 8. E´lise´e Reclus, ‘‘Les Cite´s lacustres de la Suisse’’ [1862], 894–95. 9. Balzac, Le Cousin Pons [1847], 72. 10. Balzac, La Recherche de l’absolu [1834], 21. See also the paradigmatic opening of La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote [1829], in which Balzac’s observer ‘‘examined [a storefront] with the enthusiasm of an archeologist. In truth, this debris of the sixteenth-century bourgeoisie presented the observer with more than one problem to resolve’’ (25–26). 11. Raoul-Rochette, for instance, devoted his Cours d’arche´ologie [1828] to ‘‘the history of art of the ancients,’’ which he approached from the normative perspective of ‘‘imitation’’ (5–7). Earlier, A.-L. Millin, in his Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts [1806], had defined archaeology as ‘‘the science of manners and customs’’ and distinguished an approach that privileged ‘‘events and people’’ from one focused on ‘‘works of art.’’ The latter was archaeology proper, while the former was merely antiquarianism (51). 12. Caylus, for instance, in his Recueil d’antiquite´s [1752–67], saw three interrelated uses of antiquarian studies: ancient monuments ‘‘explain particular customs, they shed light on dubious or vague facts in [ancient] authors, and they set the progress of the arts before our eyes’’ (1:ii). They serve archaeology, philology, and art history, in other words, but for Caylus ‘‘the arts [remain] as it were the principal object of this work’’ (1:xi–xii). 13. Hugo, La Le´gende des sie`cles, 1:476.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:03:58

PS PAGE 237

238

notes to pages 10 –14

chapter 1 1. Pliny the Younger (ca. 61 c.e.–112 c.e.) described the catastrophe in a famous letter to Tacitus (6.16). Pliny the Elder (23 c.e.–79 c.e.), his uncle and surrogate father, commander of the fleet at Misenum, died while investigating the event. 2. When the entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood opened his pottery works Etruria in 1769, his first vases borrowed motifs from d’Hancarville’s engravings of Sir William Hamilton’s Pompeian collection. Princely houses in this period frequently used Pompeian motifs taken from the engravings published by the Accademia Ercolanese (1757–92). The fashionable architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine refurbished the castle of Malmaison for Napoleon and Jose´phine, who purchased it in 1799, in the Pompeian style; the dining room featured Pompeian dancers drawn by Louis Lafitte (1770–1828). Pompeian period rooms were extremely popular; the Lansdowne House (1765–68) in London, built by neoclassical architect Robert Adam, boasted a Pompeian drawing room with plaster casts of bas-reliefs depicting dancing figures. 3. La Roque, Voyage d’un amateur des arts [1775–78], cited by Chantal Grell, ‘‘Les Voyageurs a` Herculanum,’’ 84. 4. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Italienische Reise [1816–17], 441. Goethe’s trip and notes date from 1786 to 1788. 5. Jean Seznec, ‘‘Herculaneum and Pompeii,’’ 151. 6. Goethe, Italienische Reise, 426. 7. Horace Walpole marveled in 1740 at the intact state of Herculaneum, which, unlike Rome, where most discoveries had been ‘‘made in the barbarous age, where they only ransacked the ruins in quest of treasure,’’ was a rare scientific fortune. But Walpole’s own rhetoric partakes in the barbarian imaginaire of plunder and hoards: he calls the city a ‘‘reservoir of antiquities.’’ Letter from Walpole to West, dated June 14, 1740 (Naples), reprinted in the exhibition catalogue Pompeii as Source and Inspiration: Reflections in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art, 13–14. 8. Cochin and Bellicard, Observations [1750], 54. 9. J.-C. Richard de Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque a` Naples et en Sicile [1781–86], 1:367. Saint-Non traveled in Italy between 1759 and 1762 but did not conceive the work until 1777, when he appointed Vivant Denon to take a team of painters and draftsmen to Italy. The original work was published in Paris from 1781 to 1786 in five volumes. 10. ‘‘The Broom,’’ reprinted in Pompeii as Source and Inspiration, 15. 11. See Chantal Grell, Herculanum et Pompe´i dans les re´cits des voyageurs franc¸ais du XVIIIe sie`cle: ‘‘only art objects interested those in charge of the excavations . . . thus, when a house was found, its walls were instantly pierced, with no respect for the whole or attempt to locate the entrance, in order to reach the rooms as quickly as possible, where the frescoes and statues could be found’’ (99). 12. Charles de Brosses, Lettre sur l’e´tat actuel de la ville souterraine d’He´racle´e [1750], cited in Grell, ‘‘Les Voyageurs,’’ 89. 13. Cochin and Bellicard, Observations, 50.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:03:59

PS

PAGE 238

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 4 – 1 7 239 14. Winckelmann, Sendschreiben [1762], 79. 15. ‘‘As the work progressed, the ornaments were removed . . . and the workers [were] obliged to transfer the soil from the places they were visiting to the places they had visited as they dug their trenches’’ (Cochin and Bellicard, 44). 16. Ernest Renan credits Fiorelli, who took charge of the excavations in 1860, with ‘‘the glory of having introduced method in this important work’’ (‘‘Le XVIIIe centenaire de Pompe´i’’ [1879], 2: 1048). 17. Winckelmann, Sendschreiben [1762], 78. 18. Pre´sident de Dupaty, Travels Through Italy [1785], 381. 19. E. de Ke´ratry, Les Ruines de Pompe´i [1867], 15. 20. Steven Hamp, in Pompeii as Source and Inspiration, 3. 21. See Philippa Levine’s informative study, The Amateur and the Professional. 22. Renan, ‘‘L’Ancienne E´gypte’’ [1865], 2:369. 23. See Andre´ Malraux’s autobiographical novel, La Voie royale [1930]. 24. L’Abbe´ Barthe´lemy, Voyage en Italie [1755–57], excerpt in Voyages en Italie, ed. Yves Hersant, 610. 25. Cochin and Bellicard, Observations, 49. 26. Saint-Non, Voyage, 1:364–66. 27. See Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 109 (35.61–66). 28. Cochin and Bellicard, Observations, 81. 29. Saint-Non, Voyage, 1:368. 30. Cochin and Bellicard, Observations, 82. 31. Chantal Grell speaks of a ‘‘disappointment,’’ stating that ‘‘the visit of the buried city of Herculaneum did not spark among travelers the enthusiasm traditionally evoked’’ (‘‘Les Voyageurs,’’ 87 and 94). 32. Louis Hautecoeur, Rome et la renaissance de l’antiquite´ a` la fin du XVIIIe sie`cle, 87 33. The Chinese reference also occurs in Dupaty, who recognizes the ‘‘whims of a Chinese imagination’’ (Travels Through Italy, 328). Swinburne judged ‘‘the fantastic architectures of those ancient mural paintings . . . [to be] as barbarous as Gothic buildings’’ (quoted in Mario Praz, ‘‘Herculaneum and European Taste,’’ 690). 34. Percy Bysshe Shelley, letter to Thomas Love Peacock (January 23–24, 1819), cited in Pompeii as Source and Inspiration, 14. 35. Franc¸ois de Paule Latapie, Description des fouilles de Pompe´i [1776], cited in the exhibition catalogue Pompe´i: Travaux et envois des architectes franc¸ais au XIXe sie`cle, 6; Adolphe Pezant, Voyage pittoresque, 298. 36. Napoleon boasted on Saint-Helena that he would have restored Rome, and probably the Campanian cities, had he remained master of Italy. Rome ‘‘would have arisen from its ruins; he proposed to clean away all the crumbling remains, to restore as much as possible, etc. He did not doubt that when that same spirit had spread across the area, the same sort of thing could be done with Herculaneum and Pompeii.’’ Emmanuel de Las Cases, Me´morial de Sainte-He´le`ne, 1:471.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:03:59

PS

PAGE 239

240

notes to pages 17–23

37. Mario Praz, ‘‘Herculaneum and European Taste,’’ 684. 38. Chantal Grell, Herculanum et Pompe´i, 200. Cf. also Jean Seznec’s remark in ‘‘Herculaneum and Pompeii’’: ‘‘men of letters made a sharp distinction between ‘l’antiquite´’ and ‘les antiquite´s.’ ‘L’antiquite´’ was the great classical tradition, as derived from Homer, Virgil, and the other ancient authors; they, the literary people, were the inheritors and the true representatives of that tradition. ‘Les antiquite´s,’ that was just pots and pans, broken vases, and such trifles’’ (154). 39. Jean Seznec, ‘‘Herculaneum and Pompeii,’’ 154. Franc¸ois Furet makes a similar distinction with respect to historiography and antiquarianism in the Ancien Re´gime. The use of coins, inscriptions, and documents was still the exclusive domain of erudite antiquarians, while history as such was chiefly a belletristic discipline, inclined toward abstraction, philosophy, and literature. This situation would only change when the two strands came together in romantic historiography. See ‘‘La Naissance de l’histoire,’’ in L’Atelier de l’histoire. 40. Goethe, Italienische Reise, 259–60. 41. On the curiosity, see Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux, 61–80. 42. See Pomian’s thesis that ‘‘curiosity’’ thrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after theological control of the ‘‘curious sciences’’ declined and before science once more disciplined the desire to see, know, and appropriate the world. 43. Bergeret de Grancourt, Journal de voyage en Italie et en Allemagne [1773–74], cited in Grell, Herculaneum et Pompe´i, 117. 44. Grell, Herculanum et Pompe´i, 69. 45. Franc¸ois Mazois, Les Ruines de Pompe´i [1824], 2:4. 46. Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence [1826], 340. 47. Grell, Herculanum et Pompe´i, 79 and 81. 48. Pre´sident Dupaty, Travels Through Italy, 328. 49. Augustin Thierry, Conside´rations sur l’histoire de France [1840], 117. 50. The concept is operative during much of the nineteenth century, but it is the British anthropologist Edward Tylor who theorizes it in Primitive Culture (1876). 51. Goethe, Italienische Reise, 261. 52. Jules Michelet, Introduction a` l’histoire universelle [1831], 439. ¨ ber das Studium des Alterthums’’ [1793], 1:256. 53. Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘‘U 54. Creuze´ de Lesser, Voyage en Italie et en Sicile, 1801–2 [1806], 174–75. 55. Grell, Herculanum et Pompeii (1982), also notes the emergence of an ‘‘archeological gaze’’ between 1750 and 1820 (66–68). 56. Aubin-Louis Millin, Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts, 1:51. 57. Raoul-Rochette, Cours d’arche´ologie, 5–6. 58. Arcisse de Caumont, Histoire sommaire de l’architecture religieuse, civile et militaire, au moyen aˆge [1830–33], 29. Edited summary of a ‘‘cours d’antiquite´’’ taught at Caen, 1800–1833. 59. Charles Newton, ‘‘On the Study of Archaeology,’’ 20 and 3.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:03:59

PS

PAGE 240

n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 3 – 3 0 241 60. Ludovic Vitet, ‘‘L’Art et l’arche´ologie’’ [1847], 2:406. 61. At the outset of his Discours pre´liminaire [1812], Cuvier paints a naı¨vely idyllic vision of nature before alerting the reader to the fact that ‘‘nature has also had its internal wars and that the surface of the globe has been ravaged by successive revolutions and various catastrophes.’’ He then proposes a new type of gaze, at once archaeological and panoramic, broad and deep, which would scan for these invisible truths: ‘‘these ideas change as soon as [one] tries to dig through the soil, now seemingly so peaceful, or climbs the hills that border the plain (48–49). 62. Rodolphe To¨pffer, ‘‘La Valle´e de Trient’’ [185-], 430–31. 63. Compare To¨pffer’s story to Stendhal’s remarks during his 1817 tour in Rome, Naples et Florence, which bluntly oppose erudition to the aesthetic enjoyment of landscape and single geology out for its deadening impact. Before a panoramic view of the plain of Lombardy, Stendhal is overcome with emotion and ‘‘thank[s] God that he is not a savant: these masses of piled-up boulders gave me a very lively emotion this morning (it was a kind of beauty), while my companion, an erudite geologist, sees nothing in this scene that strikes me except arguments in favor of his compatriot, M. Scipion Breislak, against French and English savants.’’ Knowledge spoils aesthetic pleasure: ‘‘if I had the slightest knowledge of meteorology, I wouldn’t find as much pleasure, on certain days, in seeing the clouds float by’’ (267–68).

chapter 2 1. For the English case, see Stuart Piggott’s chapter ‘‘The British Antiquaries’’ in Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination. Piggott identifies satirical stabs at antiquaries by Thomas Nashe (1592), Robert Burton (1621), and John Donne (1633) and finds the first full-blown character sketch in John Earle’s Micro-cosmographie (1628). See also Joseph Levine, ‘‘The Antiquarian Enterprise, 1500–1800,’’ in Humanism and History, esp. 100–101. 2. La Bruye`re, ‘‘De la mode,’’ in Les Caracte`res [1688], 311–16; Montesquieu, ‘‘Lettre CXLII,’’ in Lettres persanes [1721], 276–80; Marmontel,‘‘Le Connaisseur’’ [1755–59], 2: 224–41. 3. Marmontel’s story was preceded by L’Antiquaire, an ope´ra-comique staged in Paris on July 7, 1742, in which Me´daillon refuses his daughter to Le´andre, in favor of the numismatist Le Buste. But Marmontel’s tale in turn spawned a number of stage imitations (1766, 1773, and 1799). For an exhaustive list, see Charles Davillier’s study ‘‘Les Curieux au theaˆtre’’ [1870]. 4. Charles Nodier, ‘‘Le Bibliomane’’ [1831], in Contes, 515. 5. Horace de Viel-Castel, ‘‘Les Collectionneurs’’ [1840–42], 1:181–90. 6. La Bruye`re, ‘‘De la mode,’’ 311 and 316. 7. The young Flaubert also penned a dark romantic tale about ‘‘Bibliomanie’’ (1836), in which Giacomo, a bookseller in Barcelona, is accused of burning the house of a rival

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:03:59

PS

PAGE 241

242

notes to pages 30 –33

book collector in order to snatch a precious manuscript from the flames. Giacomo ‘‘loved science like a blind person loves daylight’’ (1:162). 8. La Bruye`re, ‘‘De la mode,’’ 314. 9. On the culture of collection and the vogue for cabinets of curiosities in this period, see Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux, esp. 61–80. 10. See Anthony Grafton, ‘‘The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopedism,’’ in Bring Out Your Dead, 166–80. 11. La Bruye`re, ‘‘De la mode,’’ 314–15. 12. Se´bastien-Roch-Nicolas de Chamfort, ‘‘Des Acade´mies’’ [1791], 5:281. 13. Cf. Voltaire: ‘‘what is ordinarily missing among those who compile history is the philosophical spirit.’’ Cited by Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, 196. 14. See Edward Gibbon’s remark on the intellectual climate in France in the 1750s: ‘‘the new appellation of Erudits was contemptuously applied to the successors of Lipsius and Casaubon; and I was provoked to hear . . . that the exercise of the memory, their sole merit, had been superseded by the nobler faculties of the imagination and the judgement’’ (Memoirs, 99). 15. As Franc¸ois Furet has observed in ‘‘La Naissance de l’histoire,’’ the broad sweep of official historiography before the Revolution would not absorb the antiquarian culture of proof until the 1820s. History and antiquarianism were for long two totally alien fields. ‘‘There was a sort of divorce,’’Augustin Thierry had noted in the 1820s, ‘‘between the work of collecting original documents and the ability to understand and express their real meaning’’ (Conside´rations, 107). 16. Voltaire ‘‘overtly held erudition in contempt,’’ according to Blandine Kriegel, who cites him calling for ‘‘death to details . . . that vermin that kills great works’’ (L’Histoire a` l’aˆge classique, 2:294). 17. Opposing Mabillon to Bayle, and erudition to critique, Kriegel remarks that ‘‘where Diplomatics seeks the true, Pyrrhonism seeks the false.’’ Thus, ‘‘despite his immense personal erudition, Bayle’s research goes in a direction opposite that of erudite history’’ (L’Histoire a` l’aˆge classique, 2:284). 18. Fe´nelon, Lettre a` l’Acade´mie franc¸aise [1713], 72–74. 19. Louis-Se´bastien Mercier, ‘‘L’Acade´mie des inscriptions et belles-lettres,’’ in Tableau de Paris [1781–88]. 20. Diderot, Lettres a` Sophie Volland (November 12, 1765). 21. Diderot, ‘‘L’anticomanie’’ [1894], 72. 22. Caylus, ‘‘Avertissement,’’ in Recueil d’antiquite´s, vol. 1 [1761–65]. 23. See Jean Seznec’s account of Diderot’s hostility to the comte de Caylus, based on the antiquarian’s efforts to influence artistic taste: ‘‘Diderot is a rival of the count, and a jealous rival. He too would like to play a role among the artists’’ (‘‘Le Singe antiquaire,’’ in Essais sur Diderot et l’antiquite´, 93). 24. Diderot, Ruines et paysages. Salon de 1767, 478. 25. On the endurance of the humanist tradition, see Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text, who shows ‘‘that humanism was not replaced by, but coexisted with, the New

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:00

PS

PAGE 242

n o t e s t o p a g e s 3 4 – 3 5 243 Philosophy, the New Science, and even the Enlightenment’’ (11). Rosemary Sweet also reassesses the alleged decline of antiquarianism in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, arguing that it ‘‘was a pervasive and essential constituent of the contemporary pursuit of art and literature’’ (‘‘Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England,’’ 183), while Mark Salber Phillips points to the increasing porosity of historical genres in this period (‘‘Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism’’). 26. Krzysztof Pomian notes a shift of emphasis from antiques to objects of natural history in eighteenth-century collections; see ‘‘Me´dailles / coquilles ⳱ e´rudition / philosophie,’’ in Collectioneurs, amateurs et curieux. In ‘‘Les deux poˆles de la curiosite´ antiquaire’’ (in L’Anticomanie), he charts the slow growth of the ‘‘national pole’’ of antiquarianism, concerned both with the pre-Roman past and the middle ages. Caylus, for example, only began to include Celtic monuments in the third volume of his Recueil d’antiquite´s in 1759. 27. Chamfort’s 1791 polemic, ‘‘Des Acade´mies,’’ stresses how compromised they are as royal institutions. ‘‘The principal occupation of the Acade´mie des belles-lettres, according to one of its most renowned members, Mabillon,’’ he writes, ‘‘should be the glory of the king’’ (282). If this leads Chamfort to call bluntly for ‘‘the extinction of these bodies,’’ he does hint at a possible democratic rehabilitation of the past when he charges the Academy with ‘‘studying our French antiquities [only] to disfigure them, to poison the sources of our history, [and] to put erudite forgery into the service of despotism’’ (281). 28. On the birth and spread of local archaeological societies in the 1820s, see Franc¸oise Berce´, Des monuments historiques au patrimoine, and ‘‘Arcisse de Caumont et les socie´te´s savants.’’ 29. See Stephen Bann, ‘‘The Historical Composition of Place: Byron and Scott,’’ in The Clothing of Cleo. 30. Nietzsche suggests a triple classification of history-writing in his essay ‘‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’’ [1874]: monumental, antiquarian, and critical. The second type is for Nietzsche mainly an identitarian pursuit, in which the fragile ‘‘antiquarian’’ ‘‘looks back to whence he has come . . . with love and loyalty’’ and seeks to restore this lost paradise. This excessive veneration for the past is inimical to the interests of life; when history serves life, ‘‘the past itself suffers,’’ but the antiquarian ‘‘serves the life of the past in such a way that it undermines continuing and especially higher life . . . [and] no longer conserves life but mummifies it’’ (74–75). 31. Walter Scott, The Antiquary [1816], 27–28. 32. Walter Scott, ‘‘General Preface,’’ in Waverley [1814], 521. 33. Walter Scott, Ivanhoe [1819], 526–27. 34. In an early attempt at a historical novel, Queen-Hoo Hall [1807–8], an unfinished manuscript Scott had agreed to complete for a publisher, he saw how excess erudition could mar a novel: ‘‘by rendering his language too ancient, and displaying his antiquarian knowledge too liberally, the ingenious author had raised up an obstacle to his own success.’’ The author erroneously ‘‘addresses himself exclusively to the Antiquary,’’ and so ensures his ‘‘dismiss[al] by the general reader’’ (‘‘General Preface,’’ in Waverley, 524–25). 35. Philippa Levine describes this group as follows in The Amateur and the Profes-

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:00

PS

PAGE 243

244

notes to pages 36 – 41

sional: ‘‘ecclesiology was virtually coterminous with the Cambridge Camden Society founded in 1839. The society promulgated a devotion to the architecture of the English Middle Ages as representing the truest expression of the Christian religion . . . [it] was contemporary with the popular resurgence of interest in the Middle Ages and in Gothic architecture’’ (47). 36. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present [1843], 53. 37. Baudelaire, ‘‘Le jeune enchanteur.’’ [1846], 1:523–45. The story derives from an English keepsake from 1836, and was first published in L’Esprit public in 1846. 38. Alexandre Dumas, Impressions de Voyage [1843], 2:172. 39. A.-L. Millin, Introduction a` l’e´tude des me´dailles [1796], 4. 40. Sainte-Beuve, ‘‘L’abbe´ Barthe´lemy’’ [1852], 7:192–94. 41. ‘‘Ci-gıˆt un antiquaire acariaˆtre et brusque. / Oh qu’il est bien loge´ dans cette cruche e´trusque!’’ Cited in Jean Seznec, ‘‘Le Singe antiquaire,’’ 90. 42. E. and J. Goncourt, ‘‘Caylus’’ [1858], 38:168. 43. George Eliot, Romola [1862–63], 67–68. 44. See Ernest Renan’s 1871 pamphlet, La Re´forme intellectuelle et morale, where he reminds readers that ‘‘it is impossible to understand our present woes without finding their cause in the past’’ (5), and concludes that ‘‘the lack of faith in science is the deep defect of France’’ (95). 45. Viollet-le-Duc, ‘‘Restauration’’ [1854], 8:14–34. 46. Ernest Renan, ‘‘La De´couverte de Ninive’’ [1853], 2:405. 47. For a synopsis of Botta’s achievements, see Francis H. and John N. McGovern, ‘‘Paul E´mile Botta.’’ After exhibiting his Assyrian artworks at the Louvre in 1847, Botta went on to publish the five-volume Monuments de Ninive (1849–1850). 48. For an account of Botta and Layard’s discoveries, see Frederick N. Bohrer, ‘‘Inventing Assyria.’’ 49. Ernest Renan, ‘‘La De´couverte de Ninive,’’ 2:408. 50. Victor Hugo, Les Mise´rables [1862], 3:325. 51. Jules Verne, Voyage au centre de la terre [1864], 160. 52. Edgar Quinet, La Cre´ation [1869], 21:44. 53. On this point, see Jacques Rancie`re, La Parole muette, especially chapter 1. JeanMarie Schaeffer’s La Naissance de la literature also discusses the genre-leveling thrust of the movement. 54. On the ‘‘democratization of collection’’ and the growth of ‘‘private museums’’ in the nineteenth century, see chapter 2 of Didier Maleuvre’s Museum Memories. 55. This is the synthesis Leopold von Ranke alludes to in his essay ‘‘On the Character of Historical Science’’ [1830s]. History enacts the union of ‘‘art’’ and ‘‘science’’; it is ‘‘distinguished from all other sciences in that it is also an art.’’ These two are opposed, for Ranke, not just as empiricism (antiquarianism) and theory (philosophy), but also as nonfiction (artless record of facts) and fiction (the artistic reconstruction of the facts). ‘‘History is a science in collecting, finding, penetrating; it is an art because it recreates and portrays that which it has found and recognized. Other sciences are satisfied simply with recording what has been found; history requires the ability to recreate’’ (33).

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:00

PS

PAGE 244

n o t e s t o p a g e s 4 1 – 4 4 245 56. Wordsworth, ‘‘Roman antiquities Discovered at Bishopstone, Herefordshire’’ [1835], 28. 57. Mme de Stae¨l, Corinne ou l’Italie [1807], 302. 58. Mme de Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne [1813], 1:185–86. On the association of Germany with erudition, see her ‘‘Observations ge´ne´rales,’’ and the attribution of ‘‘immense erudition’’ to writers already suspect for their bad ‘‘taste’’ (48). 59. Hugo, Le Rhin [1845], 3. 60. Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris [1831], 162. 61. Chateaubriand, Ge´nie du christianisme [1802], 2:119. 62. Sainte-Beuve, Tableau historique et critique [1828], 8. 63. Gautier exhumes a number of minor poets in Les Grotesques. The act of rediscovering forgotten writers was a quintessential romantic strategy in the war on classicism, executed by, among others, Nodier, Saint-Marc Girardin, Philare`te Charles, and SainteBeuve. See Martine Lavaud, ‘‘ ‘Grotesque XIXe sie`cle’: Le vertige relativiste des exhumations litte´raires.’’ 64. Aloysius Bertrand, Gaspard de la nuit [1829/1842], 44. 65. Christiane Zintzen discusses the mutual permeability of nineteenth-century poetry and science in Von Pompeji nach Troja and shows how ‘‘open scientific discourse was towards literary seduction and poetic license’’ (252). 66. Prosper de Barante, ‘‘Pre´face’’ to Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne [1827], 14. 67. The picturesque, once more, functions as a relay between classical aesthetics and romantic archaeology, but here we see it in historiography. Barante’s ‘‘picturesque’’ history is a transitional form en route to Thierry and Michelet’s archaeology. For an interesting reading of this ‘‘cycle’’ of historians (Barante-Thierry-Michelet) in linguistic terms, see Stephen Bann’s chapter ‘‘A Cycle in Historical Discourse’’ in The Clothing of Cleo. 68. Macaulay, ‘‘Hallam’s Constitutional History’’ [1828], 1:230–31. 69. Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, 40. 70. Hugo, ‘‘Sur Walter Scott: A` propos de Quentin Durward’’ [1823], 146. 71. Macaulay, ‘‘History’’ [1828], 1: 230. Macaulay pays homage here to Walter Scott’s pathbreaking novels, conceding that they are models for the renewal of historiography. In describing the ‘‘perfect historian,’’ he stresses that ‘‘the charm of historical romances’’ stems from their use of hitherto neglected materials or of ‘‘fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them.’’ Scott ‘‘has constructed out of their gleanings works which, even considered as histories, are scarcely less valuable than theirs.’’ The task of the ‘‘truly great historian would be to reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated’’ (1:226). 72. Leopold von Ranke echoed Macaulay’s split view of history. He called history both an art and a science—but privileged neither as its center of gravity. It was a hybrid discourse designed to breathe life into the documents the historian had unearthed. ‘‘History is a science in collecting, finding, penetrating; it is an art because it recreates and portrays that which it has found and recognized’’; the mere ‘‘recording’’ of science is enhanced by ‘‘recreation’’ (‘‘On the Character of Historical Science,’’ 33). Where Macau-

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:00

PS

PAGE 245

246 n o t e s t o p a g e s 4 4 – 4 6 lay tries to amend ‘‘philosophical history’’ through an infusion of poetic detail, Ranke truly mediates between ‘‘antiquarian’’ and ‘‘philosophical history.’’ He integrates documents and ideas, pictures and narrative, material culture and historical theory, into an overall act of cultural reconstruction. 73. An intrinsic textual distinction between history and fiction is hard to pinpoint. As Paul Ricoeur has argued in Temps et re´cit, historiography is inseparable from narrative and relies on the same mechanism as fiction for constructing action in time. Narrative is central to our perception, construction, and representation of time and transcends the divide between fiction and history. 74. Augustin Thierry, Histoire de la conqueˆte [1825], vi. 75. The ‘‘two hostile powers’’ alluded to earlier, which compete on the historian’s turf, are ‘‘the Reason and the Imagination.’’ The mistake has been to ‘‘fall[] alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each,’’ with the result that history is ‘‘sometimes fiction’’ and ‘‘sometimes theory’’ (‘‘History,’’ 1). Macaulay’s perfect historian ‘‘would be received by the imagination as well as by the reason’’ (16). 76. Guizot takes Scott to task for his anachronistic portrait of ‘‘the burgomaster of Liege’’ as ‘‘a regular burgher in a comedy, fat, indolent, without experience or boldness,’’ whereas ‘‘the burghers of this period,’’ in Guizot’s martial picture, ‘‘always had a coat of mail upon their breast, a pike in their hand; their life was as tempestuous, as warlike, and as hardy, as that of the lords with whom they fought’’ (History of the Civilization in Europe [1828], 133). 77. On this point, see Georg Luka´cs’s account of Scott’s poetics in The Historical Novel, where Luka´cs stresses the triumph of ‘‘realism’’ in Scott’s novels over his petty aristocratic conservatism; the works portray the two clashing tendencies of any given era and end up affirming the outcome rather than mourn for a lost past. 78. Thierry, ‘‘Sur la conqueˆte de l’Angleterre par les Normans,’’ in Dix ans d’e´tudes historiques [1817–27], 120–27. 79. Thierry repeats his homage to Scott in the preface to L’Histoire de la conqueˆte: ‘‘it was necessary to wait for a novelist, a man of genius, to reveal to the English people that its eleventh-century ancestors were not all defeated in a single day’’ (xii). 80. And again, later: ‘‘To say that there is more true history in his novels of Scotland and England than in the philosophically false compositions which still carry that great name is not to propose anything strange in the view of those who have read and understood Old Mortality, Waverley, Rob-Roy’’ (127). Already in the Lettres sur l’histoire de France [1820], Thierry praised Scott for helping reform modern historiography: ‘‘if there is today a revolution in the manner of writing history, [his] compositions, seemingly frivolous, will have contributed greatly to this’’ (61). 81. Thierry, Lettres, 5. These were initially published in 1820 in Le Courrier franc¸ais. On the importance of this ‘‘manifesto,’’ see Jacques Neefs, ‘‘Augustin Thierry: Le moment de la ‘ve´ritable’ histoire de France,’’ and Marcel Gauchet, ‘‘Les Lettres sur l’histoire de France d’Augustin Thierry.’’ 82. Thierry had already criticized modern spelling in L’Histoire de la conqueˆte and

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:00

PS

PAGE 246

n o t e s t o p a g e s 4 6 – 5 0 247 unmasked the affront to ‘‘historical truth’’ implicit in ‘‘the use of English spelling’’: ‘‘I have carefully restituted their Norman physiognomy to all these names’’ and ‘‘avoided . . . applying the language of one time to another’’ (xv). 83. Thierry, Lettres, 6 and 63. 84. Thierry, Conside´rations, 107. 85. Scott, Ivanhoe, 525. 86. ‘‘What I have applied to language, is still more justly applicable to sentiments and manners. The passions, the sources from which these must spring in all their modifications, are generally the same in all ranks and conditions, all countries and ages; and it follows, as a matter of course, that the opinions, habits of thinking, and actions, however influenced by the peculiar state of society, must still, upon the whole, bear a strong resemblance to each other’’ (Ivanhoe, 528). 87. Thierry, Histoire de la conqueˆte de l’Angleterre, ix. 88. Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, 44. 89. Thierry’s other great literary model is Chateaubriand. In Conside´rations (xix– xxii), he relates his discovery of Les Martyrs at school: ‘‘In 1810, I was finishing my studies at the colle`ge de Blois, when a copy of the Martyrs, brought in from the outside, circulated in the school. It was a great event for those of us who already felt a taste for beauty and an admiration for glory. We fought over the book.’’ Thierry’s discovery of this Christian epic is an archetypal scene of romantic reading which echoes Augustine’s conversion: ‘‘I read, or rather devoured the pages, . . . [feeling] first a vague charm, and a sort of fire in the imagination,’’ before the sheer power of Chateaubriand’s verbal painting enthralled him. ‘‘This moment of enthusiasm was perhaps decisive for my future vocation’’; it resurfaced later with ‘‘a singular precision’’ when he struggled over ‘‘the choice of a career.’’ 90. Thierry, Re´cits des temps me´rovingiens [1833–37], 30.

chapter 3 1. Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii [1834], vi. 2. Eve Gran-Aymerich considers Montfaucon to be the first to ‘‘promote . . . objects to the rank of historical documents having the same value as texts’’ (Dictionnaire, 11). 3. Dom Bernard de Montfaucon, L’Antiquite´ explique´e [1719–24], 1:i. 4. See also Ludovic Vitet’s critique of the Benedictine savants of Saint-Maur; while acknowledging their role as precursors for the archaeology of the Middle Ages (‘‘we only see through their eyes as it were’’), he also underscored their logocentric bias: ‘‘they had dug into the bowels of the middle ages, they had deciphered their charters, explained their customs, interpreted their laws; they had not looked at their monuments. How is it that the study of paleography, coats of arms, and coins had not led them to the study of monuments?’’ For Vitet the ‘‘lacuna’’ here is total ‘‘despite the erudite labors of Montfaucon’’ (‘‘Des e´tudes arche´ologiques en France’’ [1847]). 5. Charles Lenormant, ‘‘Arche´ologie’’ [1844]. 6. Vitet, ‘‘Des e´tudes arche´ologiques en France.’’ National history, too, would bene-

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:01

PS

PAGE 247

248

notes to pages 51–54

fit from archaeology: ‘‘there are pages in our annals that are today almost entirely illegible, but which will come back to life and which we will be able to read fluently when our archaeology has scientifically established certain facts and made them unquestionable’’ (766). 7. Georges Perrot, ‘‘Les E´tudes d’arche´ologie classique depuis Winckelmann jusqu’a` nos jours’’ [1880]. 8. Alain Schnapp, La Conqueˆte du passe´, 373. 9. See Eve Gran-Aymerich, Les Chercheurs de passe´, 632–33, as well as Claudine Cohen and Jean-Jacques Hublin, Boucher de Perthes. For a vindication by a disciple, see Gabriel de Mortillet, L’Homme fossile [1862]. 10. A number of books testified to this intellectual watershed after 1860, most notably Daniel Wilson’s Prehistoric Man (1862) and Sir John Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times (1865). Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) of course also provided theoretical support. In France, Boitard’s E´tudes ante´diluviennes: Paris avant les hommes (1861) popularized the idea. 11. Jacques Boucher de Perthes, Antiquite´s celtiques et ante´diluviennes [1847, 1857, 1864], 1:3. 12. E´lise´e Reclus, ‘‘Les Cite´s lacustres de la Suisse.’’ 13. Chateaubriand, Voyage en Italie [1803–4], 2:1475. 14. On Heinrich Schliemann’s ‘‘contribution’’ to archaeology, see Myth, Scandal, and History, ed. William M. Calder III and David A. Traill. In an article in this volume, ‘‘Schliemann the Archaeologist,’’ Hartmut Do¨hl discusses Schliemann’s alleged use of Homer to find Troy in 1870–73, and points out that Schliemann later revised his views of Homer as an eyewitness but clung to the belief that ‘‘Troy had once really existed and that the basis of the Homeric epic was actual history’’ (99). 15. E. Egger, ‘‘Pole´mon, le voyageur arche´ologue’’ [1846–47], 451. 16. For an account of Henry Layard’s reception by his English contemporaries, see Shawn Cameron Malley, Nineteenth-Century Archaeology and the Retrieval of the Past (1996). Reviews of Layard’s best-selling account ‘‘applaud[ed] Layard’s excavation of the biblical city for providing his readers with scientific, material proof of biblical historicity’’ (21). 17. Adrien de Longpe´rier, ‘‘Ninive et Khorsabad’’ [1844], 213–34. 18. Ernest Renan, ‘‘L’ancienne Egypte’’ [1865], 2:336. 19. Gaston Boissier, ‘‘Progre`s de l’arche´ologie grecque et romaine’’ [1864], 117. 20. Charles Lenormant, ‘‘Arche´ologie,’’ 13. 21. See Pliny the Younger, Lettres, VI.16 and VI.20. 22. Stendhal, Rome, Naples, et Florence, 341. Cf. also Gaston Boissier, Promenades arche´ologiques [1880], who describes Pompeii as ‘‘a living city [that] teaches us much better than books how people acted, thought, and lived’’ (401) in a provincial Roman town. 23. Ernest Breton, Pompe´¨ıa [1855], 6. 24. The´ophile Gautier, Arria Marcella [1852], 241. See also George Eliot, whose heroic Renaissance antiquarian in Romola [1863] insists on the need to look beyond textual

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:01

PS

PAGE 248

n o t e s t o p a g e s 5 4 – 5 8 249 records: ‘‘scholars themselves hardly imagine [the origins of the West] to have any existence out of books. He was of opinion that a new and more glorious era would open for learning when men should begin to look for their commentaries on the ancient writers in the remains of cities and temples, nay, in the paths of the rivers, and on the face of the valleys and the mountains’’ (68). 25. W. Drummond and Robert Walpole, Herculanensia [1810]. 26. E´.-F. de Lantier, Voyages d’Ante´nor en Gre`ce et en Asie [1836]. 27. S.-F.-S. Maisony de Laure´al, He´racle´ade [1837], x. 28. Mme de Stae¨l, Corinne, 301. 29. Ernest Renan, Mission de Phe´nicie [1864], 14. 30. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, 46. 31. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions [1845], 142. 32. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 1:617–18. 33. William Clarke, in Pompeii [1846], stresses the importance of the image Pompeii yields of the mechanical arts: ‘‘of all sorts of knowledge they are the most perishable, because the knowledge of them cannot be transmitted by mere description’’ (134–35). 34. Cf. Bulwer-Lytton’s notion of a toy-size replica of Roman civilization in The Last Days of Pompeii: ‘‘it was a toy, a plaything, a showbox, in which the gods seemed pleased to keep the representation of the great monarchy of the earth’’ (31). 35. The list of his collaborators included Prosper Me´rime´e (Inspector of Historical Monuments), Alfred Maury (librarian at the Tuileries palace, professor of history and morals at the Colle`ge de France in 1862, the author of a work on forests in Gaul), Fe´lix de Saulcy (President of the Commission de la topographie des Gaules, author of a work on Caesar’s expeditions in Great Britain in 1860), Le´on Re´nier (professor of epigraphy and Roman antiquity at the Colle`ge de France), Wilhelm Froehner (a German scholar who translated for Napoleon III), Mme Cornu (a childhood friend), Euge`ne Stoffel (a colonel), Le´on Heuzey, and Georges Perrot. On the emperor’s documentation, see Joe¨l Le Gall, ‘‘La pre´paration de L’Histoire de Jules Ce´sar de l’empereur Napole´on III,’’ who concludes that the work is ‘‘the fruit of an immense collective labor instigated by Napoleon III’’ (131). 36. On the genesis of this work, which appeared in 1865 (vol. 1) and 1866 (vol. 2), see Franc¸oise Maison, ‘‘L’Histoire de Jules Ce´sar par Napole´on III’’; Christian Goudineau, Le Dossier Vercinge´torix; and E. and J. Gran-Aymerich, ‘‘Visions de la Gaule inde´pendante au XIXe sie`cle.’’ 37. Georges Perrot, Edmond Guillaume, and Jules Delbet, Exploration arche´ologique de la Galatie et de la Bithynie [1872]. 38. On the scholarly qualities of the work, see Claude Nicolet, La Fabrique d’une nation, 160–82. 39. Quoted in Pierre Milza, Napole´on III, 482. 40. Francis Haskell, History and Its Images. Haskell traces such iconographic research back to the Renaissance, but argues that the nineteenth century saw the first major historiographical use of images.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:02

PS

PAGE 249

250 n o t e s t o p a g e s 5 8 – 6 4 41. Burckhardt cited by Haskell, History and Its Images, 332. 42. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture [1849], 178. 43. See Jacques Rancie`re, La Parole muette. 44. Ludovic Vitet, ‘‘Notre-Dame de Noyon’’ [1844], 2:2. 45. Cuvier, Discours pre´liminaire, 45. 46. Edgar Quinet, La Cre´ation, 39. 47. Jules Michelet, Le Peuple [1846], 154. 48. Winckelmann, Sendschreiben, 80. 49. William Gell, Pompeiana [1819], 1:4. 50. William Gell, Pompeiana [1826], 2:xxiii. ‘‘Nearly the whole of the objects detailed in this work might have passed away without representation or record, had not the Author been on the spot.’’ See also Longpe´rier’s report on P. E. Botta’s drawings at Khorsabad (‘‘Ninive et Khorsabad,’’ 233), often the only record of things lost to the air and rain. 51. Goethe, Italienische Reise, 455. 52. L’abbe´ de Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque, 2:112. 53. Cited in Grell, Herculanum et Pompe´i, 90. 54. Creuze´ de Lesser, Voyage en Italie et en Sicile, 167. See also William Gell, Pompeiana, 1:4. 55. Delphine Gay, ‘‘Le dernier jour de Pompe´¨ı’’ [1827], 39. 56. In ‘‘La Bande noire’’ (1823), an early defense of heritage, Hugo calls France’s ‘‘glorious debris’’ the ‘‘guardians of an injured past’’ and defies the modern vandals. On this poem, see Constance Sherak, ‘‘Investing in the Past: Victor Hugo’s ‘La Bande noire.’ ’’ Balzac often mentions the bande noire, notably in La Rabouilleuse and Le Cure´ de village. Jules Sandeau devoted a novel to La Bande noire in 1837, which Nicole Mozet has studied in ‘‘Un roman du vandalisme en 1837.’’ See also her article ‘‘La Bande noire.’’ 57. On Guizot’s role in formulating a politics of conservation during the July Monarchy, see Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘‘Donner une me´moire,’’ in Le Moment Guizot; Laurent Theis, ‘‘Guizot et les institutions de me´moire’’; and Dominique Poulot, ‘‘The Birth of Heritage: ‘Le moment Guizot.’ ’’ For Franc¸oise Choay, in L’Alle´gorie du patrimoine, Guizot’s Rapport au roi of October 21, 1830, is the crucial milestone in this development. He there calls for the creation of ‘‘an inspector-general of historical monuments in France’’ (98), a position Me´rime´e will occupy after Vitet from 1834 to 1860. 58. See Franc¸oise Berce´, Des monuments historiques au patrimoine, 17. 59. On Alexandre Lenoir’s Muse´e des monuments franc¸ais, see Francis Haskell, History and Its Images. ‘‘The desecration’’ of the tombs ‘‘began on 6 August 1793 and continued without interruption and with astonishing zeal for seventy-two hours. Fifty-one tombs had been destroyed by then.’’ The site became a quarry for Lenoir’s museum: ‘‘between November 1793 and the spring of 1796 cartloads of broken tombs were taken from SaintDenis to the Petits Augustins’’ (238). See also Dominique Poulot, ‘‘Alexandre Lenoir et les muse´es des monuments franc¸ais’’; Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, and Anthony Vidler, ‘‘Gre´goire, Lenoir et ‘les monuments parlants.’ ’’

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:02

PS

PAGE 250

n o t e s t o p a g e s 6 4 – 7 0 251 60. The myth of Lenoir’s heroic stand at Saint-Denis would die hard. In 1844, an article announcing the opening of the Muse´e Sommerard at the Hoˆtel de Cluny began by reciting the episode. See A.D., ‘‘Le Muse´e du palais des Thermes et de l’hoˆtel de Cluny’’ [1844]. Du Sommerard is here presented as Lenoir’s disciple; the sons of both men were involved with the new establishment. 61. Chateaubriand, Ge´nie du christianisme, 2:98–100. 62. See Haskell, History and Its Images, 247. 63. Cited in McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, 194–95. 64. McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, 197. 65. Chateaubriand, Ge´nie du christianisme, 1:399. 66. Cf. Renan’s comment in L’Avenir de la science that ‘‘an exact reproduction of the pyramid of Giza in the plain of Saint-Denis would be a childish ploy’’ (235). 67. Quatreme`re de Quincy, Lettres au Ge´ne´ral Miranda [1796], letter 3. 68. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 131–32. 69. Cf. Renan’s critique of the museum in L’Avenir de la science: ‘‘It has been . . . shown how much aesthetic value the masterpieces of ancient art heaped up in our museums have lost. Certainly, since their location and the meaning they had in the period when they were true accounted for three quarters of their beauty. A work has no value exept in its frame, and the frame of every work is its period’’ (237). Noteworthy in this antimuseal credo is Renan’s focus on the work’s beauty, its aesthetic value, the very thing the museum had been accused of isolating. The romantic critique was not so much antiaesthetic, then, as a plea for grasping aesthetics in contextual terms. 70. Mme de Stae¨l, De la litte´rature [1800], 54. 71. Mme de Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, 2:211. 72. For a recent attempt to read the museum in this vein—as the great modernist engine of a pure aesthetic—see Jean-Louis De´otte, Le Muse´e, l’origine de l’esthe´tique. 73. Stendhal, Les Cenci [1837], in Chroniques italiennes [1855], 55. 74. Balzac, La Peau de chagrin [1831], 49 75. E. et J. de Goncourt, Journal, 3:618–89 (August 13, 1891). 76. Chateaubriand, Ge´nie du christianisme, 2:101 77. Michelet, Cours au Colle`ge de France, 1: 524 (January 5, 1843). 78. Renan, ‘‘L’ancienne Egypte,’’ 2:370. 79. Prosper Me´rime´e, ‘‘Le Retable de Baˆle’’ [1854], in E´tudes sur les arts du moyen aˆge, 221. 80. Renan found six sarcophagi at Saı¨da, now at the Louvre, but first exhibited at the short-lived Muse´e Napole´on III in 1862 along with the findings of the expeditions of L. Heuzey in Macedonia and G. Perrot in Asia Minor. See E. and J. Gran-Aymerich, ‘‘Ernest Renan, fondateur de l’arche´ologie phe´nicienne.’’ 81. E`ve Gran-Aymerich, Les Chercheurs de passe´, 198. 82. Chateaubriand, Voyage en Italie, 2:1505. Undertaken in 1803–4, the Voyage appeared only in 1827. 83. The comparison of Rome and Pompeii was a commonplace of romantic travel

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:03

PS

PAGE 251

252

notes to pages 70 –74

writing. The early comparisons generally favored Rome and felt Pompeii had usurped its fame by its unique preservation. Creuze´ de Lesser’s Voyage reverses this judgment: although it was only a ‘‘mediocre city of Campania,’’ Pompeii was ‘‘the most true, the most curious, the most touching . . . fragment of antiquity’’ in Italy’’ (181). Bulwer-Lytton completes this reversal in The Last Days of Pompeii by turning Pompeii into a microcosm of the Empire: ‘‘Pompeii was a miniature of the civilization of that age. Within the narrow compass of its walls was contained, as it were, a specimen of every gift which luxury offered to power. In its minute but glittering shops, its tiny palaces, its baths, its forum, its theatre, its circus . . . you beheld a model of the whole empire’’ (31). 84. Chateaubriand, Voyage en Italie, 2:1474. He later amplifies this criticism: ‘‘what is done nowadays seems pernicious to me: ravished from their natural locations, the most rare curiosities are buried in cabinets where they are no longer in relation with the surrounding objects’’ (2:1475). 85. Cf. Creuze´ de Lesser’s plea in his Voyage: ‘‘how great would [Pompeii] not appear if, during the excavations, the roofs had been restored, the degradations of all sorts had been undone, and, above all, all the finds had been kept religiously in place?’’ (192). 86. Creuze´ de Lesser, Voyage, 188. Louis Viardot, ‘‘Pompe´i’’ [1840]. 87. Gautier, Le Palais pompe´ien [1860], 7. 88. Dominique Romanelli, Voyage a` Pompe´i [1829], 170. 89. Charles Bonucci, Pompe´i [1830], 167. 90. Casimir Chevalier, Herculanum et Pompe´i: Sce`nes de la civilisation romaine [1888], 86. 91. Mme de Stae¨l, Corinne, 300. 92. See the exhibition catalog Pompe´i: Travaux et envois des architectes franc¸ais au XIXe sie`cle, 31 and 111; and E`ve Gran-Aymerich, Les Chercheurs de passe´, 41. 93. E. de Ke´ratry, Les Ruines de Pompe´i, 16 and 10. 94. Charles Bonucci, Pompe´i, ‘‘Au lecteur.’’ Cf. Alexandre Dumas, who called Pompeii ‘‘a living example of what a Roman city looked like under the early reign of Titus’’ (Le Corricolo, 161–62). 95. Gaston Boissier, Promenades arche´ologiques, 312–13. See also Casimir Chevalier’s praise of Fiorelli: ‘‘in the early stages there was no thought of rendering Pompeii visible,’’ but ‘‘it was soon understood that it was necessary to restore the entire ancient city to the light of day’’ (86). 96. See Augustin Thierry, ‘‘Sur l’affranchissement des communes,’’ in Lettres sur l’histoire de France, and the first chapter in his Essai sur les progre`s du tiers ´etat on ‘‘the municipal revolution’’ of the twelfth century. 97. Hippolyte Taine, Voyage en Italie [1864], 1:57. 98. Goethe, Italienische Reise, 260–61. 99. Taine, Voyage en Italie, 1:61. 100. On the baths, see also Dumas, Le Corricolo: ‘‘bathing was for the Romans the supreme pleasure of their domestic life. Thus, in contrast to us, who hardly possess a simple dress cabinet, in a Roman house the baths as a rule occupied a sixth of the residence’’ (170).

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:03

PS

PAGE 252

n o t e s t o p a g e s 7 4 – 8 3 253 101. J. Petit-Mangin, A Pompe´¨ı: E´tude paı¨enne [1876]. 102. Jean Bertheroy (or Berthe le Barillier), La Danseuse de Pompe´i [1899]. 103. E´mile Vitta, ‘‘Pompe´i: Confe´rence accompagne´e de projections’’ [1902]. 104. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, ‘‘Herculanum de Fe´licien David a` l’Ope´ra’’ [1859], 2:766–70. 105. Franc¸ois Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, 12. He calls ‘‘civilization’’ one of those ‘‘invisible facts’’ impossible to date precisely but necessary to study. ‘‘There are material, visible facts, such as wars, battles, the official acts of government; [and] there are moral facts, none the less real that they do not appear on the surface . . . Civilization is one of these facts; a general, hidden, complex fact; very difficult, I allow, to describe, to relate, but which none the less for that exists’’ (12). 106. On the turn from political history to everyday life, see, for example, Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories, esp. chapter 2. 107. Renan, ‘‘La De´couverte de Ninive,’’ 405. 108. Creuze´ de Lesser, Voyage, 182. 109. Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, v. 110. In his Salon de 1866, Fe´lix Jahyer noted that Curzon ‘‘has reproduced in a way at once severe and brilliant the temple fragments, the purple and white columns, and the costumes of Pompeii in its time of splendor’’ (89). 111. The´ophile Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts en Europe [1855], 255. 112. Gautier, Re´cits fantastiques, 241. 113. Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, 525. 114. Chateaubriand, Oeuvres romanesques et voyages, 2:1475 115. Franc¸ois Mazois, Les Ruines de Pompe´i, 2:4. 116. Mme de Stae¨l, Corinne, 300. 117. Ernest Breton, Pompe´¨ıa, 6. 118. Creuze´ de Lesser, Voyage, 191–92. 119. Boissier, Promenades arche´ologiques, 312–13. 120. Breton, Pompe´¨ıa, 25. See also William Clarke, Pompeii: ‘‘temples and theatres . . . of greater splendour than those at Pompeii’’ abound in Italy, ‘‘but towards acquainting us with the habitations, the private luxuries and elegancies of ancient life, not all the scattered fragments of domestic architecture which exist elsewhere have done so much as this city’’ (2:70). 121. Victor de Jouy¨, L’Hermite de la Chausse´e-d’Antin, 4:235–36 (October 9, 1813). 122. Ke´ratry, Les Ruines de Pompe´i, 11. 123. Boissier, Promenades arche´ologiques, 396–97. 124. Renan, ‘‘Le XVIIIe centenaire de Pompe´i,’’ 2:1048–49. 125. J.-F.-A. de Nadaillac, La dernie`re ´election municipale a` Pompe´i [1895], 6–7. 126. Charles Bonucci, Pompe´i, 36. 127. Boissier, Promenades arche´ologiques, 329. 128. Franc¸ois Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, 122 129. E´lise´e Reclus, ‘‘Les Cite´s lacustres de la Suisse,’’ 902.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:04

PS

PAGE 253

254

notes to pages 84 –91

130. Bulwer-Lytton, Last Days of Pompeii, vi. 131. Ke´ratry, Ruines de Pompe´i, 11. 132. Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence, 340–41. 133. Gautier, Re´cits fantastiques, 257 and 262–63. Stephen Bann has drawn attention to this facial metaphor in the construction of an unmediated historical presence. In ‘‘Faceto-Face with History,’’ he argues that the facial relation is central to the modern experience of history, and suggests that it may be patterned on ‘‘being ‘face-to-face’ with a work of art’’ (236). 134. Dumas, Le Corricolo, 214 135. Carlyle, Past and Present, 45. 136. Prosper de Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, 36. 137. Cf. Edgar Quinet’s remark in La Cre´ation: ‘‘we make ourselves the contemporaries of lost ages at will: they recover their shapes before our eyes’’ (28). 138. Leopold von Ranke, ‘‘Preface to the First Edition of Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations’’ [1824], in The Theory and Practice of History, 137. 139. Cf. J. G. Herder, in Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte [1774], who anticipates this ambition, and regrets his inability to make the reader relive the dawn of Western culture: ‘‘what a tableau that would be, if I could render it to you as it was!’’ (14). His preromantic historiography already invokes an exacting pictorialism, dismissing his own ‘‘faded, broken shadow-picture of words’’ and anticipating a new total history: ‘‘the whole living picture of lifestyles, customs, needs, geographical specificities and climate would have to be included’’ (29). 140. Mme de Stae¨l, Corinne, 300. 141. L’Abbe´ de Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque, 1:358. 142. Gautier, Le Palais pompe´ien. 143. E´lise´e Reclus, ‘‘Les Cite´s lacustres de la Suisse,’’ 901. 144. In Gautier’s Le Roman de la momie [1857–58], Evandale observes that robbing the mummy ‘‘would be to kill her a second time!’’ (57). 145. Anon., Pompe´i: Notice historique et description de l’exposition. The photosculptural views, invented by Giacomo Luzatti, allowed ‘‘the enchanted spectator to fancy himself walking through these imposing and famous monuments’’ (3). 146. Georges Seure, Pompe´i [1907], 22. 147. Gautier, Italia: Voyage en Italie [1852], 337. 148. Gautier, Re´cits fantastiques, 252.

chapter 4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Gautier, Arria Marcella, 255. Balzac, Splendeurs et mise`res des courtisanes [1847], 472. Baudelaire, ‘‘Le jeune enchanteur,’’ 1:523. Maisony de Laure´al, L’He´racle´ade, xiii. Gautier, ‘‘Les Fouilles du Mont-Palatin’’ [1870], in Italia, 335–40. Cf. his descrip-

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:05

PS

PAGE 254

n o t e s t o p a g e s 9 2 – 9 7 255 tion of Chasse´riau’s Tepidarium as an ‘‘ancient fresco lifted from the walls of Pompeii,’’ in Les Beaux-Arts en Europe, 248–57. 6. Michelet, Le Moyen aˆge [1833–44], 226–27. This geographical survey of all the distinct French provinces paves the way for their integration in a transcendent national unity. 7. Quinet, La Cre´ation, 1:29. The reference to Dante is also illuminating; it associates the past not just with the underground and the afterlife, but also with a spatial recession into ever deeper horrors, a figuration characteristic of the age of progress. Cf. Ernest Renan’s comparison in ‘‘La Poe´sie des races celtiques’’ [1854] of his inquiry into Celtic poetry to a journey ‘‘through the subterranean strata of another age’’ and to the ‘‘impressions that Dante’’ produces (2:252). 8. Cf. also the chapter where Quinet paints the ‘‘impression that an immortal being would receive of the succession of creatures on earth’’ (1:95–103). 9. Victor Hugo, ‘‘La Vision d’ou` est sortie ce livre,’’ in La Le´gende des sie`cles. ‘‘Everything was in the wall, matter, spirit, muck and light; / All the cities, Thebes, Athens, floors / Of Romes on heaps of Tyres and Carthages’’ (1:67). 10. Cf. Schiller’s image in his talk on universal history, ‘‘Was heisst und zu welchem Ende schreibt man Universalgeschichte?’’ [1789] in Werke, 6:411–431. Universal history imparts the sum of human experiene ‘‘in that it spreads out before your eyes the great picture of the ages and nations’’ in an ‘‘optically deceitful’’ manner. 11. Cf. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Cultural History: ‘‘all historical categories, including progress, . . . are spatial expressions by origin,’’ and any attempt to overcome this dilemma must face ‘‘the impossibility of intuiting pure time’’ (7). 12. Macaulay, ‘‘History’’ [1828], 1:187. 13. Baudelaire, Salon de 1846, 115 and 133. 14. Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, 13. 15. Cf. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: ‘‘historical statements can reproduce past states of affairs only in a reductive or rejuvenated way, for it is impossible to restore the totality of the past, which is irrevocably gone’’ (15–16). 16. See Koselleck, ‘‘Historia Magistra Vitae.’’ The nonrepetition of historical events was also the ground of Schopenhauer’s attack on history as a non-science: ‘‘the sciences speak generally of that which always is, while history speaks of that which was only once ¨ ber Geschichte,’’ 511). and then is no more’’ (‘‘U 17. See Georg Luka´cs, ‘‘Raconter ou de´crire?’’ 18. Thierry, Lettres sur l’histoire de France, 5:11. 19. On the romantic literary revolution, see notably Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Ansolute; Jean-Marie Schaeffer, La Naissance de la litte´rature; and Jacques Rancie`re, La Parole muette. 20. Montalembert, Histoire de sainte Elisabeth de Hongrie [1836], vi–vii. 21. There are countless examples of such resurrections. Medieval Dijon is revived by Aloysius Bertrand in Gaspard de la nuit; Lamartine sees a mirage of ancient Jerusalem in his Voyage en Orient; Rome features as the macrocosm of most Pompeian fictions. Histori-

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:05

PS

PAGE 255

256 n o t e s t o p a g e s 9 8 – 1 0 8 cal dead ends (Carthage, Nineveh) function a fortiori as affirmations of survival when they are discovered. 22. Gautier, Une Nuit de Cle´opaˆtre, 331. 23. Gautier initially projects this desire on the German archaeologist Rumphius, who declares upon making his discovery: ‘‘I will be covered in glory, and I will equal Champollion, and I will make Lepsius die of jealousy!’’ (58). 24. Gautier, Le Roman de la momie, 33. 25. Gautier, Une Nuit de Cle´opaˆtre, 328. 26. See Claudie Bernard, Le Passe´ recompose´: ‘‘the historical novel has the power to demonumentalize History,’’ but Gautier’s novel instead ‘‘tends to become a museum—a glyptotheque or a pinacotheque’’ through its rigid Parnassian treatment of Egypt (272– 73). 27. Cf. Baudelaire, who identifies his ennui with that of ‘‘an old forgotten sphinx’’ in ‘‘Spleen.’’ 28. In ‘‘Nostalgies d’obe´lisques’’ [1851], E´maux et came´es, Gautier juxtaposes the monologues of the obelisks in Paris and Luxor. The first deplores the vulgarity of nineteenth-century Paris and pines for Egypt, while the other suffers the ennui of eternal solitude. 29. Gautier, Une Nuit de Cle´opaˆtre, 323. 30. Roland Barthes, in Michelet, notes that for Michelet ‘‘the resurrection of the past is not a metaphor; it is in fact a sort of sacred manducation, a taming of death. The life that Michelet gives back to the dead carries such a heavy morbid coefficient that resurrection becomes the original essence, absolutely pure and fresh, of death, just as in those dreams in which one sees a dead person, knowing full well that he is dead’’ (67). 31. Augustin Thierry, Lettres sur l’histoire de France, 4; and Dix ans d’e´tudes historiques, 17. 32. See Segalen’s posthumous Essai sur l’exotisme. 33. See Thierry’s ‘‘On the false color given to the early history of France,’’ in Lettres sur l’histoire de France. 34. Nerval, Sylvie [1853], 31. 35. William Clarke, Pompeii, 2. 36. Carlyle, Past and Present, 49. 37. Carlyle, On Heroes [1841], 23. 38. On romantic spectacular culture in general, and panoramas, dioramas, and theater in particular, see Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past; for the wax museum, see Vanessa Schwartz, ‘‘The Morgue and the Muse´e Gre´vin’’ and her book, Spectacular Realities; see also Philippe Hamon, Expositions: Litte´rature et architecture au XIXe sie`cle. 39. Balzac, ‘‘De l’e´tat actuel de la litte´rature’’ [1833], 2:1221. The culture of spectacularity put pressure on writers to develop what Balzac called a ‘‘literature of images’’: ‘‘it was necessary to feed this people of eyes now Spain, now Italy, then the Orient, then the Middle Ages, then severed heads, then rivers of blood’’ (2:1221). 40. Samuels acknowledges that ‘‘historical spectacles’’ cannot be reduced ‘‘to explicit

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:06

PS

PAGE 256

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 0 8 – 1 1 1 257 political programs’’ (The Spectacular Past, 56) and that they partly ‘‘represented a democratizing liberation of culture from ancien re´gime elitism’’ (61). He also qualifies the ‘‘antivisual stance’’ (60) he borrows from Guy Debord, but by and large his reading focuses on the ideological alienation of the spectacle and foregrounds its power to ‘‘seduce viewers’’ with ‘‘illusionistic effects’’ (19). I do not reject this reading—especially in the case of mass media—but am more interested in the ontological anxieties that inform the spectacle, and which oblige us, in my view, to look beyond its powers of mystification and take seriously its claim to make the past present. On the modern ‘‘memory crisis,’’ see Terdiman, Present Past. 41. Roland Barthes, ‘‘Rhe´torique de l’image’’, 36. 42. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, 147. 43. Hippolyte Taine, ‘‘M. Michelet’’ (1855–56), 196. 44. Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Masson, 399 (January 26, 1861). 45. Thierry, Lettres sur l’histoire de France, 12. 46. Thierry, Dix ans d’e´tudes historiques, 21. 47. Taine explicitly identifies the ontological stratum in Michelet’s optical experience: ‘‘he affirms the thing as if it were present; and he wouldn’t see it more clearly if it were [really] before his eyes in that moment’’ (‘‘M. Michelet,’’ 203). 48. Cf. David Freedberg’s ontological interpretation of the ‘‘image’’ as an anthropological constant that triggers certain invariable reactions, whether in high art, religious painting, or primitive worship, in The Power of Images, where he argues that plastic representation is always presentation. Images always mediate beings, make present the dead, the absent, the divine. For Freedberg, the intellectual distinction between sign and referent crucial to aesthetics is not supported by the history of response and marks the high cultural repression of an anthropological constant. 49. While abstraction plays a key role in modern resurrection, it may also be ventured that, at the other end of the spectrum, what sets it apart from premodern uses of the ‘‘image as presence’’ is the concern with perpetuating the unique, unrepeatable essence of singular beings, rather than the memory of heroic, exemplary, or mythic identities. Barthes is thus careful to specify that the photo of his mother recovers ‘‘an essential identity, the spirit of the loved face’’ (La Chambre claire, 105), and that it ‘‘accomplished for me, in utopian fashion, the impossible science of the unique being’’ (110). 50. Cf. Freedberg’s claim that ‘‘we cannot conveniently divorce our responses to religious images from those which are nonreligious’’ (The Power of Images, 77). Idolatry is inscribed in the being of the image. He quotes Gadamer’s claim in Truth and Being that ‘‘only the religious picture shows the full ontological power of the picture,’’ and argues that ‘‘a picture is not a copy of a copied being, but is in ontological communion with what is copied’’ (77). Stephen Bann also suggests in ‘‘Face-to-Face with History’’ that nineteenth-century historicism absorbs the religious function of presentation from sacred images; he identifies a ‘‘mutation in visual culture’’ consisting in the ‘‘transference of the effect of unmediated presence associated with religious images to images of the historical past’’ (238).

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:06

PS

PAGE 257

258

notes to pages 111–118

51. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Memoranda, 434 (December 18, 1864). On the predominance of ‘‘age value’’ in the nineteenth century, see Aloı¨s Riegl’s fundamental study, Le Culte moderne des monuments. 52. Barthes, ‘‘Le Discours de l’histoire,’’ [1967], 176. 53. Cf. Koselleck’s remarks on the modern secularization of memory in ‘‘War Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors,’’ in The Practice of Conceptual History. 54. Gautier, Avatar [1856], 312. 55. Balzac, Ursule Miroue¨t [1841], 3:828. 56. See especially Louis Lambert, where Balzac develops a spiritualist doctrine close to Gautier’s and cites mesmeric miracles as proof that ‘‘an invisible creature’’ in the body can transgress its bounds. Savants throughout history have observed its power to ‘‘abolish space in its twin modes of Time and Distance, one being mental space, the other physical space . . . they have seen it reconstructing the past, either by means of retrospective vision or by the mystery of palingenesis’’ (9:629). 57. Gautier, ‘‘Le Chaˆteau du souvenir’’ [1861], in E´maux et came´es, 121–29. 58. Cf. Gautier, ‘‘Le Chaˆteau du souvenir’’: ‘‘The image lifted from the grave / Loses its stiff and frozen form; / The purple warmth of life / Surges through the veins of the past.’’ 59. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus [1833–34], 197. 60. E. de Goncourt cites Carlyle’s dream to undercut the originality of Flammarion’s Uranie (1889), which exploits the idea ‘‘of a sudden transport to the stars just when the light illuminating an event on Earth arrives there.’’ This idea ‘‘belongs entirely to Carlyle’’ who long ago fancied that ‘‘a journey to a certain planet would give you the spectacle of the crucifixion of Jesus, or to another one, the spectacle of the death of Gustavus Adolphus’’ (Journal, 3:355–56 [December 10, 1889]). 61. See Barthes’s assertion that ‘‘historical narration is dying because the sign of History is henceforth less the real than the intelligible’’ (‘‘Le discours de l’histoire,’’ 177). 62. Gautier, ‘‘Une visite au ruines’’ [1871], in Paris et les Parisiens, 632.

chapter 5 1. Victor Hugo, Pre´face de Cromwell [1827], 25–26. 2. See Viollet-le-Duc’s ‘‘Restauration,’’ 8:14–34. 3. Hugo, La Le´gende des sie`cles, 1:61. 4. Renan, Vie de Je´sus [1863], 105. 5. Giambattista Vico posited an ‘‘ideal eternal history through which the history of all nations must pass’’ and developed a formalist conception of historical stages (divine, heroic, and human) applicable to all areas of culture in The New Science [1744] (154). 6. On the ontological privilege of aesthethic knowledge, see Jean-Marie Schaeffer, La Naissance de la litte´rature. 7. On the impact of ‘‘historical Pyrrhonism,’’ see Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘‘Ancient

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:07

PS

PAGE 258

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 1 8 – 1 2 2 259 History and the Antiquarian,’’ esp. 295; and Blandine Kriegel, L’Histoire a` l’aˆge classique, esp. 2:280–306. ¨ ber die Aufgabe des Geschichtschreibers’’ [1821], 8. Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘‘U 4:37. 9. Hugo, La Le´gende des sie`cles, 1:66. My translation. 10. Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 73. 11. Mme de Stae¨l, Corinne, 302. 12. Ernest Renan, ‘‘M. Augustin Thierry’’ [1857], 2:95. 13. Hippolyte Taine, ‘‘M. Michelet,’’ 180 and 185. His admiration of course never amounts to a defense of the visionary method: ‘‘reason, good sense, criticism and logic: these are the foundations on which the confidence of the reader and the authority of the historian are built’’ (184). 14. On this tension, see Franc¸ois Hartog, E´vidence de l’histoire, esp. ch. 3. 15. Leopold von Ranke, ‘‘On the Character of Historical Science,’’ 33. Cf. Macaulay’s assertion that history ‘‘is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers . . . the Reason and the Imagination’’ (‘‘History,’’ 178–79). 16. Gabriel Monod, ‘‘Du Progre`s des e´tudes historiques’’ [1876], 32. 17. Hartog points out that the oracles in ancient Mesopotamia proceeded by ‘‘accumulating and classifying’’ precedents exhaustively and that prophecies in the past tense have been found: ‘‘in other words, before examining the future, divination is first a science of the past’’ (E´vidence de l’histoire, 30–31). 18. See Hartog, E´vidence de l’histoire, 13 and 59. But Hartog also admits the ambiguity of Herodotus’s founding gesture, which prolongs the divinatory paradigm: ‘‘Herodotus historei, but he also seˆmainei: he designates, reveals, signifies’’ and thus ‘‘invokes the field of divination’’ (60). 19. Friedrich Schlegel, Athena¨ums-Fragmente [1798], in Kritische und theoretische Schriften, 85. 20. Quatreme`re de Quincy, ‘‘Dissertation sur la mosaı¨que dite d’Alexandre a` Arbelles’’ [1824], 4:87–91. 21. Cf. Nerval’s ambition to ‘‘restore ancient canvases’’ in Les Illumine´s [1852], 33. Thierry complains about the colorless tableaux of his predecessors. For Renan, Enlightenment historiography presents ‘‘an inanimate painting that resembles real history like a byzantine mosaic’’ (‘‘M. Augustin Thierry,’’ 93). Herodotus, conversely, had contrasted the enduring actions with the fading paintings (Hartog, E´vidence de l’histoire, 56). 22. Edgar Quinet, La Cre´ation, 1:30–32. 23. Schlegel suggests that Christianity, still evolving, cannot ‘‘be represented historically in a system but can only be characterized by divinatorische Kritik’’ (Kritische und theoretische Schriften, 102). 24. Taine, ‘‘M. Michelet,’’ 186. 25. Renan, La Vie de Je´sus, 105. 26. Renan, ‘‘M. Augustin Thierry,’’ 93. 27. Thierry, Pre´face [1834] to Dix ans d’e´tudes historiques, 6:14.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:08

PS

PAGE 259

260

notes to pages 123 –128

28. Thierry, Conside´rations sur l’histoire de France, 43. 29. Ernest Renan, L’Avenir de la science, 138–39. 30. For Renan, the modern scholar is ‘‘a man who spends his life deciphering old marbles, divining unknown alphabets, and interpreting and commenting on texts’’ (L’Avenir de la Science, 166). 31. He notes in L’Avenir de la Science that ‘‘the most important book of the nineteenth century should be entitled Critical History of the Origins of Christianity’’ (310). 32. Walter Pater, ‘‘Demeter and Persephone’’ [1876], in Greek Studies, 142. 33. Walter Pater, The Renaissance [1873], 198. 34. Cuvier, Discours pre´liminaire, 55. 35. Michelet, La Mer [1861], 56. 36. Quinet, La Cre´ation, 1:7. 37. Gaston Boissier, ‘‘Progre`s de l’arche´ologie grecque et romaine,’’ 117. 38. Viollet-le-Duc, ‘‘Restauration.’’ Bruno Foucart noted this Cuvierian inspiration in ‘‘Viollet-le-Duc et la restauration,’’ writing that the architect was most at ease rejuvenating ‘‘truncated’’ buildings: ‘‘that’s where the restorer, like a new Cuvier, feels himself capable of reconstituting an almost ruined edifice from a pile of rubble’’ (633). 39. Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Bruneau, 2:378 (July 7, 1853, to Louise Colet). 40. Hugo, La Le´gende des sie`cles, 1:61. 41. Carlo Ginzburg, ‘‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.’’ He invokes the ‘‘Scholastic motto [that] Individuum est ineffabile’’ to explain ‘‘why history never became a Galileian science’’ and why it ‘‘has stayed a social science sui generis, forever tied to the concrete’’ (106). 42. Voltaire, Zadig [1747], 34–37. 43. Thomas Huxley, in ‘‘On the Method of Zadig,’’ an essay Ginzburg cites, noted that ‘‘the essence of the prophetic operation does not lie in its backward or forward relation to the course of time, but in the fact that it is the apprehension of that which lies outside the sphere of immediate knowledge’’ (6). 44. Balzac, Splendeurs et mise`res des courtisanes, 399. 45. Ludovic Vitet, ‘‘Notre-Dame de Noyon,’’ 2:2. 46. Quinet, La Cre´ation, 8–9. 47. Cf. Jules Michelet, who imagines reenacting creation in a drop of seawater, a monad that reflects the history of the cosmos: ‘‘my drop of seawater . . . will narrate the universe for me through its transformations . . . Who can foresee, divine, the history of this drop of water?’’ (La Mer, 117). 48. The idea that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis was a nineteenth-century commonplace. See, for instance, Renan, L’Avenir de la science, 213. 49. On the history of the discovery of the Indo-European language from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century, see Bernard Sergent, Les Indo-Europe´ens. 50. Arcisse de Caumont, Histoire sommaire de l’architecture, 16–17. 51. Even the exhibition of the Elgin marbles in the British Museum was less a reconstruction of the Parthenon than a visible representation of its idea, since the metopes were

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:08

PS

PAGE 260

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 2 9 – 1 3 8 261 placed artificially near the viewer and reorganized within the spectator’s field of vision. See Quatreme`re de Quincy’s Lettres ´ecrites de Londres a` Rome [1818] to Canova. 52. Anthony Vidler, ‘‘Gre´goire, Lenoir et les ‘monuments parlants,’ ’’ 145–46. 53. Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘‘Muse´e des petits Augustins’’ [1799], 2: 345–76. Valentine’s tomb probably also inspired Richard Fleury’s painting at the Salon of 1802, Valentine de Milan pleurant son ´epoux assassine´ en 1407, as Francis Haskell notes in ‘‘The Manufacture of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Painting.’’ 54. Jules Michelet, Cours au Colle`ge de France, 1:523–27 (lesson of January 5, 1843). 55. Paul Vale´ry, ‘‘Le Proble`me des muse´es’’ [1923], 2:1290. 56. E. de Goncourt, Journal, 3:618 (August 13, 1891). 57. Christian Jurgensen Thomson began to rearrange the Danish National Museum in 1817 in accordance with the three-age system he had pioneered. See the Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology, ed. Paul G. Bahn, 89. 58. Jules Verne, Voyage au centre de la terre, 70. 59. Charles Newton, ‘‘On the Study of Archaeology,’’ 1–2. 60. Michelet, La Mer, 141–49. 61. Chateaubriand, ‘‘Pre´face’’ [1831], in E´tudes historiques, 15. 62. Thierry, Dix ans d’e´tudes historiques, 10 and 7. 63. Hugo, ‘‘Pre´face,’’ in La Le´gende des sie`cles, 1:59–60. 64. Cf. Hugo’s poem ‘‘Lui’’ [1827], in which Napoleon in Egypt presides over forty centuries of history: ‘‘He says: arise! and suddenly every century stands up’’ (Les Orientales, 419). 65. Hugo, Les Mise´rables, 1:181–87. 66. Macaulay, ‘‘History,’’ 226. 67. Walter Pater, ‘‘Demeter and Persephone,’’ in Greek Studies, 112. 68. Hugo, ‘‘La Vision d’ou` est sortie ce livre,’’ in La Le´gende, 1:65–70. 69. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ 257. 70. Augustin Thierry, Conside´rations, x. 71. Cf. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories, esp. ch. 2, ‘‘Bringing the Museum Home.’’ 72. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 1:271. 73. Nerval, Sylvie, 40. 74. Gautier, ‘‘Le Pied de momie’’ [1840], 179. 75. Nerval, Aure´lia [1855], 302. 76. Quinet, La Cre´ation, 1:44. 77. On the impact of hermeneutics on the human sciences, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method [1960], esp. 171–264. 78. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 8. 79. Cf. Gadamer’s remark that Schleiermacher’s method ‘‘is ultimately a divinatory process, a placing of oneself within the whole framework of the author’’ (Truth and Method, 187). 80. Ernest Renan, L’Avenir de la science, 184.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:09

PS

PAGE 261

262 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 4 0 – 1 4 6 81. Balzac, Louis Lambert, 11:660. 82. Thomas Hardy, ‘‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork’’ [1885], 139. 83. Aloysius Bertrand, Gaspard de la nuit, 41–42. 84. Dumas, Le Corricolo, 161. 85. Gautier, Arria Marcella, 266. 86. Michelet, ‘‘Pre´face de 1869,’’ in Le Moyen aˆge, 22 and 19. 87. Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 212. 88. In Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, the painter Frenhofer valorizes the last touch as the magic life-giving moment. But this gesture could also be read nontheologically: rather than stress the need to endow the painted figure with breath and soul, Frenhofer’s main concern is that the air should ‘‘circulate’’ around the body. The missing breath thus becomes ambient air that enhances the body’s presence. On this subject, see also Georges Didi-Huberman’s reflections on l’incarnat, the painterly rendering of live flesh, in Balzac’s novella (La peinture incarne´e). 89. Carlyle, Past and Present, 50. 90. Carlyle, On Heroes, 86. 91. See Carlyle’s essay on ‘‘Biography’’ [1832]. 92. Macaulay, ‘‘Hallam’s Constitutional History’’ [1828], 1:230. 93. On Michelet’s physical investment in writing, see Paule Petitier, Jules Michelet, 8–9 and 429. 94. Michelet, Le Moyen aˆge, 818. 95. On the habit of incorporating objects to make the past present in historiography, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘‘ ‘Narrating the Past Just as If It Were Your Own Time,’ ’’ 60. 96. Roland Barthes, Michelet, 70. Barthes also stresses the carnal essence of Michelet’s resurrection: ‘‘the goal of history is thus to rediscover in every body of the past [chaque chair du passe´] the corruptible element par excellence, not the skeleton but the tissue’’ (70). 97. Ernest Renan, ‘‘L’ancienne E´gypte,’’ 336. 98. Quatreme`re de Quincy, Lettres, 244. 99. Michelet, Cours au Colle`ge de France, 1:521–25 (lessons of December 29, 1842, and January 5, 1843). 100. Deborah Jenson has discussed Lenoir’s museum in terms of the body politics of the Revolution in Trauma and Its Representations. Her reading stresses the dismembered quality of Lenoir’s pieces, which exhibit the trauma the Terror inflicted on the nation’s body. Though the pieces no doubt testify to a wounded history, my interpretation— focused on the museum’s reception—highlights the way it recomposed a new national body. The views are not incompatible: the museum lends itself to both a tragic royalist and a comic revolutionary reading. 101. G. E. Lessing, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts [1777/1780], §29 and §34; Pascal, Pre´face: Sur le traite´ du vide’’ [1651], 232. 102. Dumas, Le Corricolo, 166. See also Gautier, Le Palais pompe´ien, 7; Charles Bo-

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:09

PS

PAGE 262

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 4 6 – 1 5 7 263 nucci, Pompe´i, I; Giacomo Leopardi, ‘‘The Broom,’’ in Pompeii as Source and Inspiration, 15; and Paul Lacroix, La Prison de Pompe´ia [1827], 27. 103. Euge`ne Meuris, La Destruction de Pompe´¨ıa [1847], 158. 104. On this question, see my article, ‘‘La Palinge´ne´sie romantique: Histoire et immortalite´ de Charles Bonnet a` Pierre Leroux.’’ 105. Victor Hugo, ‘‘Lui,’’ 420. The French presence in Naples reinvigorated the excavations. 106. The main thinkers of the Counter-Revolution, Joseph de Masitre and Louis de Bonald, had rekindled sternly theocratic doctrines. See Ge´rard Gengembre, La contrere´volution. 107. On the ‘‘body politics’’ of the French Revolution, see Antoine de Baecque, Le Corps de l’histoire. 108. Joseph de Maistre, for instance, held that ‘‘man can modify everything in the sphere of his activity, but he creates nothing.’’ The gardener may prune a tree, but cannot make one, so how could man presume to ‘‘make a constitution?’’ (Conside´rations sur la France [1797], 80). 109. On democracy and the end of theologico-political rule, see Claude Lefort, ‘‘Permanence du the´ologico-politique?’’ in Essais sur le politique. 110. Michelet, Le Moyen aˆge, 21. 111. Cf. the satanic anticult in La Sorcie`re: ‘‘under the vague shadow of Satan, the people worshipped only the people’’ (130). 112. In this sense, Michelet inverts Michel de Certeau’s notion that ‘‘writing plays the role of a burial rite . . . [which] exorcises death by inserting it into a discourse,’’ and thereby ‘‘establish[es] a place for the living’’ (The Writing of History, 100). Though such pragmatism is not entirely absent in Michelet, history is for him fundamentally a debt, even a gift, which does not so much bury the past as exhume its effigy.

chapter 6 1. See John Martin’s popular painting The Fall of Nineveh (1828), but also his Deluge, exhibited at the Paris salon of 1834, The Fall of Babylon (1819), and The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822). Martin specialized in the catastrophic sublime. 2. S. F. Schopin’s (1804–80) Les derniers jours de Pompe´i has not been dated, but it was most likely painted after Briullov’s and Lytton’s works. 3. M. de Grainville, Le dernier homme [1811], second edition, published by Charles Nodier. Grainville’s summary sketch dates from 1805. Creuze´ de Lesser based an epic poem of nine cantos on Grainville’s text in 1818, which he also entitled Le dernier homme [1832]. See also Thomas Campbell’s poem ‘‘The Last Man’’ [1823], probably inspired by Byron’s poem ‘‘Darkness’’ [1816], in which the extinction of the sun brings about the end of human life on earth. 4. ‘‘De la fin prochaine du genre humain’’ is one of Nodier’s Reˆveries from the early 1830s.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:10

PS

PAGE 263

264 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 5 7 – 1 6 1 5. For an account of the first Europeans at Petra, see Norman Lewis, ‘‘Petra: The First-Comers’’ and Briony Llewellyn, ‘‘The Real and the Ideal: Petra in the Minds and Eyes of Nineteenth-Century British and American Artist-Travelers,’’ in Glenn Markoe, ed., Petra Rediscovered. 6. Evans believed a powerful seismic event had put an end to Minoan civilization (3000 b.c.e.–1250 b.c.e.), but most likely, experts now think, it was invaded and destroyed either by Mycenaeans, Dorians, or Achaeans. 7. For my thoughts on nineteenth-century historicism, I am indebted to Michel Foucault, The Order of Things; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History; Ceri Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism; and Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio and Romanticism and the Rise of History. Hayden White’s Metahistory has also been useful, though I do not find his tropological approach fully convincing. 8. The animals in the engraving were all based on fossil remains found at Dorset. For a discussion of this image and its impact, see Martin J. S. Rudwick, Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World. 9. On the dizzying attraction of these ‘‘black holes,’’ see Yvan Leclerc’s remark on Flaubert’s fascination with the lacuna that Carthage leaves in ancient history: ‘‘The ‘vertigo’ of antiquity which seizes the author and infects the reader of Salammboˆ stems from the feeling of gazing into the emptiness. The referential emptiness of a ruined city, the signifying emptiness of an unknown language, impossible to reconstruct, the emptiness of the historiographical signifieds . . . [and] the suction of this central emptiness inspires him’’ (foreword of ‘‘Salammboˆ’’ de Flaubert: Histoire, Fiction, ed. Daniel Fauvel and Yvan Leclerc). 10. The term comes from Gautier’s tale, ‘‘Le Pied de momie,’’ in which the modern narrator is transported into ancient Egypt by a resuscitated princess. Egypt appears to him as ‘‘a vertiginous spectacle’’ (191). 11. See Koselleck’s ‘‘Historia Magistra Vitae.’’ 12. See Paul Baines, ‘‘Horace Walpole.’’ For an in-depth study of Strawberry Hill and the picturesque, see Norbert Miller, Strawberry Hill. 13. On the rise of picturesque aesthetics in the eighteenth century, see Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque. 14. Volney, Les ruines [1791]. Volney appreciates ruins aesthetically but subordinates this view to a moral reading; at the outset, he queries the ruins of Palmyra for an explanation, and a genius loci appears who urges him to ‘‘read the lessons that they present to you!’’ (18)—lessons that concern the political and moral grounds for the prosperity of nations. A note of melancholy colors the dominant moral discourse: ‘‘What has become of these ages of life and abundance? . . . where are they, the ramparts of Niniveh, the walls of Babylon, the palaces of Persepolis?’’ (13). 15. A good number of Gautier’s stories revolve around the hero’s macabre affair with a ‘‘morte amoureuse.’’ 16. The´ophile Gautier, Histoire du romantisme, 21–22. 17. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Bruneau, 1:266 (to Maxime du Camp, May 1846) and 2:152 (to Louise Colet, September 4, 1852).

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:10

PS

PAGE 264

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 6 1 – 1 6 4 265 18. Georg Luka´cs argued in The Theory of the Novel that the modern novel addressed the hero’s problematic insertion in society and the modern individual’s metaphysical homelessness. 19. For the term ‘‘antimodern,’’ see Antoine Compagnon, Les Antimodernes, who forges the concept of an ‘‘antimodern’’ tradition at the heart of modernity, marked by writers skeptical both of progress and of reactionary remedies. 20. Chateaubriand, Me´moires d’outre-tombe [1843], 1794. 21. In L’Ancien re´gime et la re´volution [1857], Tocqueville famously interpreted the French Revolution as a long-term event that ‘‘is still going on’’ (115). 22. Tocqueville, Souvenirs [1850], 89. 23. Ernest Renan, L’Avenir de la science, 390. 24. The characterization of progress as ‘‘homogeneous, empty time’’ occurs in Thesis XIII of Walter Benjamin’s ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ 261. For Durkheim’s key concept of ‘‘anomie,’’ see ‘‘Le Suicide anomique,’’ in Le Suicide, 264–311. Baudelaire discusses his concept of modernity in Le Peintre de la vie modene [1863]. 25. See the chronological table of world history in Vico’s New Science. 26. In Principles of Geology [1830–33], Charles Lyell cites the famous statement of his predecessor: ‘‘ ‘In the economy of the world,’ said the Scotch geologist, ‘I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end’; and the declaration was the more startling when coupled with the doctrine, that all past changes on the globe had been brought about by the slow agency of existing causes’’ (16). 27. Lyell, Principles of Geology, 16. 28. Lyell recalls that ‘‘some . . . deemed the doctrine inconsistent with revealed truths, [and] indulged very uncharitable suspicions of the motives of its author. They accused him of a deliberate design of reviving the heathen dogma of an ‘eternal succession,’ and of denying that this world ever had a beginning’’ (17). 29. Charles Bonnet, La Palinge´ne´sie philosophique [1769], 259. 30. Hence Michel Foucault places him in the classical episteme in The Order of Things, 150. 31. Bonnet argues that we would not recognize our ancestors from a previous geological era, so drastic is the change that occurs during our palingenetic rebirth. Every species progresses, from disaster to disaster, to its definitive shape and perfects itself in the process. Bonnet famously claimed: ‘‘one might then discover, among the apes or the elephants, Newtons and Leibnizes; and among the beavers, Perraults and Vaubans, etc.’’ (203). 32. The theory of evolution, or transformism, was first anticipated by Maupertuis, whose 1751 Syste`me de la nature proposed the idea of biparental heredity. Buffon recognized ‘‘families’’ of species that had descended from a common ancestor but saw such modifications as a spontaneous reassembly of organic molecules. 33. Georges Buffon, in Des E´poques de la nature [1778], reinterprets the ‘‘six days’’ of creation as ‘‘six time periods; the sacred historian does not specify the duration of each one, but the sense of the narrative seems to make it long enough for us to extend it as far as the physical truths which we will demonstrate require’’ (35).

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:11

PS

PAGE 265

266 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 6 4 – 1 7 0 34. Buffon, Des E´poques de la nature, 190. 35. Buffon explicitly compares time to space, linking Pascal’s abyss to his own: ‘‘the past is like distance; our vision diminishes there, and would even be lost unless history and chronology had set down flags’’ (2). 36. Georges Buffon, Des E´poques de la nature, 4. 37. Charles Lyell, while rejecting catastrophes, remains sensible to the sublime, though he curiously dismisses the term as if it excluded pain and terror: ‘‘such views of the immensity of past time, like those unfolded by the Newtonian philosophy in regard to space, were too vast to awaken ideas of sublimity unmixed with a painful sense of our incapacity to conceive a plan of such infinite extent’’ (Principles of Geology, 16). 38. Georges Cuvier, Discours sur les re´volutions, 7. 39. Cuvier, Discours pre´liminaire, 46. Cf. also Charles Lyell, who begins his Principles of Geology with the same analogy: ‘‘As the present condition of nations is the result of many antecedent changes, some extremely remote and others recent, some gradual, others sudden and violent, so the state of the natural world is the result of a long succession of events’’ (5). 40. Cuvier, Discours pre´liminaire, 1; Buffon, Des E´poques de la nature, 1. 41. Michelet, Histoire romaine, 15. 42. The same rhetoric of geological disaster marks Gautier’s novel of ancient Egypt, Le Roman de la momie, where the desert of the royal tombs tells of a global cataclysm: ‘‘it resembled a torrefied landscape . . . [or] the heaped-up cinders left behind after a chain of mountains had burnt during an age of cosmic catastrophes in a great planetary fire’’ (34). 43. Voltaire wrote the Poe`me sur le de´sastre de Lisbonne (1756) in response to the earthquake on November 1, 1755 which killed thirty thousand. The episode also features as a chapter in Candide (1758). 44. See Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Analytic of the sublime,’’ in Critique of Judgement: ‘‘the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of limitlessness, yet with a superadded thought of its totality’’ (90, §23). 45. Cf. for example Felicia Hemans’s poem ‘‘The Treasures of the Deep’’ [1823]. The poem catalogs the riches harbored on the seafloor and calls on the sea to ‘‘restore the dead’’ (l.34). Among its secrets are also lost cities: ‘‘thy waves have roll’d / Above the cities of a world gone by!’’ (ll. 13–14). 46. Mary Shelley, ‘‘The Reanimated Roman,’’ 332. 47. Chateaubriand, Itine´raire de Paris a` Je´rusalem [1811], 257–58. He admits to seeing nothing, but speculates that the legends might be verified during ebb (259). 48. Michelet, La Mer, 134–37. 49. Thomas De Quincey, ‘‘Savannah-la-Mar,’’ in Confessions, 157. 50. Jules Verne, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers [1869], 415. 51. See, for instance, Joseph de Maistre, Conside´rations sur la France, who interprets the Revolution as God’s way of purging the sins of the Ancien Re´gime, not exactly an orthodox view in counterrevolutionary circles.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:11

PS

PAGE 266

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 7 0 – 1 7 4 267 52. Ame´lie Nothomb, Pe´plum [1996]. Goethe’s famous statement on Pompeii— ‘‘much grief [Unheil] has occurred in the world, but little that has prepared so much joy for posterity’’—sets the tone for this secular reading, which replaces punishment by preservation. See Italienische Reise [March 13, 1787], 267. 53. Augustin Thierry, Histoire de la conqueˆte, xi. 54. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la de´mocratie en Ame´rique [1835], 1:480. 55. Thierry, Histoire de la conqueˆte, xii. 56. Jules Michelet, Histoire romaine, 15. 57. ‘‘Almost the entire Italian coast had been colonized by Pelasgians . . . on the coast, they founded the cities of Ce´re´, Tarquinies, Ravenna and Spina, and the ancient Venice of the Adriatic’’ (Histoire romaine, 17). 58. In the Iliad, the Pelasgians are allies of the Trojans and appear in the catalog of ships (2.840–43). Homer later describes their camp (10.428–29). 59. For Michelet’s vision of the people, see Le Peuple. 60. Gustave Flaubert, Salammboˆ [1862], 494. 61. Thierry, Histoire de la conqueˆte, xi. 62. Volney, Les Ruines, 16. The passage goes on to flesh out this image: ‘‘who knows if on the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Suiderzee . . . a traveler like myself won’t one day sit down there on silent ruins, and weep alone over the the ashes of peoples and the memory of their grandeur?’’ 63. The term ‘‘book of life’’ occurs frequently in the Bible. Originally, it probably referred to genealogical records and citizen registries kept for various purposes. Figuratively, it means the divine record of human deeds and especially the names of the saved. See, notably, Revelation 20:15: ‘‘And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.’’ 64. The purity of the gift can always be questioned, of course, since every gift is tied, as Marcel Mauss has shown (The Gift), to a countergift. The obligation to remember, however, falls on future generations, so that direct reciprocity becomes physically impossible. 65. Jules Michelet, La Mer, 144. 66. Cf. also Michelet’s use of archaeology in the Tableau de la France, notably in the section on Languedoc, a ‘‘very ancient land. You will there find ruins on top of ruins; the Camisards above the Albigensians, the Saracens above the Goths, and below them the Romans and the Iberians. The walls of Narbonne are built with tombstones, statues, and inscriptions. The amphitheater of Nıˆmes is pierced with Gothic embrasures, crowned with Saracen crenellations, and blackened by the flames of Charles Martel. But it is still the oldest people who have left the most; the Romans have sunk the deepest traces’’ (203). 67. Gautier, in E´doaurd Fournier, Paris de´moli, mosaı¨que de ruines, iii. 68. Gautier, ‘‘Paris Futur’’ [1851], in Paris et les Parisiens, 184. Coming soon after Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’e´tat, these articles depicting a future imperial metropolis offer a chilling blueprint for the Second Empire. 69. Flaubert, Salammboˆ, 111.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:12

PS

PAGE 267

268 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 7 5 – 1 8 0 70. For a cultural history of the panorama, see Stephen Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. More recently, Maurice Samuels has discussed its spectacular depictions of history in The Spectacular Past. 71. Balzac’s social climber sees Paris strecthed out before him ‘‘along the two banks of the Seine,’’ almost conquered already (Le Pe`re Goriot [1834], 3:290). 72. Emile Zola, La Cure´e [1871], 1:387–90. 73. Chateaubriand, Atala. Rene´. Le dernier Abencerage, 185. 74. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 165. 75. Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, 64. 76. The antiquary famously describes this sublimation as follows: ‘‘the Will [vouloir] burns us and Power [pouvoir] destroys us; but KNOWING [savoir] leaves our feeble organization in a perpetual state of calm’’ (62). 77. Chateaubriand, Ge´nie du christianisme, 2:101. 78. Cf. Chateaubriand’s account of illustrious tombs in Greece in the Itine´raire de Paris a` Je´rusalem. In Athens, while walking along ‘‘the old path of the Academy, lined with the tombs of citizens who died for the patrie, and those of the greatest men of Greece . . . Thrasybulus, Pericles, Chabrias, Timotheus, Harmodius and Aristogiton,’’ he recalls Cicero’s account of ‘‘Atticus wandering among these graves, and overcome with pious respect at the sight of these imposing ashes’’ (154–55). But the famous dead have now become inaccessible: ‘‘[Cicero] could not have drawn the same picture any longer today: the tombs are ruined. The famous dead men whom the Athenians had placed outside their city, like a front-guard, have not risen to defend it’’ (155). 79. Chateaubriand, Me´moires d’outre-tombe, 102. And later: ‘‘But my father did not lie for a long time in his coffin: he was cast out of it when the old France was dumped by the roadside’’ (114). 80. Chateaubriand dramatizes this strange quest: ‘‘it was over there that the tomb of Leonidas should have been . . . I vainly interrogated the smallest stones to ask them for the ashes of Leonidas’’ (Itine´raire de Paris a` Je´rusalem, 104). 81. The trauma attached to the word ‘‘effacer’’ often makes it the subject of such utopian reversals as Chateaubriand here practices. Ludovic Vitet also uses the term paradoxically: speaking of attempts to restore imperiled medieval buildings, he approves the effort to ‘‘resurrect this architecture when it is a question of effacing the ravages of time on the works it has produced.’’ See ‘‘L’Art et l’arche´ologie,’’ 2:414. 82. Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 30. 83. Carlyle, On Heroes, 138. 84. Cf. Flaubert’s remark to Louise Colet (April 7, 1854): ‘‘The books from which entire literatures have emerged, such as Homer and Rabelais, are encyclopedias of their periods’’ (Correspondance, ed. Masson, 285). 85. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 65. 86. ‘‘Only in the state, with the consciousness of laws, are there clear actions‘‘ (Hegel, Introduction, 65). 87. L.-S. Mercier, ‘‘Que deviendra Paris?’’ in Le Tableau de Paris, 1:979–85.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:13

PS

PAGE 268

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 8 1 – 1 8 5 269 88. See, on this score, Karlheinz Stierle’s study of this tradition in Der Mythos von Paris. 89. See Jan Assmann’s account of the transmission of cultural memory in ‘‘Remembering in Order to Belong: Writing, Memory, and Identity,’’ in Religion and Cultural Memory: ‘‘writing cannot ensure the permanence of meaning and knowledge,’’ since memory relies more on institutions, rituals, and canons than on its specific storage medium (87). 90. Carlyle, On Heroes, 71. 91. Ernest Renan, ‘‘La De´couverte de Ninive,’’ 405. Renan also remarks that Nineveh had been ‘‘so profoundly wiped from the earth that Xenophon crossed the field of its ruins without noticing it’’ (405). 92. The Danish kitchen middens had been studied as early as 1827, but the public controversy over their origin (were they man-made or natural?) only broke out in 1851. See The Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology, ed. Bahn, 90. On the novelty of Rudolf Virchow’s Abfallsarcha¨ologie (garbage archaeology) at the Swiss lake dwellings in 1853, see Christiane Zintzen, Von Pompeji nach Troja, 33. 93. Hugo, Les Mise´rables, 3:321. 94. Michelet, like Hugo, stresses that destruction provides the raw material for this providential script: ‘‘every year devours a page [of the earth]. This is a world in demolition, chewed up from below by the sea, but attacked even more by rain and frost from above’’ (La Mer, 56). 95. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 319. 96. Carlyle, ‘‘On History,’’ 50. 97. John Ruskin, ‘‘The Opening of the Crystal Palace’’ [1854], 11:424. 98. John Ruskin, ‘‘The Lamp of Memory,’’ in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 194. In ‘‘The Opening of the Crystal Palace,’’ he draws a satirical portrait of the quixotic rescue impulses of the naı¨ve antiquarian: ‘‘if every earnest antiquarian, happy in his well-ordered library, and in his sense of having been useful in preserving an old stone or two out of his parish church, and an old coin or two out of a furrow in the next ploughed field, could indeed behold, each morning as he awaked, the mightiest works of departed nations mouldering to the ground in disregarded heaps; if he could always have in clear phantasm before his eyes the ignorant monk trampling on the manuscript, the village mason striking down the monument, the court painter daubing the despised and priceless masterpiece . . . , he would not always smile so complacently in the thought of the little learnings and petty preservations of his own immediate sphere’’ (422). The sacralizing fetishism of the antiquarian can never restore the whole, nor reconstitute, from the fragment, an imaginary totality. 99. Carlyle establishes a debt of gratitude to the unknowable past: just as ‘‘thanksgivings were once wont to be offered ‘for unrecognised mercies,’ ’’ so we should now ‘‘look with reverence into the dark untenanted places of the Past, where, in formless oblivion, our chief benefactors, with all their sedulous endeavours . . . lie entombed’’ (On Heroes, 50). By confronting the anxiety of amnesia, Carlyle partly defuses it and channels it into

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:14

PS

PAGE 269

270 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 8 5 – 1 9 4 a memorial duty; the many ‘‘tombs of the unknown soldier’’ in the modern period obey the same logic. 100. Victor Hugo, ‘‘L’E´pope´e du ver,’’ in La Le´gende des sie`cles, 1:279–93. 101. Hugo, La Le´gende, 1:65–70. 102. The euphoric poetic program that Hugo had announced in the Preface to Cromwell contrasts sharply with this admission of fragmentation. In 1827, buoyed by his romantic faith, Hugo had written that art ‘‘restores what the annalists have truncated’’ (25–26). 103. Georges Didi-Huberman has recently studied the notion of the ‘‘imprint’’ (L’Empreinte). 104. Didi-Huberman, L’Empreinte, 19. ¨ ber das Studium des Alterthums,’’ 1:263. 105. Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘‘U 106. Mme de Stae¨l, Corinne, 300. 107. Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy [1846], 169. 108. Hippolyte Taine, ‘‘M. Michelet,’’ 196. 109. Hugo, La Le´gende, 1:60. 110. Cf. Barante on his imitation of the naı¨ve language of the ‘‘chroniclers of past ages’’: ‘‘I know well that they report, evidently, speeches and conversations which have never really taken place; but, as told by them, these nonetheless carry the imprint of the period of which I wanted to give an idea’’ (Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, 42). 111. See Carlo Ginzburg, ‘‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.’’ 112. Jules Verne, Voyage au centre de la terre, 226. 113. Mme de Stae¨l, Corinne, 300. 114. Gaston Boissier, Promenades arche´ologiques, 313. 115. Gautier, Re´cits fantastiques, 238. 116. Gautier, Le Roman de la momie, 44. 117. Ted Underwood has argued, in the British context, that Romanticism sought in history an earthly form of immortality (‘‘Romantic Historicism and the Afterlife’’). 118. ‘‘Lebt es im Abgrund auch? Wohnt unter der Lava verborgen noch ein neues Geschlecht? Kehrt das entfloh’ne zuru¨ck?’’ Friedrich Schiller, ‘‘Pompeji und Herkulanum’’ [1804], 1:166–68. 119. Carlyle, Past and Present, 75 and 46. 120. Chateaubriand, Me´moires d’outre-tombe, 834–35. 121. Nerval, ‘‘ ‘Faust’ de Goethe suivi du second ‘Faust,’ ’’ 1:503. 122. Gautier, Re´cits fantastiques, 266. 123. Michelet makes clear in the 1869 Preface to his Histoire de France that he experienced his lifelong enterprise as a sort of communion with the dead. Having lived for nine years ‘‘at the gates of the Pe`re-Lachaise cemetery’’ and thereafter led a life ‘‘that one might have called buried [enterre´], having no society but the past, and no friends but interred peoples,’’ Michelet was a certified necrophiliac who sacrificed his own life to reanimate the nation’s ghosts. ‘‘I loved death,’’ he wrote, endorsing Gautier’s Pygmalian theory that love is required to resurrect the dead: the historian has to invest ‘‘enough love to recreate,

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:15

PS

PAGE 270

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 9 4 – 1 9 9 271 to rebuild the world [of the Middle Ages].’’ In Michelet’s case, such love is inextricable from pity and sorrow, because mourning is the means by which he accesses the underworld of history; he possesses the ‘‘gift of tears’’ (le don des larmes), a ‘‘naive magic’’ that gives him ‘‘an almost infallible power of evocation’’: ‘‘all those whom I have mourned, peoples and gods, have relived’’ (Le Moyen Aˆge, 21–22). 124. Ernest Renan exemplifies this shift to a new ‘‘positivist’’ faith: once a seminary student, he articulated his modern ‘‘belief ’’ in science after losing his religious faith and wrote the gospel of positive science in L’Avenir de la science. There, after worrying about ‘‘the immensity of oblivion,’’ he professed the scientific immortality of all beings and actions: ‘‘no action dies. The merest insect . . . performs a labor that will leave its mark on the eternal chain of causes’’ (263). Nothing truly vanishes, or is at least always absorbed into some collective identity. 125. Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 162. 126. Jules Verne’s method of spatializing the encyclopedia of knowledge and of distributing tables of names from scientific manuals visually into a comprehensive ‘‘exhibition’’ (of marine life, for example, in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers) obeys a general period logic that Philippe Hamon has studied in Expositions. 127. Jules Verne, Voyage au centre de la terre, 255. 128. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions, 144. The palimpsest naturally also serves as a figure for cultural archaeology. Cf. Charles Newton’s use of the term: ‘‘Traces of ancient manners must be sought, as we seek for customs, in the secluded life of the peasantry, or we must discern them half-obliterated beneath the palimpsest surface of modern society’’ (‘‘On the Study of Archaeology,’’ 7). For Carlyle, history itself is analogous to the mystery of the palimpsest. ‘‘History is a real Prophetic Manuscript, and can be fully interpreted by no man.’’ Its meaning ‘‘lies far beyond our ken; yet in that complex Manuscript, covered over with formless inextricably-entangled unknown characters,— nay, which is a Palimpsest, and had once prophetic writing, still dimly legible there,—some letters, some words, may be deciphered’’ (‘‘On History,’’ 53). Hugo remarks that Claude Frollo views the ornamental fac¸ade of Notre-Dame as ‘‘a palimpsest’’ of hermetic symbols (219). 129. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents [1930], 16–17. 130. Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la me´moire, 92. 131. Baudelaire, ‘‘Le Cygne,’’ in Les Fleurs du mal. 132. Scott, Waverley, 492–93. 133. Balzac, Avant-Propos. 134. Louis Se´bastien Mercier, ‘‘Que deviendra Paris?’’ in Tableau de Paris, 1:983. 135. Paul Bourget’s remark on Maxime du Camp, cited in Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 1:144 (C 4). 136. See ‘‘La Modernite´,’’ in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, where Baudelaire defines the modern artist’s object: ‘‘it is a matter for him of extracting from fashion the poetic element in the historical, of drawing the eternal out of the transitory’’ (354).

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:15

PS

PAGE 271

272 n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 0 0 – 2 0 7

chapter 7 1. See Nietzsche’s critique of ‘‘antiquarian history’’ in ‘‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.’’ 2. Cf. Michael Kohlhauser, ‘‘La Part de l’Histoire’’: ‘‘the Romantics, whether on the right or the left, . . . share an identical experience of history’’ (17). 3. On the trouboudour style, see Fernand Baldensperger, ‘‘Le ‘genre troubadour’ ’’ and Franc¸ois Pupil, Le Style troubadour. 4. Victor Hugo, ‘‘La Bande noire.’’ 5. Cf. Balzac’s famous paradox in Illusions perdues: ‘‘the Royalists are romantic, the Liberals are classic’’ (253). 6. On the revaluation of medieval architecture, see Vitet, ‘‘Des e´tudes arche´ologiques en France.’’ 7. L.-S. Mercier, ‘‘De´molition du Petit Chaˆtelet,’’ in Le Tableau de Paris, 1:1305–6. 8. Paul-Louis Courier, Lettres au re´dacteur du Censeur (November 12, 1819), 22–24. 9. On political legitimation in liberal historiography, see Jacques Neefs, ‘‘Augustin Thierry: Le moment de la ‘ve´ritable’ histoire de France’’; Lionel Gossman, ‘‘Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography,’’ in Between History and Literature, 83–151; Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot; Laurent Theis, ‘‘Guizot et les institutions de me´moire’’; Franc¸ois Furet, ‘‘La Naissance de l’histoire’’; and Georges Lefebvre, La Naissance de l’historiographie moderne. 10. Citation from Paul Viallaneix ‘‘Michelet: Le magiste`re de l’historien.’’ 11. Hugo, Les Mise´rables, 3:328. 12. Musset, Confession, 49. 13. Balzac, ‘‘Complaintes satiriques’’ [1830], 2:740. 14. Musset, Confession, 49. 15. Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 169. 16. See Mme de Stae¨l’s comments on French classicism in De l’Allemagne: ‘‘the sterility that threatens our literature would suggest that the French spirit itself now needs to be renewed by a more vigorous sap’’ (1:48). 17. See E. de Goncourt’s remark on Flaubert’s historical novels: ‘‘in the novel, Flaubert has not only been a painter of contemporary life, he has been a resurrectionist, in the manner of Carlyle and Michelet, of old worlds, of vanished civilizations, of perished peoples. He has made Carthage and the daughter of Hamilcar relive again, as well as the Thebaid and its hermit, medieval Europe and its Julien l’Hospitalier’’ ( Journal, 3:496 [November 23, 1890]). 18. Gerald M. Ackerman, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Jean-Le´on Ge´roˆme, 35. 19. Gautier, Salon de 1847, 25–29. Thore´, equally charmed, asks ‘‘how the censorship jury allowed this first work of a nameless pupil to pass?’’ (Salon de 1847, 60–61). Gustave Planche, in his Salon de 1847, praised Ge´roˆme’s grace, freshness, and harmony (354–67). 20. Gautier, Exposition de 1859, 10; Planche, Le Salon de 1847, 355. 21. See Louis-Antoine Prat, Dessins de The´odore Chasse´riau, 1:545. Quote is from

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:16

PS

PAGE 272

n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 0 7 – 2 1 0 273 Chasse´riau’s annotated drawing, ‘‘Une Salle avec un escalier, Une trace sur un mur’’ (no. 1487). 22. Chasse´riau’s breathless dramatization mentions multiple women: ‘‘all the women were along the wall all frightened it’s the line engraved on the wall Diomedes’ wife is the one in the middle flanked by her whole family the father arrives’’ (Prat, Inventaire ge´ne´ral, 545). Gautier’s tale Arria Marcella may have reactivated the painter’s memory as Ste´phane Gue´gan suggests (Chasse´riau, 366). 23. Pierre Larousse, ‘‘Pompe´i, le dernier jour de,’’ 12:1374–75. 24. Gautier, Salon de 1847, 21–22. 25. Edmond About, Salon de 1866, 184–88. 26. Cf. Gautier’s remark on Ge´roˆme’s antique paintings in the Exposition de 1859: ‘‘these types of transposition rejuvenate art and infuse some new blood in its veins’’ (10). 27. For a broader view of archaeology’s power to renew art, see Walter Pater’s bible of aestheticism, The Renaissance [1873], in which he depicts Hellenism as a vital subterranean current that no culture can fully absorb: ‘‘the Hellenic element alone has not been so absorbed, or content with this underground life; from time to time it has started to the surface; culture has been drawn back to its sources to be clarified and corrected. Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in our intellectual life; it is a conscious tradition in it’’ (198–99). 28. Fe´lix Jahyer, Salon de 1866, 138–43. 29. Viel-Castel, Me´moires, 3:203 (January 21, 1856). Quoted by Marie-Claude Dejean de la Batie, ‘‘La Maison pompe´ienne,’’ 134. 30. On modern Pompeian dwellings, see notably Curtis Dahl, ‘‘A Quartet of Pompeian Pastiches.’’ Dahl discusses the Pompeianum of Ludwig I (1849), the Crystal Palace at Sydenham (1853), Prince Napoleon’s Pompeian Palace (1858), and the wealthy hardware merchant Franklin Webster Smith’s Pompeia (inspired by the Crystal Palace and patterned on the House of Pansa) in Saratoga Springs (1889). 31. The marquise of Belgiojoso, for instance, created a Pompeian dining room (around 1835), and Dampierre entrusted a Pompeian music room to Ingres. See Dejean de la Batie, ‘‘La Maison pompe´ienne,’’ and Laurence Bellot, La Maison pompe´ienne. 32. The Pompeian Palace was appropriately built on the site of the Fine Arts Pavilion of the Exposition universelle of 1855. On the Pompeian Court, see the exhibition booklet by George Scharf, The Pompeian Court in the Crystal Palace. 33. Gautier, Le Palais pompe´ien, 10. The Turkish Bath was ‘‘an oriental caprice . . . that in no way detracted from the ancient physiognomy of the house’’ (22). 34. On the paintings, see Dejean de la Batie, ‘‘La Maison pompe´ienne,’’ 134. She notes that, when the decorations were sold in 1868, the list included twenty-six modern paintings, notably an Inte´rieur de Harem by Chasse´riau and an Inte´rieur de lupanar by Ge´roˆme. 35. See the online exhibition of the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France, ‘‘Des Photographes pour l’empereur. Les albums de Napole´on III,’’ http://expositions.bnf.fr/napol/ index.htm.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:16

PS

PAGE 273

274 n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 1 0 – 2 2 8 36. Arse`ne Houssaye, Les Confessions, 4:202. 37. On these successive sales, see Laurence Bellot, La Maison pompe´ienne. 38. See ‘‘Bonaparte,’’ The American Cyclopaedia, 29. 39. Gustave Planche, ‘‘Litte´rature dramatique’’ [1851], 77. 40. Emmanuel de Quinsonas, Le dernier mot sur la maison de Diome`de [1869], 15. 41. Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art, 136. 42. Hippolyte Rigault, ‘‘Une maison romaine aux Champs-E´lyse´es’’ [1859], 81–84. 43. Gautier, Le Palais pompe´ien, 14. 44. ‘‘Pompe´i,’’ L’Artiste, 81–84. 45. J.-F.-A. de Nadaillac, La dernie`re ´election municipale a` Pompe´i [1895], 7–9. 46. E. and J. de Goncourt, Notes sur l’Italie (1855–1856), 310–11. 47. Alexandre Dumas, Caligula, 6:2. The first act, set at Baia, features ‘‘an elegant room modeled on the House of the Faun at Pompeii’’ (35). 48. Gautier, Le Palais, 12. 49. Rigault, ‘‘Une maison romaine,’’ 81. 50. Arse`ne Houssaye, Les Confessions, 4:202. 51. Gautier, Le Palais, 3. 52. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, 89. 53. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, 8. 54. Pierre Michel’s Un mythe romantique: Les barbares, 1789–1848 studies this motif exhaustively, most notably its ideological use by liberal elites to contain the people. My focus here is on the archaeological dimension of this myth. 55. Chateaubriand, Me´moires d’outre-tombe, 160. 56. Euge`ne Sue, Les Myste`res de Paris, 31. For Chevalier’s thesis, see his Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses. He also argues that Sue dismantles this assimilation in the process of writing in response to letters from working-class readers, a claim Christopher Prendergast has recently refuted in For the People by the People? 57. Nerval, Sylvie, 32. 58. Alfred de Vigny, Stello. Daphne´ [1837], 284. 59. See Sainte-Beuve, ‘‘De la litte´rature industrielle’’ [1839]. 60. Michelet, Le Peuple, 72. His italics. 61. For a commentary on Michelet’s various uses of this family legend, see Paule Petitier, ‘‘Michelet et l’imprimerie.’’ 62. See Jacques Rancie`re, Le Partage du sensible. 63. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852]. The coup d’e´tat of 1851 helpfully concentrates executive power so that the revolution can focus ‘‘all its forces of destruction against it’’ (237). 64. Hugo, Les Mise´rables, 2:203. 65. See Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Empreinte, and Devant le temps, 99–111. 66. Michelet, Histoire de la Re´volution franc¸aise, 1:58. 67. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution [1837], 2:96 68. Hugo, Les Mise´rables, 2:304–7.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:17

PS

PAGE 274

n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 2 8 – 2 3 1 275 69. Michelet, Le Moyen Aˆge, 227. 70. Mme de Stae¨l, Corinne, 348. 71. On the image of the volcano in the late eighteenth century, see Michel Delon, L’Ide´e d’e´nergie au tournant des Lumie`res, 194–98. ‘‘The volcano, the site where tellurian forces surface, marks the imagination at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries’’ (194). Delon notes that ‘‘love, poetry, and revolution proclaim their resemblance to volcanic eruptions’’ (196) but does not comment further on the link with revolution. 72. Georges Cuvier, Discours pre´liminaire, 55. 73. For the cross-contamination of geology and history, see also Charles Lyell’s description of the discipline in Principles of Geology: ‘‘as the present condition of nations is the result of many antecedent changes, some extremely remote and others recent, some gradual, others sudden and violent, so the state of the natural world is the result of a long succession of events’’ (5). Lyell then compares the events that shaped political geography to the upheavals that deteremined ‘‘the form of a coast, the configuration of the interior of a country, the existence and extent of lakes, valleys, and mountains’’ (5–6). 74. A remarkable example of the historical threats that can lurk in beautiful landscapes occurs in Balzac’s Les Chouans [1829], where republican soldiers in rebel Bretagne behold a panoramic landscape from a hilltop. The commander’s gaze wavers between admiration and anxiety, expansion and paranoia, before this deceptive tranquility. Maurice Samuels reads this scene in terms of a romantic spectacularity that imposes a sense of imaginary control through the panoramic gaze (The Spectacular Past, 201–3), but it is just as plausible to foreground the unexpected political threat that disrupts the timeless beauty of the scene. 75. Jacques Delille, L’Homme des champs [1800], 53–54. 76. This romantic myth of rupture and fossilization will later inform Walter Benjamin’s archaeology of consumer capitalism. His arcades are evidently modeled on buried civilizations; but see also the telling fragment: ‘‘sudden pastness [Vergangenheit] of a city: illuminated windows before Christmas shine as if their light came all the way from 1880’’ (Das Passagen-Werk). 77. Michelet, Histoire de la Re´volution franc¸aise, 1:329. 78. Vigny, Stello, 160. 79. Vigny, ‘‘Les Oracles’’ [1862], 165–70. 80. Dumas, Le Corricolo, 163. 81. Renan, L’Avenir de la science, 351. 82. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, 24; Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Masson, 134. 83. Carlyle, On Heroes, 102. 84. Leopold von Ranke, Die Grosssen Ma¨chte [1833], 33. 85. Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, 283. 86. Michelet, Histoire romaine, 4 87. Shelley, ‘‘Ode to Naples,’’ 616–20. ‘‘The oracular thunder penetrating shook / The listening soul in my suspended blood.’’ 88. Ke´ratry, ‘‘Les Ruines de Pompe´i,’’ 33.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:17

PS

PAGE 275

276 n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 3 2 – 2 3 4 89. Renan, ‘‘Le 18e centenaire de Pompe´i,’’ 1058–59. 90. E. and J. de Goncourt, Journal, 1:282. 91. E. and J. de Goncourt, Charles Demailly [1860]: ‘‘everyone returned home through the empty streets, in which the footsteps resound through the sleeping city, through this nocturnal Paris, mysteriously dead, immobile, and silent under the moon, like some Pompeii guarded by city sergeants’’ (74). 92. Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, ‘‘Soir d’e´clipse,’’ 2:943–44. 93. E. and J. de Goncourt, Journal, 1:320 (December 13, 1857). 94. David’s Herculanum (libretto by Joseph Me´ry) premiered at the Paris opera on March 4, 1859. It had a rerun in December 1859. Another Pompeian opera, Alexandre Beaume’s Le dernier jour de Pompe´i, adapted from Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, with music by Victorin Joncie`res, was staged at the The´aˆtre Lyrique on September 21, 1869, coinciding opportunely with the end of the Empire. 95. Flaubert, Correspondance, 3:442 (May 26, 1865). 96. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 2:1056. Passage cited by Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 66. 97. Mme de Stae¨l, Corinne, 337. 98. This depth, however, can always be recaptured as an origin, if catastrophe can be viewed as a new creation. Hence Michelet waxes lyrical about the fertility of volcanoes in La Mer, presenting them as the hotbeds of life on earth: ‘‘the volcanic regions contain the treasure of the globe, powerful virtues of fecundity. They fertilized the sterile earth’’ (121). Half womb (‘‘a receptacle of life’’ [121]), half breast (‘‘a volcano of milk’’ [108]), Michelet’s volcano inverts Mme de Stae¨l’s ‘‘bad mother.’’ The price for this recuperation is the promotion of nature to a formative role in history, a price Michelet was increasingly willing to pay. 99. Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouve´ [1927], 34.

................. 17036$

NOTE

09-26-08 11:04:17

PS

PAGE 276

bibliography

primary works About, Edmond. Salon de 1866. Paris: Hachette, 1867. Anon. Pompe´i: Notice historique et description de l’exposition. Paris: Alcan-Le´vy, 1874. Anon. Le Sacre de Numa, ou E´gerie: Histoire trouve´e dans les ruines d’Herculanum. Geneva, 1775. Anon. [P-]. ‘‘Lettre sur le pre´tendu fossile humain des environs de Moret.’’ Paris: D’E´verat, 1824. Balzac, Honore´ de. ‘‘Avant-Propos’’ [1842]. In Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 1. Paris: Furne, 1842–48. ———. Les Chouans [1829]. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. ———. Cousin Pons [1847]. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. ———. ‘‘De l’e´tat actuel de la litte´rature’’ [1833], ‘‘Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du temps pre´sent’’ [1830]. In Oeuvres diverses, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 1996. ———. Illusions perdues [1843]. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. ———. Louis Lambert. In La Come´die humaine, vol. 11. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 1980. ———. La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote [1829]. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. ———. La Peau de chagrin [1831]. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. ———. Le Pe`re Goriot [1834], In La Come´die humaine. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 1976. ———. La Recherche de l’absolu [1834]. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. ———. Splendeurs et mise`res des courtisanes [1847]. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. ———. Ursule Miroue¨t [1841]. In La Come´die humaine, vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 1976. Barante, M. d. Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne de la maison de Valois, 1364–1477. Paris: Le Normant-Garnier, 1827. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules. Memoranda. Journal, 1836–1864. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1993. Barthelemy, L’Abbe´ de. Voyage en Italie, imprime´ sur ses lettres originales ´ecrites au comte de Caylus [1755–57]. Paris: F. Buisson, 1802. Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du mal. Paris: Flammarion, 1991. ———. Le jeune enchanteur: Histoire tire´e d’un palimpseste d’Herculanum [1846]. In Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 1975.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:01

PS

PAGE 277

278 b i b l i o g r a p h y ———. Le Peintre de la vie moderne [1863]. In Critique d’art. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. ———. Salon de 1846. In Critique d’art. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Bertheroy, Jean. La Danseuse de Pompe´i. Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1899. Bertrand, Aloysius. Gaspard de la nuit. Fantaisies a` la manie`re de Rembrandt et de Callot [1829/42]. Paris: Flammarion, 1972. Beule´, Ch. E. Le Drame du Ve´suve. Paris: Michel Le´vy Fre`res, 1872. Boissier, Gaston. Promenades arche´ologiques: Rome et Pompe´i [1880]. Paris: Hachette, 1911. ———. ‘‘Progre`s de l’arche´ologie grecque et romaine,’’ Revue des deux mondes, May 1, 1864. Boitard. Etudes ante´diluviennes: Paris avant les hommes, l’homme fossile, etc. Paris: Passard, 1861. ‘‘Bonaparte.’’ In The American Cyclopaedia. New York: Appleton, 1873. Bonnet, Charles. La Palinge´ne´sie philosophique, ou ide´es sur l’e´tat passe´ et sur l’e´tat futur des ˆetres vivants. Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1769. Bonucci, Charles. Pompe´i. Naples: L’Imprimerie franc¸aise, 1830. Boucher de Perthes, Jacques. Antiquite´s celtiques et ante´diluviennes [1847, 1857, 1864]. 3 vols. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1989. Bouchet, Jules. Compositions antiques. Paris: chez l’auteur, 1851. Bouilhet, Louis. ‘‘Les Fossiles.’’ In Oeuvres [1859, 1880]. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974. Breton, Ernest. Pompe´¨ıa. Paris: Gide et J. Baudry, 1855. Buffon, Georges. Des E´poques de la nature. Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1778. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. England and the English. London: Richard Bentley, 1833. ———. The Last Days of Pompeii [1834]. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1877. Byron, Lord George Gordon. ‘‘Darkness’’ [1816]. In Byron: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Campbell, Thomas. ‘‘The Last Man’’ [1823]. New Monthly Magazine. Carlyle, Thomas. ‘‘Biography’’ [1832]. In Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 4. London: Chapman and Hall, 1869. ———. The French Revolution [1837]. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. ———. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History [1841]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. ———. ‘‘On History’’ [1830]. In Selected Works, Reminiscences and Letters, ed. Julian Symons. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. ———. Past and Present [1843]. New York: New York University Press, 1965. ———. Sartor Resartus [1833–34]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Caumont, Arcisse de. Histoire sommaire de l’architecture religieuse, civile et militaire, au moyen aˆge [1830–33]. Paris: Derache, 1838. Caylus, comte de. Recueil d’antiquite´s ´egyptiennes, ´etrusques, grecques et romaines. 7 vols. Paris: Desaint et Saillant, 1761–65. Chamfort, Se´bastien-Roch-Nicolas de. ‘‘Des Acade´mies’’ [1791]. In Oeuvres comple`tes. Paris: Chaumerot Jeune, 1824–25. Chateaubriand. Atala. Rene´. Le dernier Abencerage [1826]. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:01

PS

PAGE 278

b i b l i o g r a p h y 279 ———. E´tudes historiques. Paris: Garnier Fre`res, 15. ———. Ge´nie du christianisme. 2 vols. [1802]. Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1966. ———. Itine´raire de Paris a` Je´rusalem [1811]. Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1968. ———. Me´moires d’outre-tombe [1848]. Paris: Librairie Ge´ne´rale Franc¸aise, 1973. ———. Voyage en Italie [1803–4]. In Oeuvres romanesques et voyages, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard Ple´iade, 1969. Chevalier, Casimir, Mgr. Herculanum et Pompe´i: Sce`nes de la civilisation romaine. Tours: Alfred Mame, 1888. Clarke, William. Pompeii: Its Past and Present State; Its Public and Private Buildings, etc. 2 vols. London: M. A. Nattali, 1846. Cochin (fils) and Bellicard. Observations sur les antiquite´s de la ville d’Herculanum [1750]. Saint-E´tienne: Publications de l’Universite´ de Saint-E´tienne, 1996. Coulanges, Fustel de. La Cite´ antique: E´tude sur le culte, le droit, les institutions de la Gre`ce et de Rome [1864]. Paris: Flammarion, 1984. Courier, Paul-Louis. Lettres au re´dacteur du Censeur [1819–20]. In Oeuvres comple`tes. Paris: Firmin Didot Fre`res, 1839. Cousin, Victor. Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie [1829]. In Oeuvres, vol. 1. Brussels: Hauman, 1840. ———. ‘‘De la philosophie de l’histoire.’’ In Premiers essais de philosophie. Paris: Didier, 1862. Creuze´ de Lesser. Voyage en Italie et en Sicile, 1801–2. Paris: P. Didot l’Aıˆne´, 1806. ———. Le Dernier homme, poe`me imite´ de Grainville. Paris: Delaunay, 1832. Cuvier, Georges. Discours pre´liminaire: Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupe`des [1812]. Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1992. ———. Discours sur les re´volutions de la surface du globe. Paris: Edmond d’Ocagne, 1830. D., A. ‘‘Le Muse´e du palais des Thermes et de l’hoˆtel de Cluny.’’ Revue arche´ologique 1.1 (1844): 18–38. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species [1859]. London: Penguin, 1985. Davillier, Charles. ‘‘Les Curieux au the´aˆtre.’’ In Joseph de la Porte, L’Antiquaire: Come´die en trois actes. Paris: Aubry, 1870. Delille, Jacques. ‘‘L’Homme des champs’’ [1800]. In Oeuvres. Paris: Lefe`vre, 1833. De Quincey, Thomas. Suspiria de Profundis [1845]. In Confessions of an English OpiumEater, and Other Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy [1846]. London: Penguin, 1998. Diderot, Denise. ‘‘L’anticomanie’’ [1894]. In Extraits. Paris: Hachette, 1909. ———. Lettres a` Sophie Volland. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. ———. Ruines et paysages: Salon de 1767. Paris: Hermann, 1995. Drummond, W., and Robert Walpole. Herculanensia, or Archeological and Philological Dissertations, Containing a Manuscript Found Among the Ruins of Herculaneum. London: Bulmer and Co., 1810. Dumas, Alexandre. Caligula. In Oeuvres comple`tes. Paris: Michel Le´vy, 1874. ———. Impressions de Voyage. Le Corricolo [1843]. Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1897.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:01

PS

PAGE 279

280 b i b l i o g r a p h y Dupaty, Pre´sident de. Travels Through Italy in a Series of Letters [1785]. London: Robinson, 1788. Egger, E. ‘‘Pole´mon, le voyageur arche´ologue.’’ Revue arche´ologique 3.2 (1846–47). Eliot, George. Romola [1863]. London: Everyman, 1999. Fe´nelon. Lettre a` l’Acade´mie Franc¸aise sur la grammaire, la rhe´torique, la poe´tique et l’histoire [1713]. Paris: Euge`ne Belin, 1879. Figuier, Louis. La Terre avant le de´luge. Paris: Hachette, 1879. Flaubert, Gustave. ‘‘Bibliomanie.’’ In Oeuvres de jeunesse. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 2001. ———. Bouvard et Pe´cuchet. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. ———. Correspondance. Ed. Bernard Masson. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. ———. Correspondance. 4 vols. Ed. Jean Bruneau. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 1973–98. ———. Salammboˆ [1862]. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. ———. Voyage a` Carthage [1858]. In Voyages. Paris: Arle´a, 1998. Fournier, Edouard. Paris de´moli: Mosaı¨que de ruines. Pref. The´ophile Gautier. Paris: Auguste Aubry, 1855. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents [1930]. New York: Norton, 1989. Gautier, The´ophile. Arria Marcella: Souvenir de Pompe´i [1852], Avatar [1856], Jettatura [1856], and ‘‘Le Pied de momie’’ [1840], In Re´cits fantastiques. Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1981. ———. Les Beaux-Arts en Europe. Paris: Michel Le´vy Fre`res, 1855. ———. Le Capitaine Fracasse [1863]. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. ———. E´maux et Came´es [1852]. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. ———. Exposition de 1859. Ed. Wolfgang Drost and Ulrike Henninges. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universita¨tsverlag, 1992. ———. ‘‘La Femme de Diome`de’’ [1860]. In The´aˆtre, myste`re, come´dies et ballets. Paris: Charpentier, 1877. ———. Les Grotesques. Paris: Michel Le´vy Fre`res, 1853. ———. Histoire du romantisme [1871]. Paris: Charpentier et Cie, 1874. ———. Italia. Voyage en Italie [1852]. Paris: La Boıˆte a` Documents, 1997. ———. Mademoiselle de Maupin [1835–36]. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966. ———. Une Nuit de Cle´opaˆtre and Le Roi Candaule. In Nouvelles. Paris: Charpentier, 1889. ———. Le Palais pompe´ien: E´tude sur la maison gre´co-romaine, ancienne re´sidence du Prince Napole´on. With Arse`ne Houssaye and Charles Coligny. Paris: Palais pompe´ien, 1860. ———. Paris et les Parisiens. Paris: La Boıˆte a` Documents, 1996. ———. Le Roman de la momie [1857–58]. Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1966. ———. Salon de 1847. Paris: Hetzel, 1847. Gay, Delphine. ‘‘Le dernier jour de Pompe´i’’ [1827]. In Essais poe´tiques, 4th ed. Paris: Dupont, 1828. Gell, William. Pompeiana [1819]. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852. ———. Pompeiana: The Result of Excavations Since 1819. London, 1835. Gibbon, Edward. Memoirs of My Life. London: Nelson, 1966.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:02

PS

PAGE 280

bibliography

281

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Italienische Reise [1816–17]. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1976. Goncourt, Edmond et Jules de. ‘‘Caylus’’ [1858]. In Portraits intimes du six-huitie`me sie`cle, in Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 38. Paris: Slatkine Reprints, 1986. ———. Charles Demailly [1860]. Paris: Flammarion, 2007. ———. Journal [1851–96]. 3 vols. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989. ———. Notes sur l’Italie [1855–56]. Paris: Editions Desjonque`res, 1996. Grainville, M. de. Le Dernier homme. Paris: Deterville, 1811. Guizot, Franc¸ois. The History of Civilization in Europe [1828]. Trans. William Hazlitt [1844]. London: Penguin, 1997. ———. Histoire de la civilisation en France [1829]. Vol. 3. Paris: Didier, 1876. Haggard, Rider. King Solomon’s Mines [1885]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hardy, Thomas. ‘‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork’’ [1885]. In A Changed Man and Other Stories [1913]. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984. Hegel, G. W. F. Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Trans. Leo Rauch. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988. Hemans, Felicia. ‘‘The Treasures of the Deep’’ [1823]. In Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Literary Texts, 2002. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit [1774]. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997. Hoffmann, E. T. A. ‘‘Die Bergwerke zu Falun.’’ In Sa¨mtliche Werke, vol. 4. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2001. Houssaye, Arse`ne. Les Confessions. Souvenirs d’un demi-sie`cle, 1830–1880. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971. Hugo, Victor. ‘‘La Bande noire’’ [1823] and ‘‘Lui’’ [1827]. In Odes et Ballades. Les Orientales. Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1968. ———. La Le´gende des sie`cles. 2 vols. Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1979. ———. Les Mise´rables [1862]. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. ———. Notre-Dame de Paris [1831]. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. ———. Pre´face de Cromwell [1827]. In Oeuvres comple`tes: Critique. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985. ———. Le Rhin [1845]. In Voyages. Paris: Laffont, 1987. ———. ‘‘Sur Walter Scott: A` propos de Quentin Durward’’ [1823]. In Oeuvres comple`tes: Critique. Paris: Laffont, 1985. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. ‘‘Betrachtungen u¨ber die Weltgeschichte.’’ In Schriften zur Anthropologie und Geschichte. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1960. ———. ‘‘Muse´e des petits Augustins’’ [1799]. In Werke, vol. 2. Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag, 1904. ¨ ber die Aufgabe des Geschichtschreibers’’ [1821]. In Werke, vol. 4. Berlin: B. ———. ‘‘U Behr’s Verlag, 1905. ¨ ber das Studium des Alterthums, und des Griechischen insbesondere’’ [1793]. ———. ‘‘U In Werke, vol. 1. Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag, 1903.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:03

PS

PAGE 281

282

bibliography

Jahyer, Fe´lix. Salon de 1866. Paris: Librairie centrale, 1866. James, Henry. Italian Hours [1909]. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Jouy¨, Victor de. L’Hermite de la Chausse´e-d’Antin, ou observations sur les moeurs et usages parisiens au commencement du XIXe sie`cle. 4 vols. Paris: Pillet, 1815. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Ke´ratry, E. de. Les Ruines de Pompe´i. Paris: Hachette, 1867. Kisˇ, Danilo. The Encyclopedia of the Dead [1983]. London: Penguin, 1991. La Bruye`re, Jean de. Les Caracte`res [1688]. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Lacroix, Paul. La Prison de Pompe´ia: Trage´die en un acte et en vers. Paris: Barba, 1827. Lamartine, Alphonse de. Voyage en Orient [1835]. Paris: Nizet, 1959. Lantier, Etienne-Francois de. Voyages d’Ante´nor en Gre`ce et en Asie, avec des notions sur l’Egypte, manuscrit grec trouve´ a` Herculanum. Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1836. Larousse, Pierre. ‘‘Pompe´i, le dernier jour de.’’ In Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe sie`cle, 12:1374–75. Las Cases, Emmanuel de. Me´morial de Sainte-He´le`ne. 2 vols. Paris: Seuil, 1968. Laure´al, S.-F.-S. Maisony de. L’He´racle´ade, ou Herculanum enseveli sous la lave du Ve´suve. Paris: Delaunay, 1837. Layard, Austen Henry. Nineveh and Its Remains. New York: George P. Putnam, 1849. Lemercier, Adrien. Les derniers jours de Pompe´i: Imite´ de Bulwer. Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1840. Lenormant, Charles. ‘‘Arche´ologie.’’ Revue arche´ologique. Paris: Leleux, 1844, Part 1, April 15–September 15. Lessing, G. E. Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts [1777/1780]. In Werke. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979. Longpe´rier, Adrien de. ‘‘Ninive et Khorsabad,’’ Revue arche´ologique 1.1 (1844): 213–34. Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology [1830–33]. London: Penguin, 1997. ———. The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man. Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1863. Macaulay, Lord Thomas Babington. ‘‘History’’ [1828] and ‘‘Hallam’s Constitutional History’’ [1828]. In Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 1. Boston: Weeks, Jordan, and Co., 1840. ———. History of England. In Complete Works. New York: AMS Press, 1980. Maistre, Joseph de. Conside´rations sur la France [1797]. Paris: Complexe, 1988. Malraux, Andre´. La Voie royale [1930]. Paris: Librairie Ge´ne´rale Franc¸aise, 1992. Mangon-Delalande. ‘‘L’Arche´ologue.’’ Avranche: Socie´te´ d’Arche´ologie d’Avranche, 1844. Marmontel. ‘‘Le Connaisseur.’’ In Contes moraux [1755–59], in Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 2. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852]. New York: Penguin, 1992. Mazois, F. Les Ruines de Pompe´i. 4 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1824. Medina, Louisa. The Last Days of Pompeii. New York: Samuel French, 1844.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:04

PS

PAGE 282

b i b l i o g r a p h y 283 Mercier, Louis Se´bastien. Mon Bonnet de nuit [1784–85] and Du The´aˆtre [1773]. Ed. JeanClaude Bonnet. Paris: Mercure de France, 1994. ———. Le Tableau de Paris [1781–88]. 2 vols. Ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet. Paris: Mercure de France, 1994. Me´rime´e, Prosper. E´tudes sur les arts du moyen aˆge. Paris: Flammarion, 1967. ———. ‘‘La Ve´nus d’Ille’’ [1837]. In Colomba. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Me´ry, Joseph. ‘‘Les Ruines de Paris.’’ In Un Mariage a` Paris. Paris: Arnauld de Vressel, 1856. Available at http://gallica.bnf.fr/utopie/Text4.htm. Me´ry, Joseph and Hadot. Herculanum. Ope´ra en 4 actes, musique par Fe´licien David. Paris: Michel Le´vy Fre`res, 1859. ———. Herculanum, ou l’orgie romaine. Marseilles: Feissait aıˆne´ et Demonchy, 1834. Meuris, Euge`ne. La Destruction de Pompe´¨ıa [1847]. Limoges: Euge`ne Ardant, 1891. Michelet, Jules. Cours au Colle`ge de France, 1838–1844. Vol. 1. Ed. Paul Viallaneix. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. ———. Histoire de France. Le Moyen aˆge [1833–44]. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981. ———. Histoire de la Re´volution franc¸aise. 2 vols. [1848–53]. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979. ———. Histoire romaine. Paris: L. Hachette, 1831. ———. Introduction a` l’histoire universelle [1831]. Paris: Flammarion, 1897. ———. Journal. Vol. 1 [1828–48]. Ed. Paul Viallaneix. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. ———. La Mer [1861]. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. ———. Le Peuple [1846]. Ed. Paul Viallaneix. Paris: Flammarion, 1974. ———. La Sorcie`re [1862]. Ed. Paul Viallaneix. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966. Millin, A.-L. Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts. 3 vols. Paris: Desray, 1806. ———. Introduction a` l’e´tude des me´dailles. Paris: Magasin encyclope´dique, 1796. Moigno, F. ‘‘Le Palais pompe´ien.’’ Les Mondes, June 24, 1869. Monod, G. ‘‘Du Progre`s des e´tudes historiques en France depuis le XVIe sie`cle.’’ Revue historique 1 (January–June 1876): 5–38. Montalembert, Charles Forbes. Du Vandalisme et du catholicisme dans l’art [1833]. Paris: Debe´court, 1839. ———. Histoire de sainte Elisabeth de Hongrie, duchesse de Thuringe. Paris: Bailly, 1836. Montesquieu. Lettres persanes [1721]. Paris: Librairie Ge´ne´rale Franc¸aise, 1984. Montfaucon, Dom Bernard de. L’Antiquite´ explique´e et repre´sente´e en figures. 10 vols. Paris: Florentin Delaulne, 1719–24. Morris, William. Artist, Writer, Socialist. Vol. 1. Ed. May Morris. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936. Mortillet, Gabriel de. L’Homme fossile. Annecy: L. The´sio, 1862. Musset, Alfred de. La Confession d’un enfant du sie`cle [1836]. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Nadaillac, Jean-Franc¸ois-Albert Du Pouget de. La dernie`re ´election municipale a` Pompe´i. Paris: De Soye et Fils, 1895. Nerval, Ge´rard de. Aure´lia [1855]. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. ———. ‘‘ ‘Faust’ de Goethe suivi du second ‘Faust’ ’’ [1840]. In Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 1989. ———. Les Illumine´s [1852]. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:04

PS

PAGE 283

284

bibliography

———. ‘‘Isis’’ [1847] and ‘‘Octavie’’ [1853]. In Les Filles du feu. Paris: Librairie Ge´ne´rale Franc¸aise, 1999. ———. Sylvie [1853]. Paris: Bordas, 1985. Newton, Charles. ‘‘On the Study of Archaeology’’ [1850]. In Essays on Art and Archaeology. London: Macmillan, 1880. Nietzsche, Friedrich. ‘‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.’’ In Untimely Meditations [1873–76]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Nodier, Charles. ‘‘Le Bibliomane.’’ In Contes. Paris: Garnier,1961. ———. ‘‘De la fin prochaine du genre humain.’’ In Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 5. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1998. Nothomb, Ame´lie. Pe´plum. Paris: Albin Michel, 1996. Pascal, Blaise. Pre´face. Sur le traite´ du vide [1651]. In Oeuvres. Paris: Seuil, 1963. Pater, Walter. ‘‘Demeter and Persephone’’ [1876]. In Greek Studies. London: Macmillan, 1910. ———. Marius the Epicurean [1885]. London: Penguin, 1985. ———. The Renaissance [1873]. Twickenham: Senate, 1998. Perrot, Georges. ‘‘Les E´tudes d’arche´ologie classique depuis Winckelmann jusqu’a` nos jours.’’ Revue des deux mondes 40 (August 1, 1880): 516–55. Perrot, Georges, Edmond Guillaume, and Jules Delbet. Exploration arche´ologique de la Galatie et de la Bithynie. 2 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot Fre`res, 1872. Petit-Mangin, J. A Pompe´¨ı: E´tude paı¨enne. Chartres: E´douard Garnier, 1876. Pezant, Adolphe. Voyage pittoresque a` Pompe´i, Herculanum, au Ve´suve, a` Rome et a` Naples. Paris: Cretaine, 1839. Pixere´court., R.-C. Guilbert de. La Teˆte de mort, ou les ruines de Pompeı¨a: Me´lodrame en trois actes. Paris: Chez Quay, 1828. Planche, Gustave. ‘‘Litte´rature dramatique: Le Joueur de fluˆte—Les Come´dies de M. Augier.’’ Revue des deux mondes (January–March 1851). ———. Salon de 1847. Revue des deux mondes (1847): 354–67. Pliny the Younger. Lettres. Paris: Flammarion, 2002. Pliny the Elder. Naturalis Historia: English & Latin Selections. St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, [1970]. ‘‘Pompe´i.’’ L’Artiste (1866): 81–84. Proust, Marcel. Le Temps retrouve´ [1927]. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Quatreme`re de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostome. ‘‘Dissertation sur la mosaı¨que dite d’Alexandre a` Arbelles’’ [1824]. In Franc¸ois Mazois, Les Ruines de Pompe´i, vol. 4. ———. Lettres au Ge´ne´ral Miranda sur le prejudice qu’occasionnens aux arts et a la science le de´placement des monuments de l’art de l’Italie, le de´membrement de ses ´ecoles, et la spoliation de ses collections, galleries, muse´es, etc. [1796]. Paris: Fayard, 1989. ———. Lettres ´ecrites de Londres a` Rome, et addresse´es a` M. Canova, sur les marbres d’Elgin [1818]. In Conside´rations sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art. Paris: Fayard, 1989. ———. Monuments et ouvrages d’art antiques restitue´s. Paris: Jules Renouard, 1829. ———. The True, the Fictive, and the Real: The Historical Dictionary of Quatreme`re de Quincy. Ed. Samir Youne´s. London: Andreas Papadakis, 1999.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:05

PS

PAGE 284

b i b l i o g r a p h y 285 Quinet, Edgar. La Cre´ation [1869]. In Oeuvres comple`tes, vols. 21–22. Paris: Librairie Germer-Baillie`re. Quinsonas, Emmanuel de. Le dernier mot sur la maison de Diome`de, ou un revenant de Pompe´i. Paris: Balitout, 1869. Ranke, Leopold von. ‘‘On the Character of Historical Science’’ [1830s] and ‘‘Preface to the First Edition of Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations’’ [1824]. In The Theory and Practice of History, ed. Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1973. ———. Die Grosssen Ma¨chte [1833]. In Preussische Geschichte. Essen: Emil Vollmer Verlag. Raoul-Rochette, De´sire´. Cours d’arche´ologie. Paris: Euge`ne Renduel, 1828. Reclus, E´lise´e. ‘‘Les Cite´s lacustres de la Suisse.’’ Revue des deux mondes 37 (1862). Renan, Ernest. ‘‘L’ancienne Egypte’’ [1865], ‘‘M. Augustin Thierry’’ [1857], ‘‘La De´couverte de Ninive’’ [1853], ‘‘Les Origines de la langue franc¸aise’’ [1853], ‘‘La Poe´sie des races celtiques’’ [1854], and ‘‘Le XVIIIe centenaire de Pompe´i’’ [1879]. In Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 2. Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1948. ———. L’Avenir de la science [1890]. Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1995. ———. Mission de Phe´nicie. Paris: Imprimerie impe´riale, 1864. ———. ‘‘Philosophie de l’histoire contemporaine’’ [1859] and ‘‘Lettre a` M. Marcerllin Berthelot’’ [1863]. In Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 1. Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1948. ———. ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’’ [1882]. In Ernest Renan et l’Allemagne, ed. E´mile Bure´. New York: Brentano’s, 1945. ———. La Re´forme intellectuelle et morale [1871]. Paris: Editions Complexe, 1990. ———. Vie de Je´sus [1863]. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Rey-Dusseuil, Marius. ‘‘Essai sur le roman historique.’’ In A. Manzoni, Les Fianc¸es. Trans. Rey-Dusseuil. Paris: Charpentier, 1845. Rigault, Hippolyte. ‘‘Une Maison romaine aux Champs-Elyse´es.’’ In Conversations litte´raires et morales. Paris: Charpentier, 1859. Romanelli, L’Abbe´ Dominique. Voyage a` Pompe´i. Paris: Houdaille et Veniger, 1829. Ruskin, John. ‘‘The Opening of the Crystal Palace’’ [1854]. In Complete Works, vol. 11. New York: Bryan, Taylor and Co., 1894. ———. The Seven Lamps of Architecture [1849]. New York: Dover, 1989. ———. The Stones of Venice [1853]. New York: Da Capo Press, 1960. Sainte-Beuve. ‘‘L’Abbe´ Barthe´lemy’’ [1852]. In Causeries du lundi, vol. 7. Paris: Garnier. ———. ‘‘De la litte´rature industrielle’’ [1839]. In Pour la critique. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. ———. Tableau historique et critique de la poe´sie et du the´aˆtre franc¸ais au XVIe sie`cle. Paris: Charpentier [1828], 1843. Saint-Non, J.-C. Richard de. Voyage pittoresque a` Naples et Sicile [1781–86]. Paris: Dufour et Cie, 1829. Voyage undertaken in 1777. Scharf, George. The Pompeian Court in the Crystal Palace. London: Crystal Palace Library, 1854. Schiller, Friedrich. ‘‘Pompeji und Herkulanum’’ [1804]. In Werke und Briefe, vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2000.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:06

PS

PAGE 285

286 b i b l i o g r a p h y ———. ‘‘Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?’’ [1789]. In Werke und Briefen, vol. 6. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2000. Schlegel, Friedrich. Athena¨ums-Fragmente [1798]. In Kritische und theoretische Schriften. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics and Criticism [1834]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ¨ ber Geschichte.’’ In Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Bk. 3, Schopenhauer, Arthur. ‘‘U Ch. 38). Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998. Scott, Walter. The Antiquary [1816]. London: Penguin, 1998. ———. Ivanhoe [1819]. London: Penguin, 1986. ———. Quentin Durward [1823]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. Waverley [1814]. London: Penguin, 1972. Segalen, Victor. Essai sur l’exotisme. Paris: Librairie Ge´ne´rale Franc¸aise, 1986. Seure, Georges. Pompe´i: Notice sur les vues. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1907. Shelley, Mary. ‘‘Valerius: The Reanimated Roman’’ [1819]. In Collected Tales and Stories. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Shelley, Percy B. ‘‘Ode to Naples’’ [1820]. In Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Stae¨l, Madame de. Les Carnets de voyage de Mme de Stae¨l. Ed. Simone Balaye´. Geneva: Droz, 1971. ———. Corinne ou l’Italie [1807]. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. ———. De l’Allemagne [1813]. Paris: Flammarion, 1968. ———. De la litte´rature [1800]. Paris: Flammarion, 1991. Stendhal. Les Cenci [1837]. In Chroniques italiennes [1855]. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. ———. Rome, Naples et Florence [1826]. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Sue, Euge`ne. Les Myste`res de Paris. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989. Taine, Hippolyte. ‘‘M. Michelet’’ [1855–56]. In Essais de critique et d’histoire. Paris. L. Hachette, 1866. ———. Voyage en Italie [1864]. 2 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1884. Thierry, Augustin. Conside´rations sur l’histoire de France. Paris: J. Tessier, 1840. ———. Dix ans d’e´tudes historiques [1817–27]. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1883. ———. Essai sur l’histoire de la formation et des progre`s du tiers ´etat. Paris: Furne, 1853. ———. Histoire de la conqueˆte de l’Angleterre par les Normands [1825]. Paris: Furne, Jouvet et Cie, 1867. ———. Lettres sur l’histoire de France [1820]. In Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 5. Paris: Furne et Cie, 1846. ———. Re´cits des temps me´rovingiens [1833–37]. Paris: J. Tessier, 1840. Thore´, The´ophile. Salon de 1847. Paris: Alliance des Arts, 1847. Tocqueville, Alexis de. L’Ancien re´gime et la re´volution [1857]. Paris: Flammarion, 1988. ———. De la de´mocratie en Ame´rique [1835/1840]. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. ———. Souvenirs [1850]. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. To¨pffer, Rodolphe. ‘‘La Valle´e de Trient.’’ In Nouvelles genevoises. Paris: Garnier Fre`res, 185–.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:07

PS PAGE 286

b i b l i o g r a p h y 287 Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom [1871]. New York: Holt, 1889. Vale´ry, Paul. ‘‘Le Proble`me des muse´es’’ [1923]. In Pie`ces sur l’art, in Oeuvres. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. Verne, Jules. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers [1869]. Paris: Pocket, 1999. ———. Voyage au centre de la terre [1864]. Paris: Pocket, 1999. Viardot, Louis. ‘‘Pompe´i.’’ Revue des deux mondes 23 (July–September 1840): 622–39. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science [1744]. New York: Penguin, 1999. Viel-Castel, Horace de. ‘‘Les Collectionneurs.’’ In Les Franc¸ais peints par eux-meˆmes [1840– 42]. Paris: Omnibus, 2003. ———. Me´moires du Comte Horace Viel Castel sur le re`gne de Napole´on III (1851–1864). Paris: Chez Tous Les Libraires, 1888. Vigny, Alfred de. Stello. Daphne´ [1837/1913]. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. ———. ‘‘Les Oracles: Destine´es d’un Roi’’ [1862]. In Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 1986. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. ‘‘Herculanum de Fe´licien David a` l’Ope´ra’’ [1859]. In Oeuvres comple`tes. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 1986. ———. ‘‘Soir d’e´clipse.’’ In Oeuvres comple`tes. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´iade, 1986. Viollet-le-Duc. ‘‘Restauration.’’ In Dictionnaire raisonne´ de l’architecture, 8:14–34. Paris: B. Bance, 1854. Vitet, Ludovic. ‘‘Des e´tudes arche´ologiques en France.’’ Revue des deux mondes 19 (July– September 1847): 762–68. ———. ‘‘Notre-Dame de Noyon: Essai arche´ologique’’ [1844] and ‘‘L’Art et l’arche´ologie’’ [1847]. In E´tudes sur l’histoire de l’art, 4 vols. Paris: Michel Le´vy Fre`res, 1875. Vitta, E´mile. ‘‘Pompe´i: Confe´rence accompagne´e de projections.’’ Paris: Imprimerie Centrale de la Bourse, 1902. Volney, C. F. Les Ruines, ou Me´ditations sur les re´volutions des empires [1791]. Paris: Dugour et Durand, 1799. Voltaire. Zadig, ou la destine´e [1747]. In Romans et contes. Paris: Flammarion, 1966. Weichardt, Carl. Pompeji vor der Zerstoerung: Reconstructionen der Tempel und ihrer Umgebung entwurfen und ausgefuehrt von C. Weichardt, Architekt. Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1897. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen [1762]. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1997. Wordsworth, William. ‘‘Roman Antiquities Discovered at Bishopstone, Herefordshire’’ [1835]. In Complete Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. Zola, Emile. La Cure´e [1871]. In Les Rougon-Macquart. Paris: Gallimard-Ple´aide, 1960.

critical and secondary works Ackerman, Gerald M. La Vie et l’oeuvre de Jean-Le´on Ge´roˆme. Paris: ACR, 1992. Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience. London: Verso, 1993.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:08

PS PAGE 287

288

bibliography

Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989. Assmann, Jan. Religion and Cultural Memory. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006. Baecque, Antoine de. Le Corps de l’histoire: me´taphores et politique (1770–1800). Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1993. Bahn, Paul G., ed. Archaeology: The Cambridge Illustrated History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Baines, Paul. ‘‘Horace Walpole.’’ In The Literary Encyclopedia (March 21, 2002). The Literary Dictionary Company. www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec⳱true&UID⳱4587). Baldensperger, Fernand. ‘‘Le ‘genre troubadour.’ ’’ In E´tudes d’histoire litte´raire. Paris: Hachette, 1907. Bann, Stephen. The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in NineteenthCentury Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. ———. ‘‘Face-to-Face with History.’’ New Literary History 29.2 (Spring 1998): 235–46. ———. ‘‘Inscription and Identity in the Representation of the Past.’’ New Literary History 22.4 (Autumn 1991): 937–60. ———. The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. ———. Romanticism and the Rise of History. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. ———. ‘‘The Sense of the Past: Image, Text, and Object in the Formation of Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Britain.’’ In The New Historicism, ed. Aram H. Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1989. ———. ‘‘Une nouvelle vision de l’histoire.’’ In Paul Delaroche: Un Peintre dans l’histoire. Exposition au Muse´e de beaux-arts de Nantes, 22 oct. 1999–17 janv. 2000. Dir. Claude Allemand-Cosneau and Isabelle Julia. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux. Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Barthes, Roland. La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie. Paris: Cahiers du cine´ma. Gallimard. Seuil, 1980. ———. ‘‘Le Discours de l’histoire’’ [1967]. In Essais critiques IV. Paris: Seuil, 1984. ———. Michelet [1954]. Paris: Seuil, 1995. ———. ‘‘Rhe´torique de l’image’’ [1964]. In L’Obvie et l’obtus. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Bellot, Laurence. La maison pompe´ienne de S.A.I. le Prince Napole´on. Master’s thesis, Paris IV, dir. Bruno Foucart, Franc¸oise Hamon, and Sylvie Aubenas, 1996–98. Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983. ———. ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment.’’ In Reflections. New York: Schocken, 1986. ———. ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’’ In Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1968. Benveniste, E´mile. ‘‘Civilisation. Contribution a` l’histoire du mot.’’ In Proble`mes de linguistique ge´ne´rale. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Berce´, Franc¸oise. ‘‘Arcisse de Caumont et les socie´te´s savantes.’’ In Lieux de me´moire II.ii, ed. Pierre Nora. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:08

PS

PAGE 288

b i b l i o g r a p h y 289 ———. Des Monuments historiques au patrimoine, du XVIIIe sie`cle a` nos jours. Paris: Flammarion, 2000. ———. ‘‘Les Enjeux et les contradictions de l’arche´ologie et de la politique sous la monarchie de juillet et le second empire.’’ In Prosper Me´rime´e: E´crivain, arche´ologue, historien, ed. Antonia Fonyi. Geneva: Droz, 1999. Bernard, Claudie. Le Passe´ recompose´: Le Roman historique franc¸ais du dix-neuvie`me sie`cle. Paris: Hachette, 1996. Bernard-Griffiths, Simone. ‘‘Histoire naturelle et histoire dans la philosophie d’Edgar Quinet.’’ Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des E´tudes franc¸aises 47 (May 1995): 215–46. ———. ‘‘Lecture de l’Ahasve´rus (1833) d’Edgar Quinet: Regards sur une palinge´ne´sie romantique du mythe du Juif errant.’’ Romantisme 45 (1984): 79–104. ———. ‘‘Quinet l’enchanteur: Mythologie de l’amour et philosophie de l’histoire.’’ Romantisme 68 (1990–92): 111–25. Blin, Richard. ‘‘Le Corps barbare.’’ La Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise 462–63 (July–August 1991): 183–87. Blix, Go¨ran. ‘‘La Palinge´ne´sie romantique: Histoire et immortalite´ de Charles Bonnet a` Pierre Leroux.’’ In Les Formes du temps: Rythme, histoire, temporalite´, ed. Paule Petitier and Gise`le Se´ginger. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2007. Bohrer, Frederick N. ‘‘Inventing Assyria: Exoticism and Reception in Nineteenth-Century England and France.’’ Art Bulletin 80.2 (June 1998): 336–56. Braudel, Fernand. On History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Brilliant, Richard. Pompeii, AD 79: The Treasure of Rediscovery. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1979. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Calder, William M., and David A. Traill, eds. Myth, Scandal, and History: The Heinrich Schliemann Controversy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986. Campbell, James L. Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986. C ¸ elik, Zeynep. Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Chastel, Andre´. ‘‘La Notion de patrimoine.’’ In Lieux de me´moire II: La Nation, vol. 3, ed. Pierre Nora. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Chevalier, Louis. Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses a` Paris pendant la premie`re moitie´ du XIXe sie`cle [1958]. Paris: Hachette, 1978. Chevallier, Elisabeth. ‘‘Les Peintures de´couvertes a` Herculanum: Pompe´i et Stabies vues par les voyageurs du XVIIIe sie`cle.’’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts 90.1307 (December 1977). Choay, Franc¸oise. L’Alle´gorie du patrimoine. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Cohen, Claudine, and Jean-Jacques Hublin. Boucher de Perthes: Les Origines romantiques de la pre´histoire. Paris: Belin, 1990. Compagnon, Antoine. Les Antimodernes, de Joseph de Maistre a` Roland Barthes. Paris: Gallimard, 2005.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:09

PS

PAGE 289

290 b i b l i o g r a p h y Corbin, Alain. Le Monde retrouve´ de Louis-Franc¸ois Pinagot: Sur les traces d’un inconnu (1798–1876). Paris: Flammarion, 1998. Cozea, Angela. ‘‘Salammboˆ dans une perspective romane: La traduction d’Hannibal comme ‘survie.’ ’’ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 17.3–4 (September– December 1990): 307–17. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Crawford, Robert. ‘‘Pater’s Renaissance, Andrew Lang, and Anthropological Romanticism.’’ ELH 53.4 (Winter 1986): 849–79. Crossley, Ceri. French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians, Quinet, Michelet. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. ‘‘L’Origine du monde dans la philosophie romantique des sciences.’’ In Litte´ratures et origines, Actes du colloque international de Clermont-Ferrand, 17–19 novembre 1993. Saint-Genouph: Nizet. Culler, A. Dwight. The Victorian Mirror of History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. Dahl, Curtis. ‘‘A Quartet of Pompeian Pastiches.’’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 14.3 (October 1955): 3–7. Damisch, Hubert. ‘‘L’Arche de Noe´.’’ Critique 476–77, vol. 43 (January–February 1987): 5–22. Deguise, Pierre. ‘‘Constant et Barante.’’ in Benjamin Constant, Madame de Stae¨l et le groupe de Coppet. Actes du deuxie`me congre`s de Lausanne et du troisie`me colloque de Coppet, 15–19 juillet, 1980. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1982. Dejean de la Batie, Marie-Claude. ‘‘La Maison pompe´ienne du Prince Napole´on, avenue Montaigne.’’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts 87 (April 1976). Delon, Michel. L’Ide´e d’e´nergie au tournant des Lumie`res (1770–1820). Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988. Denis, Antoine. Baron de Barante, 1782–1866: Homme politique, diplomate et historien. Paris: Honore´ Champion, 2000. De´otte, Jean-Louis. Le Muse´e, l’origine de l’esthe´tique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. Foi et savoir. Paris: Seuil, 2000. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images. Paris: Minuit, 2000. ———. L’Empreinte. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997. ———. La peinture incarne´e. Paris: Minuit, 1985. Do¨hl, Hartmut. ‘‘Schliemann the Archaeologist.’’ In Myth, Scandel, and History, ed. William M. Calder III and David A. Traill. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986. Dowling, Linda. ‘‘Walter Pater and Archaeology: The Reconciliation with Earth.’’ Victorian Studies 3.2 (Winter 1988). Duchet, Claude. ‘‘L’Illusion historique: l’enseignement des pre´faces, 1815–1832.’’ Revue d’histoire litte´raire de la France 2–3 (March–June 1975): 245–67.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:10

PS

PAGE 290

bibliography

291

Durkheim, E´mile. Le Suicide. Paris: Quadrige-Presses universitaires de France, 1995. Fauvel, Daniel, and Yvan Leclerc, eds. Salammboˆ de Flaubert: Histoire, Fiction. Paris: Champion, 1999. Febvre, Lucien. ‘‘Civilisation: E´volution d’un mot et d’un groupe d’ide´es’’ [1930]. In Pour une histoire a` part entie`re. Paris: SEVPEN, 1962. Ferris, Ina. ‘‘Pedantry and the Question of Enlightenment History: The Figure of the Antiquary in Scott.’’ European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 273–83. Foucart, Bruno. ‘‘Viollet-le-Duc et la restauration.’’ In Lieux de Me´moire II. La Nation, vol. 2, ed. Pierre Nora. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Furet, Franc¸ois. ‘‘La Naissance de l’histoire.’’ In L’Atelier de l’histoire. Paris: Flammarion, 1982. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method [1960]. New York: Continuum, 1995. Gaehtgens, Thomas W. ‘‘Le Muse´e historique de Versailles.’’ In Lieux de me´moire II. La Nation, vol. 3, ed. Pierre Nora. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. ———. Versailles: De la re´sidence royale au muse´e historique. Paris: Albin Michel, 1984. Gauchet, Marcel. ‘‘Les Lettres sur l’histoire de France d’Augustin Thierry.’’ In Lieux de me´moire II. La Nation, vol. 2, ed. Pierre Nora. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Gengembre, Ge´rard. ‘‘Bonald, la doctrine pour et contre l’histoire.’’ In Les Re´sistances a` la re´volution. Actes du colloque de Rennes, September 17–21, 1985. Paris: Editions Imago, 1987. ———. La contre-re´volution, ou, l’histoire de´sespe´rante: Histoire des ide´es politiques. Paris: Imago, 1989. Ginzburg, Carlo. ‘‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.’’ In Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Glencross, Michael. Reconstructing Camelot: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995. Go¨bel, Walter. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Systemreferenz, Funktion, literarischer Wert in seinem Erza¨hlwerk. Heidelberg: Universita¨tsverlag C. Winter, 1993. ———. ‘‘Entertaining Knowledge: Systemreferenz in Bulwers ‘Last Days of Pompeii.’ ’’ Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 40 (1990): 399–407. Gossman, Lionel. Between History and Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Goudineau, Christian. Le Dossier Vercinge´torix. Paris: Actes Sud/Errance, 2001. Grafton, Anthony. Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. ———. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:10

PS

PAGE 291

292 b i b l i o g r a p h y Gran-Aymerich, Eve. Les Chercheurs de passe´, 1798–1945. Paris: CNRS E´ditions, 2007. ———. Dictionnaire biographique d’arche´ologie, 1798–1945. Paris: CNRS E´ditions, 2001. Gran-Aymerich, Eveline and Jean. ‘‘Ernest Renan, fondateur de l’arche´ologie phe´nicienne.’’ Arche´ologia 224 (May 1987): 71–79. ———. ‘‘Visions de la Gaule inde´pendante au XIXe sie`cle: Mythe historique et re´alite´ arche´ologique.’’ In Le Monde des images en Gaule et dans les provinces voisines. Paris: Editions Errance, 1988. Greene, Christopher M. ‘‘Romanticism, Cultural Nationalism and Politics in the July Monarchy: The Contribution of Ludovic Vitet.’’ French History 4.4 (December 1990): 487–509. Grell, Chantal. Herculanum et Pompe´i dans les re´cits des voyageurs franc¸ais du XVIIIe sie`cle. Naples: Centre Jean Be´rard, 1982. ———. ‘‘Les Voyageurs a` Herculanum.’’ Dix-huitie`me sie`cle 22 (1990): 83–94. Gue´gan, Ste´phane. Chasse´riau: Un autre romantisme. Paris: Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux, 2004. Guise, Rene´. ‘‘Balzac et le roman historique: Notes sur quelques projets.’’ Revue d’histoire litte´raire de la France 2–3 (March–June 1975): 353–72. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. ‘‘ ‘Narrating the Past Just as If It Were Your Own Time’: An Essay on the Anthropology of Historiography.’’ In Making Sense in Life and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Halbwachs, Maurice. Les Cadres sociaux de la me´moire. Paris: Albin Michel, 2000. Hamon, Philippe. Expositions: Litte´rature et architecture au XIXe sie`cle. Paris: Jose´ Corti, 1989. Hartog, Franc¸ois. E´vidence de l’histoire. Paris: E´ditions de l’E´cole des Hautes E´tudes en Sciences Sociales, 2005. Haskell, Francis. History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. ———. ‘‘The Manufacture of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Painting.’’ Past and Present 53 (November 1971): 109–220. Hautecoeur, Louis. Rome et la renaissance de l’antiquite´ a` la fin du XVIIIe sie`cle. Paris: Fontemoing, 1912. Hersant, Yves, ed. Italies: Anthologie des voyageurs franc¸ais aux XVIIIe et XIXe sie`cles. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988. Huxley, Thomas. ‘‘On the Method of Zadig: Retrospective Prophecy as a Function of Science’’ [1880]. In Science and Hebrew Tradition: Essays, 1–23. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. Jacobsen, Brigitte. ‘‘Reconstruction et vision de l’histoire dans Notre-Dame de Paris.’’ In Repre´sentations de l’histoire. Actes du colloque franco-allemand de Cologne 17–18 juin 1988. Janus, 1988. Jeffrey, Lloyd N. ‘‘Cuvierian Catastrophism in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and ‘Mont Blanc.’ ’’ South Central Bulletin 38.4 (Winter 1978): 148–52. Jenson, Deborah. Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in PostRevolutionary France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:11

PS

PAGE 292

b i b l i o g r a p h y 293 Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. ‘‘Antiquarianism, the History of Objects, and the History of Art before Winckelmann.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas (2001): 524–41. Kohlhauser, Michael. ‘‘La Part de l’histoire: romantisme, relativisme.’’ Romantisme 114.4 (2001): 5–29. ¨ ber die Auflo¨sung des Topos im Horizont Koselleck, Reinhart. ‘‘Historia Magistra Vitae: U neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte.’’ In Vergangene Zukunft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. ———. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. ———. Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. Kriegel, Blandine. L’Histoire a` l’aˆge classique. 4 vols. Paris: Presses universitaires de FranceQuadrige, 1996. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Laming-Emperaire, Annette. Origines de l’arche´ologie pre´historique en France. Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1964. Lanson, Rene´. Le Gouˆt du moyen aˆge en France au XVIIIe sie`cle. Paris: G. van Oest, 1926. Latane´, David E., Jr. ‘‘ ‘See you?’: Browning, Byron, and the Revolutionary Deluge in Sordello, Book I.’’ Victorian Poetry 22.1 (Spring 1984): 85–91. Lavaud, Martine. ‘‘ ‘Grotesque XIXe sie`cle’: Le vertige relativiste des exhumations litte´raires.’’ Romantisme 114.4 (2001): 43–49. Lefebvre, Georges. La Naissance de l’historiographie moderne. Paris: Flammarion, 1971. Lefort, Claude. ‘‘Permanence du the´ologico-politique?’’ In Essais sur le politique, XIXe–XXe sie`cles. Paris: Seuil, 1986. Le Gall, Joe¨l. ‘‘La pre´paration de L’Histoire de Jules Ce´sar de l’empereur Napole´on III.’’ Bulletin de la Socie´te´ Nationale des Antiquaires de France (1982): 129–32. Lelievre, Michel. ‘‘Chateaubriand historien et le recours aux re´cits.’’ In Re´cit et histoire, ed. Jean Bessie`re. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984. Leppmann, Wolfgang. Pompeji: Eine Stadt in Literatur und Leben. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1966. Levine, Joseph M. Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987. Levine, Philippa. The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Lewis, Norman N. ‘‘Petra: The First-Comers.’’ In Petra Rediscovered, ed. Glenn Markoe, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003. Llewelyn, Briony. ‘‘The Real and the Ideal: Petra in the Minds and Eyes of NineteenthCentury British and American Artist-Travelers.’’ In Petra Rediscovered, ed. Glenn Markoe. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003. Lo¨with, Karl. Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Loyer, Franc¸ois. ‘‘Du romantisme a` l’arche´ologie: L’Invention de la notion de patrimoine.’’ In Patrimoine et socie´te´, ed. Jean-Yves Andrieux. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1998.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:11

PS

PAGE 293

294 b i b l i o g r a p h y Luka´cs, Georg. The Historical Novel [1937]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. ———. ‘‘Raconter ou de´crire ?’’ [1936]. In Proble`mes du re´alisme. Paris: L’Arche, 1975. ———. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Maigron, Louis. Le Roman historique a` l’e´poque romantique: Essai sur l’influence de Walter Scott. Paris: Champion, 1912. Maison, Franc¸oise. ‘‘L’Histoire de Jules Ce´sar par Napole´on III.’’ In Napole´on III et l’arche´ologie: Fouilles en foreˆt de Compie`gne sous le Second Empire, 21–29. Ville de Compie`gne, 2000. Maleuvre, Didier. Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Malley, Shawn Cameron. Nineteenth-Century Archaeology and the Retrieval of the Past: Carlyle, Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, Pater, and Haggard. Ph.D. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1996. Markoe, Glenn, ed. Petra Rediscovered: Lost City of the Nabataeans. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003. Martin, Suzanne. ‘‘Reˆve initiatique a` Pompe´i: Nerval et le mythe du ‘dieu qui meurt.’ ’’ E´tudes franc¸aises 33.2 (Fall 1997): 111–26. McCalla, Arthur. A Romantic Historiosophy: The Philosophy of History of Pierre-Simon Ballanche. Boston: Brill, 1998. McClellan, Andrew. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in 18th-Century Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. McGovern, Francis H. and John N. ‘‘Paul E´mile Botta.’’ Biblical Archaeologist 49.2 (June 1986): 109–13. Michel, Pierre. Un mythe romantique: Les barbares, 1789–1848. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1981. Miller, Norbert. Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole und die A¨sthetik der scho¨nen Unregelma¨ssigkeit. Munich: Hanser, 1986. Milza, Pierre. Napole´on III. Paris: Perrin, 2004. Molino, J. ‘‘Qu’est-ce que le roman historique?’’ Revue d’histoire litte´raire de la France 2–3 (March–June 1975): 195–234. Momigliano, Arnaldo. ‘‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian.’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13.3–4 (1950): 285–315. Mozet, Nicole. ‘‘La bande noire ou un morceau d’histoire post-re´volutionnaire dont la litte´rature n’a pas raconte´ l’histoire.’’ In Litte´rature et re´volutions en France, ed. G. T. Harris and P. M. Wetherill. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990. ———. ‘‘Un roman du vandalisme en 1837: La Bande noire de Jules A. David.’’ In Re´volution franc¸aise et ‘‘vandalisme re´volutionnaire.’’ Colloque international de ClermontFerrand, 15–17 de´cembre 1988. Paris: Universitas, 1992. Murphy, Kevin D. Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Ve´zelay. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Neefs, Jacques. ‘‘Augustin Thierry: Le moment de la ‘ve´ritable’ histoire de France.’’ Romantisme 28–29 (1980): 289–303.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:12

PS

PAGE 294

b i b l i o g r a p h y 295 Nicolet, Claude. La Fabrique d’une nation: La France entre Rome et les Germains. Paris: Perrin, 2003. Nora, Pierre. ‘‘L’E`re de la comme´moration.’’ In Lieux de me´moire III: Les France. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. ———. ‘‘L’Histoire de France de Lavisse.’’ In Lieux de me´moire II: La Nation, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Oettermann, Stephen. The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Orr, Linda. Headless History. Nineteenth-Century French Historiography of the Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Patzek, Barbara. ‘‘Schliemann und die Geschichte der Archa¨ologie im neunzehnten Jahrhundert.’’ In Heinrich Schliemann nach hundert Jahren, ed. William M. Calder III and Justus Cobet. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989. Petitier, Paule. La Ge´ographie de Michelet: Territoire et mode`les naturels dans les premie`res oeuvres de Michelet. Paris: Harmattan, 2000. ———. ‘‘L’Histoire romantique, l’encyclope´die et le moi.’’ Romantisme 104 (1999): 27–38. ———. Jules Michelet: L’Homme histoire. Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 2006. ———. ‘‘Michelet et l’imprimerie: Les me´tamorphoses d’un roman familial.’’ In Varie´te´s sur Michelet, ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths. Clermont-Ferrand: Nizet, 1998. Phillips, Mark Salber. ‘‘Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 57.2 (1996): 297–316. Piggott, Stuart. Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination: Ideas from the Renaissance to the Regency. German Democratic Republic: Thames and Hudson, 1989. Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVe–XVIIIe sie`cle. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Pomian, Krzysztof, and Annie-France Laurens, eds. L’Anticomanie: La collection d’antiquite´s aux 18e et 19e sie`cles. Paris: EHESS, 1992. Pompe´i: Travaux et envois des architectes franc¸ais au XIXe sie`cle. Exhibition catalog, January 14–March 22, 1981. Paris: Ecole Nationale Supe´rieure des Beaux-Arts, 1981. Pompeii as Source and Inspiration: Reflections in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art. Exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, April 7–May 15, 1977, Ann Arbor. Poulot, Dominique. ‘‘Alexandre Lenoir et les muse´es des monuments franc¸ais.’’ In Lieux de me´moire II: La Nation, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. ———. ‘‘The Birth of Heritage: ‘Le moment Guizot.’ ’’ Oxford Art Journal 11.2 (1988): 40–56. Prat, Louis-Antoine. Inventaire ge´ne´ral des dessins: Dessins de The´odore Chasse´riau, 1819– 1856. Paris: Re´union des muse´es nationaux, 1988. Praz, Mario. ‘‘Herculaneum and European Taste.’’ Magazine of Art 32.12 (December 1939): 684–93.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:12

PS

PAGE 295

296 b i b l i o g r a p h y Prendergast, Christopher. For the People by the People? Euge`ne Sue’s Les Myste`res de Paris: A Hypothesis in the Sociology of Literature. Oxford: Legenda, 2003. Pupil, Franc¸ois. Le Style troubadour, ou la nostalgie du bon vieux temps. Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1985. Rancie`re, Jacques. La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la litte´rature. Paris: Hachette, 1998. ———. Le Partage du sensible: Esthe´tique et politique. Paris: La Fabrique, 2000. ———. Politique de la litte´rature. Paris: Galile´e, 2007. Rannaud, Ge´rald. ‘‘Stendhal et la tentation de l’histoire.’’ Romantisme 107 (2000): 5–22. Richard, Jean-Pierre. ‘‘La Nuit me´rovingienne.’’ In Proust et le monde sensible. Paris: Seuil, 1974. Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et re´cit. 3 vols. Paris: Seuil, 1983. Riegl, Aloı¨s. Le Culte moderne des monuments. Paris: Seuil, 1984. Rigney, Ann. Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le Moment Guizot. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Rosenblum, Robert. Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967. Rudwick, Martin J. S. Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Samuels, Maurice. The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in NineteenthCentury France. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. La Naissance de la litte´rature: La The´orie esthe´tique du romantisme allemand. Paris: Rue d’Ulm, 1983. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics and Criticism [1838]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Schnapp, Alain. La Conqueˆte du passe´: Aux origines de l’arche´ologie. Paris: E´ditions Carre´, 1993. Schwartz, Vanessa. ‘‘The Morgue and the Muse´e Gre´vin: Understanding the Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Sie`cle Paris.’’ In Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre, ed. Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. ———. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Sie`cle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Sergent, Bernard. Les Indo-Europe´ens: Histoire, langues, mythes. Paris: Payot, 2005. Seznec, Jean. Essais sur Diderot et l’antiquite´. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. ———. ‘‘Herculaneum and Pompeii in French Literature of the Eighteenth Century.’’ Archaeology 2.3 (September 1949): 150–58. Sherak, Constance. ‘‘Investing in the Past: Victor Hugo’s ‘La Bande noire,’ ’’ RLA X (1999): 157–63.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:13

PS

PAGE 296

b i b l i o g r a p h y 297 Springer, Carolyn. The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Italian Romanticism, 1775–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Starobinski, Jean. ‘‘The Word Civilization.’’ In Blessings in Disguise; or, the Morality of Evil. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Stierle, Karlheinz. Der Mythos von Paris: Zeichen und Bewusstsein der Stadt. Munich: C. Hanser, 1993. Sweet, Rosemary. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: Hambledon and London, 2004. ———. ‘‘Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England.’’ EighteenthCentury Studies 34.2 (2001): 181–206. Swenson, J. ‘‘A Small Change in Terminology or a Great Leap Forward? Culture and Civilization in Revolution.’’ MLN 112.3 (1997): 322–48. Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Theis, Laurent. ‘‘Guizot et les institutions de me´moire.’’ In Lieux de me´moire: La Nation, vol. 3, ed. Pierre Nora. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Trevelyan, Raleigh. The Shadow of Vesuvius: Pompeii AD 79. London: Folio Society, 1976. Underwood, Ted. ‘‘Romantic Historicism and the Afterlife.’’ PMLA 117.2 (March 2002): 231–51. Viallaneix, Paul. ‘‘Michelet: Le magiste`re de l’historien.’’ Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des E´tudes franc¸aises 47 (May 1995): 247–64. Vidler, Anthony. ‘‘Enterre´ vivant: Pompe´i et l’arche´ologie de l’inquie´tante e´trangete´.’’ Critique 476–77 (January–February 1987): 155–68. ———. ‘‘Gre´goire, Lenoir et les ‘monuments parlants,’ ’’ In La Carmagnole des muses, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet. Paris: Armand-Collin, 1988. Walch, Jean. Les Maıˆtres de l’histoire: 1815–1850. Geneva: Editions Slatkine, 1986. Ward, Patricia A. ‘‘Barante’s Historiography of Terror.’’ In The Play of Terror in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. John T. Booker and Allan H. Pasco. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Wetzel, Andreas. ‘‘Reconstructing Carthage: Archaeology and the Historical Novel.’’ Mosaic 21.1 (Winter 1987): 13–23. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. ———. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. ———. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. ¨ ffentlichkeit im Zintzen, Christiane. Von Pompeji nach Troja: Archa¨ologie, Literatur und O 19. Jahrhundert. Vienna: WUV-Universita¨tsverlag, 1998.

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:13

PS

PAGE 297

................. 17036$

BIBL

09-26-08 11:04:14

PS

PAGE 298

index

About, Edmond, Salon de 1866, 208 Acade´mie des Beaux-Arts, 16–17 Acade´mie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 30, 33, 34 n.27; satire of, 32 Acade´mie des sciences, 51 Acade´mie franc¸aise, 30–31 Accademia Ercolanese, Le Antichita` di Ercolano, 10 n.2, 12, 17 Alcubierre, 14 Amnesia, 3, 6, 139, 180, 182–83, 185, 229 Ancien Re´gime, 1, 4, 19–20, 34, 63, 165, 170, 176, 201, 229, 232–33 Animation: of artifacts, 68; desire and, 82, 141, 144, 194; of fossils, 126–27; at museum, 130; of paintings, 67, 106, 142 n.88; of the past, 43, 49, 77, 124, 144; and petrification, 101–2; of Pompeii, 78, 88 Anomie, 162 Anquetil-Duperron, 53 Antiquarian, 7, 21–23, 28–47, 54, 80, 118, 176, 215; figures of ridicule, 29–30, 185 n.98; scientist as, 58, 165; and verbal bias, 49 Antiquarianism, 5, 22, 28–47, 135; as subculture, 15 Antiquity, 5, 9, 15, 17, 21–22, 123, 133, 145–46, 171, 179, 187, 191, 197, 199, 215; demystification of, 16; as literary and artistic ideal, 18, 48, 52, 66, 159, 205–6, 214; preservation of, 170, 184, 219 Archaeological sites: Ale´sia, 6, 57; Ancyra, 57; Asia Minor, 52, 57; Bibracte, 57; Cnidus, 124; Galatia, 57; Greece, 52; Knossos, 157, 158 n.6; Macedonia, 57; Persia, 52; Petra, 157, 157 n.5; Pharsalus, 57; Phoenicia, 69, Serapeum, 69; Troy, 157–58. See also Assyria; Egypt; Excavation; Pompeii Archaeology: amateur vs. professional, 4, 51,

................. 17036$

158; barbarian, 220–23, 234; birth of, 9; definition of, 22–24; distinct from art history, 23; and eroticism, 81–82, 98, 206–8; of future, 1–2, 81, 184, 198–99, 229, 233, 235–36; of garbage, 39, 182–83, 182 n.92; heroic, 7, 34, 36, 158; imperial, 38; linguistic, 4; of memory, 196, 231; national, 4; and other sciences, 5–6, 50, 58, 226; utility of, 37. See also Myth Archive, 40, 47, 144, 173–83; allegory of, 189; the book as, 175, 178–81; indestructible, 8, 55, 113, 115, 184, 188, 196; and journalism, 81, 180; monuments as, 58; natural, 165; perishable, 56, 134, 175–76, 184–85; and preservation, 170, 179–80, 184; and preservation by destruction, 184, 187–91, 235–36; and recording, 1–2, 144, 159, 178, 181–82, 189, 235–36; the ruin as, 175, 177–78; and state, 174–75, 179–80; total, 95, 175–76, 181, 183–86, 191–99. See also Hugo, Victor, and sewer; Visual rhetoric Aristotle, 32, 117 Assmann, Jan, 181 n.89 Assyria, 6–7, 38–39, 52, 69, 157, 182 Atlantis, 155, 168–70, 180 Auber, Portici de, La Muette, 230 Augier, Emile, Le Joueur de fluˆte, 213 Baecque, Antoine de, 148 Balzac, Honore´ de, 63, 97, 107, 111, 124–25, 142, 205, 220; and antique store (La Peau de chagrin), 40, 67–68, 130, 137, 176, 176 n.76; Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, 142 n.88; Les Chouans, 228 n.74; La Come´die humaine, 2, 198–99; Contes drolatiques, 205; Le Cousin Pons, 5; as ethnographer, 79, 81, 179, 198; Louis Lambert, 112 n.56, 139–40;

INDX

09-26-08 11:04:05

PS

PAGE 299

300 i n d e x Balzac, Honore´ de (continued ) La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote, 5 n.10; Le Pe`re Goriot, 175; Sce`nes de la vie prive´e, 81; Splendeur et mise`res, 89–90; Ursule Miroue¨t, 112–13 Bande noire, la, 63, 63 n.56, 131, 201–2 Bann, Stephen, 7, 85 n.133, 111 n.50; on Walter Scott, 34 Barante, Prosper de, 7, 93–94, 141; History of the Dukes of Burgundy, 44, 85–86, 188 n. 110; and picturesque, 44 n.67, 105 Barbarian: Franks as, 46–47; invasions, 226, 230; the people as, 218; renewal, 201, 216–26; vandalism, 181, 219–20, 230 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 111 Barkan, Leonard, 65 Barre`s, Maurice, 217 Barthe´lemy, l’abbe´ de, 16; Voyage of the Young Anacharsis in Greece, 16, 36, 54 Barthes, Roland: La Chambre claire, 108, 111 n.49; on history, 115 n.61; on Michelet, 104, 104 n.30, 144, 144 n.96; on photography, 90, 108–11 Baudelaire, Charles, 43, 68, 83, 162, 169; ‘‘Le jeune enchanteur,’’ 36, 90–91; and memory, 94, 198; Le Peintre de la vie moderne, 198, 199 n.136; on photography, 108; ‘‘La Vie ante´rieure,’’ 161 Bayle, Pierre, Dictionnaire critique et historique, 31 Beche, Henry de la, Duria antiquor, 159 Bellay, Joachim du, 160 Benjamin, Walter, 134, 229 n.76, 233–34; and the collector, 135–36 Be´ranger, Pierre-Jean de, 222 Bergeret de Grancourt, 19–20, 61 Bergson, Henri, 197 Bernard, Claudie, 7, 101, 101 n.26 Bertheroy, Jean, La Danseuse de Pompe´i, 74 Bertrand, Aloysius, Gaspard de la nuit, 43, 140 Bodily rhetoric, 140–54; fleshing out, 116–18, 141–45; organic metaphor, 141, 145–46; personification, 141, 146–55 Body: of city, 145; centuries, 147; collective, 129, 224; of creation, 124; endowing language with, 60; erotic, 140–44; of evidence, 138, 189–91; and image, 91, 103; indestructible, 137, 141; intangible, 128, 178; of Jesus, 139; of king, 147–48; life in harmony with, 73–74; molds, 190–91; mortal, 146, 148, 179; of nation, 142, 145–46,

................. 17036$

INDX

148–54; of the past, 8, 60, 132–33, 140–54, 186; of past figures, 46, 140, 142; politic, 141, 148, 152; of scientist, 137; of spectator, 136 Boileau, 54 Boissier, Gaston, 53, 54 n.22, 80, 83, 124 Bonald, Louis de, 65, 148, 216 Bonnet, Charles, 160; Palinge´ne´sie philosophique, 163–64, 163 n.31 Bonucci, Charles, 71, 83 Botta, Paul E´mile, in Assyria, 38, 52, 157, 182 Boucher de Perthes, Jacques, Antiquite´s celtiques et ante´diluviennes, 51 Bouchet, Jules-Frederic, Ancient Scene, 82 Boulanger, Gustave: Rehearsal at the Pompeian Palace, 213–14; La Voie des tombeaux a` Pompe´i, 208 Bourget, Paul, 198–99 Breton, Ernest, 54, 80, 85 British Museum, 39, 52, 128, 128 n.51, 157 Briullov, Karl, The Last Day of Pompeii, 155–56 Brosses (Pre´sident de), 13 Buffon, Georges, 165–66; E´poques de la nature, 164, 164 nn.33–36; Histoire naturelle, 163 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 74, 78, 84; The Last Days of Pompeii, 6, 10, 57 n.34, 70 n.83, 83, 155, 231, 233 n.94 Burckhardt, Jacob, 58 Burckhardt, Johann Ludwig, 157 Burke, Edmund, 217, 221, 223 Burnouf, Euge`ne, 53 Carlyle, Thomas, 7, 47, 108, 110–11, 184–85, 185 n.98, 234; on the barbarian, 217, 222; on the book, 179, 181; on fleshing out the past, 141–44; On Heroes, 107, 143–44; Past and Present, 35, 56, 85, 142–43, 192; Sartor Resartus, 114–15; on visualizing the past, 106–7; on volcano, 227, 230 Carthage, 4, 97, 168, 173–74, 180, 199 Catastrophism, 155–56, 162–68; and divine punishment, 168–70, 170 n.51, 172, 235; and history, 8, 228, 231; and human disasters, 2, 165–73, 228, 234–36; and preservation, 184. See also Volcano Caumont, Arcisse de, 34; Cours d’antiquite´s, 23 Caylus, comte de, 32, 36–37; Recueil d’antiquite´s, 6 n.12, 50, 34 n.26

09-26-08 11:04:05

PS

PAGE 300

i n d e x 301 Certeau, Michel de, 154 n.112, 203, 222–23, 236 Chamfort, Se´bastien-Roch-Nicolas de, 30; ‘‘Des Acade´mies,’’ 34 n. 27 Champollion, J.-F., 53 Charles de Bourbon (king of Naples), 11–14 Chasse´riau, The´odore, Tepidarium, 206–8, 207 n.22 Chateaubriand, 7, 13, 43, 52, 77, 79, 161, 177, 181, 184, 200; Le dernier Abencerage, 176; on barbarian, 217–18; E´tudes historiques, 131; Ge´nie du christianisme, 62, 70, 201; Itine´raire de Paris a` Je´rusalem, 168, 177 n.78, 178; Les Martyrs, 47, 47 n.89; Me´moires d’outretombe, 177; on memory, 192–93; on museum, 62–66, 68–71, 70 n.84; Rene´, 35 Chevalier, Casimir, 71 Chevalier, Louis, 218, 218 n.56 City: of antiquity (polis), 72–73, 77; buried, 10, 49, 55–56, 166, 168–70, 168 n.45, 233; coherent image of, 14, 49, 60, 71; coral reef as, 169; as image of civilization, 72–73, 77; as museum, 71–72; Pompeii as, 19, 71–78; visibility of, 15, 71–72 Civilization: and anonymous individual, 83, 173, 184; vs. art, 21; concept of, 77–78, 77 n.105; continuity of, 158, 219–20, 223; destruction of, 155, 160, 166–74, 181, 224, 232–33, 235; embodied in city, 72–73; and everyday life, 54, 81, 235–36; expressed through language, 53; history of, 31, 94; as invisible object, 48–49, 77–78, 146; origin of, 172, 178, 219, 227 Clarke, William, 56 n.33, 81 n.120, 106–8, 110–11, 113 Cochin (fils), Observations sur les antiquite´s de la ville d’Herculanum, 11, 13–14, 16–17, 19 Collection, 128, 130, 135–37, 198; Assyrian, 38; of Caylus, 50; of Charles III, at Museo Borbonico, 11, 13; of coins, 36; of curiosities, 29; Egyptian, in Berlin, 15; Kunst- und Wunderkammer, 19, 30; of Lord Hamilton, 12; as middle-class pursuit, 33, 135–37; private, 63; satire of, 29–30; and singularity, 135; writers and, 40 Commission de la topographie des Gaules, 57 Commune (Paris), 2, 115, 232 Comte, Auguste, 165 Conan Doyle, Arthur, The Lost World, 159 Concordat, 4, 63 Cornu, Se´bastien, 210

................. 17036$

Coulanges, Fustel de, 145; La Cite´ antique, 72 Courier, Paul-Louis, 202–3 Coutan, Amable-Paul, 24; View of Pompeii, 25 Couture, Thomas: Romains de la de´cadence, 206, 208 Crary, Jonathan, 108 Creuze´ de Lesser, 14, 21, 62, 70, 70 nn. 83, 85; 78, 80, 157 n.3 Curiosity: category of, 19; city as, 49, 60; critique of, 32; definition of, 30; of material life, 21; of Perriers’ work, 56; Pompeii as, 10–11, 61, 70; of private life, 79 Curzon, Alfred de, A Dream in the Ruins of Pompeii, 78–79, 78 n.110, 208 Cuvier, Georges, 4, 26, 53, 58, 124–25, 127–28, 139, 160, 163, 165–66, 228, 235; Discours pre´liminaire, 24, 24 n.61; Discours sur les re´volutions du globe, 165 Dante, 92, 92 n.7, 143, 179, 181, 183 David, Fe´licien, Herculanum, 77, 233, 233 n.94 David, Jacques-Louis, 17, 216 Death drive, 235–36 Delille, Jacques, 232; L’Homme des champs, 229–30 Delon, Michel, 228 n.71 De Quincey, Thomas, Suspiria de profundis, 56, 169–70, 196 Description de l’Egypte, 38, 157 Despre´s, View of the Temple of Isis, 87–88 Dickens, Charles, 188 Diderot, Denis, 18, 36, 160; and anticomanie, 32, 32 n.23; Salon de 1767, 32; Didi-Huberman, Georges, 142 n.88, 187, 224 Divination, 115–27, 186; and hermeneutics, 138, 138 n.79; as historical method, 120; in Mesopotamia, 121, 121 nn.17–18; paradigm of, 125; and philology, 123; by reader, 133, 140; in sciences, 124–25 Drummond, W. (and Robert Walpole), 54 Du Camp, Maxime, Paris, 198–99 Dumas, Alexandre (pe`re), 36, 85, 140, 161, 230; Caligula, 215; Le Corricolo, 36, 74 n.100 Dupaty (Pre´sident), 14, 20 Durkheim, Emile, 162 Eclecticism, 40, 94, 128, 136, 139, 141, 205 Egypt, 6–7, 15, 38, 52, 69; Gautier’s, 98–105 Elbeuf (prince de), 11

INDX

09-26-08 11:04:06

PS

PAGE 301

302 i n d e x Elgin marbles, 128, 128 n.51 Eliot, George, Romola, 37, 54 n.24, 206 Embodiment. See Body Empire: Assyrian, 38, 182; First, 17, 33, 39, 63, 201, 205, 214; Holy Roman, 151; Roman, 83, 214, 217, 219, 230; Second, 71, 74, 206, 208–9, 213–14, 216, 231–32 Encyclope´die, 18, 32, 56–57, 225; ‘‘Erudition,’’ 30; ‘‘Preliminary Discourse,’’ 30–31 Enlightenment, 10, 15, 20, 24, 56, 65, 120, 191, 225, 230; anthropology, 217; and erudition, 28, 34; and heritage, 202; history, 31, 34, 40, 43–44, 141, 146, 223; and reincarnation, 160 Entropy: and anxiety of loss, 1, 94, 142, 164, 175, 177, 180; denial of, 192–99; and erosion of memories, 56, 131, 135–37, 159, 173, 179, 181, 183–86, 233; and image, 91–97, 104; and language, 93, 95, 144; time of, 3, 101; and waste, 183 Erudition, 28; as anti-literary, 35, 40; in art and imagination, 7, 35 n.34, 36, 40–47, 199, 206, 210; in the Encyclope´die, 30; exclusion from history, 31; humanist, 29 Evans, Arthur, 158 Evolution, 163, 164 n.32, 218, 227 Excavation: of buried treasure, 11–13; of civilizations, 38, 48, 52, 78, 86, 157; commissioned by Napoleon III, 57; critique of, 12–14, 62, 70; dangers of, 227; historiography as, 59–60; of paintings, 90–91; of Pompeii, 11–14, 52, 86, 71–72; psychoanalysis as, 196–97; of text, 43, 43 n.63, 55–56, 59 Fe´nelon, 54; Lettre a` l’Acade´mie, 31–32 Ferguson, Adam, 94 Fiorelli, Giuseppe, 14 n.16, 71, 72 n.95, 80, 190 Flaubert, Gustave, 30, 43, 58, 68, 95, 97, 109, 125, 161, 173–74, 179 n.81, 206 n.17, 218, 230, 233; ‘‘Bibliomanie,’’ 30 n.7, Salammboˆ, 159 n.9, 206 Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et punir, 204 Fortunatus’s hat, 114–15 Franco-Prussian War, 37 Freedberg, David, The Power of Images, 110 n.48, 111 n.50 Freud, Sigmund, 163, 196–97 Furet, Franc¸ois, ‘‘La Naissance de l’histoire,’’ 18 n.39, 31 n.15 Gautier, The´ophile, 1–3, 7, 68, 78, 86–89, 91, 97, 104, 109, 113–15, 210, 213, 215–16; Arria

................. 17036$

INDX

Marcella, 54, 61, 78, 82, 85, 88, 98, 102, 128, 136, 160–61, 190, 192, 194, 207 n.22; art criticism, 206–8; Avatar, 111–12; La Femme de Diome`de, 213; Les Grotesques, 43, 43 n.63; Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1; ‘‘Nostalgies d’obelisques,’’ 101; Paris de´moli, 174; ‘‘Paris futur,’’ 174; Une Nuit de Cle´opaˆtre, 100, ‘‘Le Pied de momie,’’ 98, 137, 160; Roman de la momie, 91, 98–105, 167 n.42, 190–91 Gay, Delphine, ‘‘Le dernier jour de Pompe´i,’’ 62 Gaze, 10, 33, 85; active, 119; aesthetic, 9, 13, 24, 67, 130; archaeological, 7–8, 21, 24, 48– 49, 63, 78, 139, 146, 204; desiring, 102; divine, 92, 99, 193, 204; historical, 9, 126, 168; of an immortal, 126; neoclassical, 15, 17, 48; picturesque, 24; reconstructive, 160; retrospective, 110, 112–13; scientific, 24; and singularity, 21; urbanistic, 72 Gell, William, 87; Pompeiana, 60, 60 n.50 Genius, aesthetics of, 32, 41, 121, 125, 194 Geology, 39, 124, 137, 195, 231; national, 221, 226–36; and panorama, 24 n.61, 27n, 92, 124; and the picturesque, 24–27, 24 n.61, 27n, 233; schools of, 162; and time, 162–67, 228, 234 Ge´roˆme, Jean-Louis, 43, 208; Inte´rieur, grec, 206; Jeunes Grecs, 206, 216; Pollice verso, 208 Gibbon, Edward, 31 n.14 Gift. See Memory, obligation of Ginzburg, Carlo, 125, 125 n.41, 188 Girodet, Anne-Louis, The Deluge, 155, 166 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 129, 193; Italienische Reise, 11–12, 14, 18, 20, 73, 170 n.52 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, 36, 68, 114 n.60, 130, 206 n.17, 215, 232–33; Charles Demailly, 232, 232 n.91 Gosse, Nicolas, Scenes from Ancient Life, 17 Grafton, Anthony, 33, 33 n.25 Grainville, ‘‘The Last Man,’’ 155, 157, 157 n.3 Grand Tour, 10–11 Grell, Chantal, 13 n.11, 16 n.31 Guizot, Franc¸ois, 37, 63 n.57, 83–84, 149, 216, 223; on concept of civilization, 77–78, 77 n.105; on Scott, 45, 45 n.76; on Thierry, 46 Haggard, Rider, 38 Halbwachs, Maurice, 197 Hamilton (Lord), 10 n.2, 12, 61, 228 Hamon, Jean-Louis, Les Muses a` Pompe´i, 208

09-26-08 11:04:07

PS

PAGE 302

i n d e x 303 Hardy, Thomas, ‘‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork,’’ 140 Hartog, Franc¸ois, E´vidence de l’histoire, 120 n.14, 121 nn.17–18 Haskell, Francis, 58, 58 n.40, 64 n.59, 108 Haussmann, 72–73; and urban reform, 2, 174 Hegel, G. W. F., 78, 83, 127, 146, 152, 174–75; and archive, 179–81; Philosophy of History, 180 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 53, 86 n.139, 128, 152, 160 Heritage, 23, 38; cultural, 56; Egyptian, 69; literary, 49, 55; merchants, 201; nationalization of, 63–64, 202; native, 66; politics, 34, 37, 63, 63 n.57, 67, 185, 202, 216; warriors, 63. See also Bande noire Herodotus, 52, 121, 172, 178 Heroism, 143–45, 148, 172–73, 178, 184, 217, 220, 223, 225. See also Archaeology, heroic Heuzey, Le´on, mission to Macedonia, 57 Historical novel, 36, 43–47, 67, 84, 101–2, 101 n.26, 128, 136, 206 Historiography, 7; Ancien Re´gime, 20, 46, 96, 120; counterrevolutionary, 201–2; erudite, 33, 118; feudal, 45; and immortality, 141; and last judgment, 132, 134, 137, 183; liberal, 149, 153, 202–3, 202 n.9, 217; material, 57; national, 205, 216–17; and the novel, 43–47; philosophical, 31, 43–44, 94, 117, 117 n.5, 141, 162; political, 94; primal scene of, 59, 140; rhetorical, 31, 33, 49, 120; romantic, 43–47, 115, 117, 120–21; and Scripture, 151, 162; and skepticism, 31; universal, 146, 186, 193 Hittorff, Jacob-Ignace, 210 Homer, 123, 172, 179, 181, 210; Iliad, 52, 104, 157, 172 n.58; Lamarck compared to, 130; Thierry compared to, 46 Houssaye, Arse`ne, 210, 215–16 Hugo, Victor, 7, 44, 58, 63–64, 97, 125, 135, 137, 181, 184–85, 189, 195, 201–2; and ‘‘ceci tuera cela,’’ 55–56, 179; ‘‘The Epic of the Worm,’’ 185–86; La Le´gende des sie`cles, 6, 92–93, 117, 119, 131, 133–35, 168, 185–86, 188, 192; ‘‘Lui,’’ 147–48; ‘‘The Mine and the Miners,’’ 223–26, 230–31; Les Mise´rables, 39–40, 131–33, 185, 194, 203, 223; NotreDame de Paris, 43, 94, 119, 133, 142, 176, 179, 195, 205; Pre´face de Cromwell, 116; Le Rhin, 43; on Scott, 45; and sewer, 39–40, 182–83, 187, 194–95, 197, 203–4; ‘‘La Ville

................. 17036$

disparue,’’ 168, 170; and the year 1817, 131–33 Humboldt, Wilhelm von: on Lenoir’s museum, 129; ‘‘On the Historian’s Task,’’ 118–19; ‘‘On the Study of Antiquity,’’ 21, 187 Hutton, James, 162, 162 n.26 Huxley, Thomas, ‘‘On the Method of Zadig,’’ 125 n.43, 127 Huysmans, J.-K., 68 Identity: abolished, 234; and body, 146; Christian, 4; medieval, 205; modern, 107–8, 204; national, 7, 23, 149, 171, 178, 214, 227; of period, 148; resurrected, 136; secular, 3, 97, 153; surrogate, 215–16. See also Reincarnation Immortality: of book, 181, 198–99; and collection, 137; of culture, 199; of deeds, 179; of the ephemeral, 198–99; in Gautier, 98–105, 194; and historiography, 115, 141, 173; of humanity, 146, 160–61, 171; of kings, 147–49; and mesmerism, 113; of nation, 149, 179; in Nerval, 193; secular, 4, 173, 179, 192, 194 n.124; of soul, 3, 97 Imprint, 139, 148, 186–91, 188 n.110, 192, 229; of breast, 61, 160, 190, 207; cultural, 21, 51– 53, 129, 204; moral, 109, 231; natural, 124–25; texts and, 55, 93–94, 131–32, 231; visual, 93–94, 104 Incarnation of the past, 117, 142, 148, 150, 154. See also Body Ingres, J.-A.-D., Antiochus and Stratonice, 17 Jahyer, Fe´lix, 78 n.110, 209 Jena Romantics, 117 Jenson, Deborah, 146 n.100 Joan of Arc, 150–51 Jou, Victor de, 81 Julian (the Apostate), 219–20 July Monarchy, 229–30; and heritage politics, 37–38, 201–3, 216 Kant, Immanuel, 19, 24, 114, 185; on the sublime, 167 Kauffmann, Angelica, Pliny the Younger, 53 Ke´ratry, E. de, comte, 14, 71, 81, 84, 231 Koselleck, Reinhart, 93, 93 n.11, 95 nn.15–16, 111 n.53, 159 La Bruye`re, Jean de, 37; Les Caracte`res, 29–30 Lalande, 62

INDX

09-26-08 11:04:08

PS

PAGE 303

304 i n d e x Lamartine, Alphonse de, 222 Lantier, Etienne-Franc¸ois de, Voyages d’Ante´nor, 54–55 Laplanche, J., View of the Pompeian Palace, 212 Larousse, Pierre, 208 Las Cases, Emmanuel de, Me´morial de SainteHe´le`ne, 17 n.36 Latapie, 17, 19–20 Laure´al, S.-F.-S. Maisony de, Heraclead, 55, 91 Layard, Henry Austen, 38, 52, 52 n. 16, 182; Nineveh and Its Remains, 39, 157 Le Bon, Gustave, 218 Leconte de Lisle, 43 Legrand d’Aussy, 94 Lenoir, Alexandre, 64, 64 nn.59–60, 68, 127– 31, 135, 145–46, 146 n.100 Lenoir, Charles, Dancer of Pompeii, 74, 76 Lenormant, Charles, 50, 53 Leonidas, 178 Leopardi, Giacomo, 13 Lessing, G. E., Laokoon, 91–92, 105, 146, 152, 160 Levine, Philippa, 14–15, 35 n.35 Longpe´rier, Adrien de, 52 Lost World, 2, 4, 8, 27, 55, 126, 130, 139, 155–99; and archive, 176; buried city as, 168–70; vanished people as, 170–73 Louvre, 6, 32, 39, 128–29; Assyrian museum at, 52; Egyptian section, 68–69, 130; Napoleon’s spoils at, 63 Luka´cs, Georg, 45 n.77, 95, 161 Lyell, Charles, 184; Principles of Geology, 162– 63, 162 n.26, 163 n.28, 164 n.37, 165 n.39, 228 n.73 Mabillon, 34 n.27; De re diplomatica, 31 Macaulay, Lord Thomas Babington, 40, 43– 45, 104, 133, 141, 144; ‘‘On History,’’ 44 nn.71–72, 45 n.75, 93–96 Maistre, Joseph de, 148, 148 n.108, 170 n.51 Mal du sie`cle, 101, 161–62 Malraux, Andre´, 15; La Voie royale, 38 Mariette, Auguste, 15, 69 Marmontel, 37; ‘‘Le Connaisseur,’’ 29, 29 n.3, 32 Martin, John, 155, 155 n.1 Marx, Karl, 223 Material culture, 21–22, 40, 48–49, 182; at Pompeii, 80; texts as, 55–56, 181; and textual bias, 49–60, 54 n.24

................. 17036$

INDX

Mazois, Franc¸ois, 19, 79, 86; Ruines de Pompe´i, 71 Memory: crisis, 108, 177, 180, 182; cultural, 58, 173, 181, 181 n.89, 223, 228; erosion of, 131, 181, 184–85, 228; exorcism of, 154 n.112, 201–4, 223, 236; feudal, 201; and image, 93–94; imperishability of, 7, 169–70, 196–97; obligation of, 4, 150, 167, 173, 173 n.64, 184–85, 185 n.99, 224; politics of, 67, 147; and tradition, 107, 219–20, 223, 227. See also Archive; Entropy Mercier, Louis Se´bastien, 32, 81, 203; Le Tableau de Paris, 56, 180–81, 184, 198–99, 201–2 Me´rime´e, Prosper: on museum, 69; on Napoleon III, 57 Me´ry, Joseph, and ‘‘The Ruins of Paris,’’ 2 Mesmerism. See Visual rhetoric Michel, Pierre, Les Barbares, 218 n.54 Michelet, Jules, 4, 7, 20–21, 40, 47, 58, 83, 93, 95, 104, 108, 110, 112, 120, 124, 127–28, 131, 137, 175, 194, 202–3, 206, 225–26, 229, 231, 234, 236; allegory of history, 59–60, 144; on the barbarian, 217, 220–23; on France as person, 141, 145–46, 149–54, 236; Histoire de la Re´volution franc¸aise, 227; Histoire romaine, 166–68, 172–73, 231; on Lamarck, 130; on Lenoir’s museum, 68–69, 129; La Mer, 126 n.47, 168–69, 173–74, 183, 183 n.94, 187, 196, 234 n.98; Le Moyen Aˆge, 152–53; and necrophilia, 194 n.123; Tableau de la France, 92, 94, 151–52, 171, 174 n.66, 176, 228 Millin, Aubin-Louis, 36; Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts, 6 n.11, 22 Mine. See Hugo, Victor Monod, Gabriel, 121 Montalembert, Charles Forbes, 96–97 Montesquieu, 37; Les Lettres persanes, 29 Montfaucon, Bernard de: Antiquite´ explique´e, 49–50; Les Monuments de la monarchie franc¸aise, 34 Mortality, 191, 236; of cultures, 1–3, 146, 149–54; and dwelling, 136–37; human, 3, 100, 146–48; and visual language, 90. See also Death drive Muse´e des monuments franc¸ais, 64, 64 n.59, 68, 127–31. See also Lenoir, Alexandre Museum, 198; and aesthetic reduction, 64, 69, 129; Atlantis as, 170; Campana Museum, 210; and collection, 136–37; and cultural re-

09-26-08 11:04:08

PS

PAGE 304

i n d e x 305 construction, 69, 128, 130, 135, 146; Danish National Museum, 130; debate over, 7, 62– 71, 65 n.69, 129; experience of, 67–68, 129–30; function of idealization, 18; Muse´e Napole´on III, 69 n.80, Muse´e Pe´dagogique, 87; Museo Borbonico, 11, 13, 190; Museum of Natural History, 130; at Pompeian palace, 210; Pompeii as, 70–71; at Portici, 61–62, 70; and presence, 85, 111; vs. in situ preservation, 60–71; and singularity, 129; world as, 137, 195 Musset, Alfred de, 136, 200, 204–5; Confession d’un enfant du sie`cle, 161 Myth: of archeology, 4, 6–8, 87–88, 91, 182– 83, 191, 194–95, 234; of book, 179; of divination, 122; of first eye, 126–27; of history, 109; lost world, 8, 10, 97, 158–59, 162–63; of magnetism, 111; of memorial survival, 3, 170, 191–94; of memory, 196; of origins, 158, 172; pictorial, 110–11; of Pompeii, 184, 230; reenactment of, 97; of subterranean voyage, 37; theory of, 107; time travel, 114 Nadaillac, Jean-Franc¸ois-Albert Du Pouget, 82, 215 Napoleon, 10, 17, 17 n.36, 38–39, 63, 70–71, 131, 145, 147–48, 157, 210, 214 Napoleon (prince Je´roˆme, ‘‘Plon-Plon’’), 158, 209–13. See also Pompeian Palace Napoleon III, 208, 210, 213, 223; and L’Histoire de Jules Ce´sar, 6, 57, 57 n.35 Natural history, 19, 58, 92, 124, 130, 162, 169, 195, 231, 234 Neoclassicism, 9, 17, 41, 65; ideal of, 16 Neo-Grecs, 206–9, 216 Nerval, Gerard de, 161, 192–95; Aure´lia, 136–37; ‘‘Isis,’’ 194; Sylvie, 106, 136, 218 Newton, Charles, 23; on divination, 124; on museum, 130; ‘‘On the Study of Archaeology,’’ 5 n.7, 57 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 34–35, 34 n. 30, 200, 202 Nodier, Charles: ‘‘Le Bibliomane,’’ 29–30; ‘‘Of the Coming End of the Human Species,’’ 157 Normand, Alfred, 210 Nothomb, Ame´lie, 170 Oblivion, 8, 148, 164, 175, 178, 181, 184, 224, 228; and image, 96; and limits of language, 95; Renan and, 3; Hugo and, 6. See also Entropy

................. 17036$

Ontology: and being of the past, 89, 102, 104, 108–10, 113–15, 188, 193; corporeal, 139, 144; and crisis, 108; of erosion, 185; of photography, 108–10; of poetry, 117; of the present, 173, 197–98; of societies, 94, 216; visual, 90–97, 104–5, 107, 110, 110 nn.47–48, 113, 127 Orr, Linda, 7 Palimpsest, 54, 56, 140, 196 n.128; mind as, 196 Palingenesis, 112 n.56, 146, 146 n.104, 153, 163 Panorama. See Visual rhetoric Pascal, Blaise, 146, 164 Pater, Walter: Greek Studies, 133; The Renaissance, 209 n.27, on Winckelmann, 124 Pelasgians, 168, 170–73 Perrot, Georges, 50–51; mission to Asia Minor, 57 Petit-Mangin, J., A Pompe´i, 74 Petrarch, 123 Pezant, Adolphe, 17 Philology, 31, 122, 135; applied to natural history, 59; archaeology allied with, 53; archaeology independent of, 50–51; and deciphering languages, 53; as master science, 138–40; Renan on, 123–24, 138–40 Photography, 90; Barthes on, 108–9; and Michelet, 109–10, 188; retrospective, 106–7 Physiognomy, 128; of nineteenth century, 204–6; of periods, 45, 129, 131–32, 188 Picturesque, 7, 24, 26, 41, 44 n.67, 47, 73, 93, 205, 228 n.74, 233; epistemology of, 105; ruins and, 160 Planche, Gustave, 213 Pliny (the Elder), 10 n.1, 53; on Zeuxis, 16 Pliny (the Younger), 10, 10 n.1, 53 Polyhistors, 19, 31 Pomian, Krzysztof, 19 n.42, 33, 34 n. 26 Pompeian decoration: in Crystal Palace, 158, 210; at Louvre, 17; at Malmaison, 10, 10 n.2, 17; pottery, by Josiah Wedgwood, 10, 10 n.2; private mansions, 10 n.2, 209–10, 209 n.30, 210 n.31 Pompeian Palace, 158, 201, 208–16, 210 nn.32–36, 213 n.37 Pompeii: aesthetic judgment of, 15–18; body molds at, 190; brothels of, 74, 82; Christianity at, 77, 84; compared to other lost worlds, 169–70, 184, 229, 232, 236; compared to Rome, 70, 70 n.83, 79–81; discov-

INDX

09-26-08 11:04:09

PS

PAGE 305

306

index

Pompeii (continued ) ery of, 10–15; in film, 10; last days of, 62, 155–56, 235; life frozen at, 80, 229–30, 232– 33, 235–36; Paris as, 2–3, 20, 74, 199, 214– 16, 232–36, 232 n.91; personification of, 140, 144, 146–47; and revolution, 226–27, 231–32; texts compared to, 55–56, 192. See also Excavation; Utopia Positivism, 116, 118, 139, 144–45, 165, 191, 194– 96, 194 n.124 Praz, Mario, 17 Prehistory, 5, 57, 107, 111, 129, 159, 164, 166– 68, 172, 182, 189, 227–28, 234; antediluvian times, 26; discovery of, 51; and ‘‘fossil man,’’ 195–96; and philology, 139 Presence: earthly, 148; experience of, 84–88; face-to-face with past, 47, 49, 84–86, 85 n.133, 111, 114, 117, 131; and faith, 97, 115; and image, 90, 104, 107, 110, 140; of past, 91, 144; as theology, 84 Private life: of antiquity, 52, 73; and novel, 44; at Pompeii, 78–84 Proust, Marcel, 149, 196–97; A la recherche du temps perdu, 234–36 Quatreme`re de Quincy, AntoineChrysostome, 13, 50, 145; and divination, 121; Lettres au Ge´ne´ral Miranda, 65; Lettres de Londres a` Rome, 128 n.51; on museum, 62, 64–66, 70 Quinet, Edgar, 104, 220, 222; La Cre´ation, 92, 126; and natural history, 40, 58–59, 96, 124, 126–27, 137–38 Quinsonas, Emmanuel de, 210, 213 Rabelais, Franc¸ois, 205 Racine, Jean, 54 Rancie`re, Jacques, 58, 222 Ranke, Leopold von, 41 n. 55, 44 n.72, 86, 121; on volcano, 230 Raoul-Rochette, De´sire´, Cours d’arche´ologie, 6 n.11, 22–23 Rawlinson, Henry, 53 Reclus, Elise´e, 5, 51–52, 86 Record. See Archive Reincarnation, 160–61 Renaissance, 9, 19, 21, 24, 31, 65, 150; and antiquarianism, 28, 34, 37, 127, 159–60; humanism, 51, 123; novelized, 37; Romanticism and, 43, 67, 128, 136 Renan, Ernest, 3–4, 7, 117, 140, 161, 194; on

................. 17036$

INDX

Assyrian archaeology, 38–39, 78, 184; L’Avenir de la science, 65 n.69, 123, 123 nn.30– 31, 138–39, 161–62, 194 n.124; on divination, 122–23; on Egyptian archaeology, 15, 52, 69, 144; L’Histoire des origines du christianisme, 123, 139; in Phoenicia, 55, 69, 69 n.80; on Pompeii, 14 n.16, 82, 231–32; La Re´forme intellectuelle et morale, 37 n.44; on Thierry, 120; Vie de Je´sus, 122, 139, 206; on volcano, 230–32 Renewal, 200–201; aesthetic, 204–16; national, 59–60; political, 226–36; social, 216–26 Restif de la Bretonne, 81 Restoration, 63, 69; of Knossos, 158; limits of, 186; of paintings, 121, 121 n.21; of palace of Saint-Louis, 89–90; of Pompeii, 70–71, 70 n.85; of statues, 145; of throne, 192; and Viollet-le-Duc, 117, 127, 185 Resurrection: of abstract entities, 111 n.49, 127–28; of cities, 140, 145; by eclectic reassembly, 127–40; of Egypt, 104, 147, 191; of France, 150–54, 227; of history, 116–17, 130, 139, 193; of lost worlds, 155–99, 231; of nature, 124, 130, 189; of periods, 132; of persons, 96–97, 140, 190, 207; of Place de Gre`ve, 119; poetics of, 8, 140, 193; Revolution as, 227; of sacred sites, 96–97, 97 n.21; scientific, 138–39; tradition of, 236 Revolution: age of, 37, 54, 62–65, 161–62, 167, 223, 226–36; Counter-, 64–65, 170, 200– 201, 216, 218, 221; February (1848), 161; French, 1, 7, 17, 30, 34, 83, 107, 148–50, 160, 165, 171, 177, 180, 202–3, 205–6, 214, 217– 18, 224, 226–30, 234–35; geological, 59, 163–66, 226–36; historiographical, 40, 46, 58, 118, 121, 123, 223; July (1830), 149, 230; philological, 33; religious, 84; scientific, 34 Revue arche´ologique, 50, 52 Revue des deux mondes, 213 Revue historique, 121 Richard, abbe´ de, 19 Richebourg, Pierre-Ambroise, Interior of the Library of the Pompeian Palace, 211 Rigault, Hippolyte, 214–15 Rigney, Ann, 7 Robert, Hubert, 160 Rosenblum, Robert, 214 Roussel, Paul, Nonia, Dancer of Pompeii, 74–75 Ruskin, John, 58, 185; ‘‘The Opening of the

09-26-08 11:04:10

PS

PAGE 306

i n d e x 307 Crystal Palace,’’ 185 n.98; Seven Lamps of Architecture, 58 Sacre de Numa, 54 Sain, Edouard, Excavation at Pompeii, 208–9 Saint-Denis, royal tombs at, 64, 68, 70, 145– 46, 177 Sainte-Beuve, 36, 173, 219; Tableau historique et critique, 43 Saint-Non, J.-C. Richard de, 61, 85–86; Voyage pittoresque, 13, 13 n.9, 16 Samuels, Maurice, 7, 107–8, 107 n.38, 108 n.40, 175 n.70, 228 n.74 Savannah-la-Mar, 169–70. See also City, buried; De Quincey, Thomas Schiller, Friedrich: ‘‘Pompeji und Herkulanum,’’ 191–92; on universal history, 92 n.10 Schlegel, Friedrich, on divination, 121, 121 n.23 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 138, 138 n.79 Schliemann, Heinrich, 52, 52 n.14, 157–58 Schopin, Fre´de´ric Henri, The Last Days of Pompeii, 155–56 Scientific: adventure, 37; culture, 37; resurrection, 138, 195–96; revolution in, 28, 34 Scott, Walter, 7, 40–41, 43–47, 79, 84, 93, 120, 133, 141; The Antiquary, 34–35; Ivanhoe, 35, 45, 46 n.86; Queen-Hoo Hall, 35 n.34, Quentin Durward, 45 Secular: memory, 111 n.53, 147–48, 173, 191–94; myth, 197; ontology, 7, 110; theology, 7–8; time, 154 Secularization, 3, 62, 111; of archive, 191, 197; of catastrophes, 167–70; of heritage, 64, 146; of history, 147–48, 151–52, 185, 191–94; of identity, 97; of incarnation, 150; of nation, 4, 148–54; of relics, 111; of resurrection, 139, 142, 146; of time, 115 Segalen, Victor, 105 Seure, Georges, 87 Seznec, Jean, 12, 18 n.38, 32 n.23 Shakespeare, 143, 181 Shelley, Mary, ‘‘Valerius,’’ 168 Shelley, Percy B., 17; ‘‘Ode to Naples,’’ 231 Singularity, 20; of artifacts, 28; of periods, 131; romantic history and, 117, 131–32; and science, 125 Socie´te´ des antiquaires de Normandie, 23, 34, 50 Socie´te´ franc¸aise d’arche´ologie, 34 Stae¨l, Mme de, 7, 54–55, 71, 79–80, 86, 187,

................. 17036$

189–90; De l’Allemagne, 42, 66, 206 n.16; Corinne, 35, 41–42; on the imagination, 119–20; De la litte´rature, 65–66; on volcano, 228, 234–35 Stendhal, 19, 53–54, 84; Les Cenci, 67; Rome, Naples et Florence, 27n Sublime, 26; category of, 24; historical, 155, 162–68, 229; natural, 227–28, 232, 235 Sue, Euge`ne, 220; Les Myste`res de Paris, 218 Survival, category of, 20–21 Swiss lake dwellers, 5, 86, 182. See also Elise´e Reclus Sympathy (historian’s), 109, 112, 173, 188, 194, 194 n.123, 203 Taine, Hippolyte, 58, 77, 82, 144, 188, 194, 218; on divination, 121–22; on Michelet, 109–10, 110 n.47, 120, 120 n.13; Voyage en Italie, 72–74 Terdiman, Richard, 108 Thierry, Augustin, 7, 20, 31 n.15, 40, 45–47, 47 n.89, 105, 109–10, 120, 131, 141, 149, 223; and divination, 122–23; Essai sur le Tiers E´tat, 83; Histoire de la conqueˆte, 45–46, 171; Lettres sur l’histoire de France, 45; Re´cits des temps me´rovingiens, 46–47, 134, 203; on Scott, 45, 45 nn.79–80 Time: abolition of, 99; acceleration of, 160; and desire, 101; gap in, 1, 163, 165, 203, 223–25; geological, 162–67, 228, 234; in Hugo, 223–24; mastery over, 147–48; in Michelet, 203, 221–23; open-ended, 159; progressive, 162, 221, 223–24; secular, 154; spatialization of, 92–96, 152, 164 n.35, 223–26; of transition, 94, 161–62, 200; travel, 106, 114–15, 114 n.60, 129–30, 170 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 161, 171; Souvenirs, 161; on volcano, 230 To¨pffer, Rodolphe, 24, 26–27 Troy, 52, 155, 157–58, 168, 172 Utopia: antique, 81–82; archaic, 155; aristocratic, 72; Egyptian, 101; genre of, 159; golden age, 1, 159; and Hugo’s mine, 223–25; and lost worlds, 162; Pompeii as, 73–74, 77, 208–9, 213–16; of preservation, 191, 197, 234 Ut pictura poesis, 92, 105 Valenciennes, Pierre-Henri de, 24; Eruption of Vesuvius, 26, 53

INDX

09-26-08 11:04:11

PS

PAGE 307

308 i n d e x Vale´ry, Paul, 129 Vandalism, 62, 202, 219–20; coining of term, 63; in Egypt, 69 Vercinge´torix, 57 Verne, Jules: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 170; Voyage to the Center of the Earth, 39–40, 130, 189, 195–97, 234 Viardot, Louis, 70 Vico, Giambattista, 117, 117 n.5, 123, 162 Viel-Castel, Horace de, 209; ‘‘Les Collectionneurs,’’ 29–30 Vien, Joseph-Marie, 206; Marchande d’Amours, 17 Vigny, Alfred de: Daphne´, 218–20; ‘‘Les Oracles,’’ 229–30; Stello, 218, 229 Villa of Diomedes, 207, 210 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, 232; review of Herculanum, 77 Vinchon, Auguste. See Gosse, Nicolas Viollet-le-Duc, 37, 63, 69, 90, 117, 124, 127, 185, 205 Visual rhetoric, 89–115; camera, 106–7, 111–12, 114–15; and condensation of space, 94–96; and condensation of time, 93–94; diorama, 89, 107; magic mirror, 89, 106–7, 114–15, 119; mesmerism, 106, 111–15; painting, 93– 96, 106; panorama, 40, 89, 91, 94, 107, 114, 124, 133, 175–77, 198; spectacle, 89, 107 nn.38–39, 115, 133, 175

................. 17036$

INDX

Vitet, Ludovic, 23, 50, 50 nn. 4, 6; 58, 178 n.81, 201 Vitta, Emile, 74, 76 Volcano, 201; dancing on, 230; as figure for passions, 228–29; as figure for revolution, 226–34; Paris as, 1, 233–34; and renewal, 226–36 Volney, C. F., Les Ruines, 160, 160 n.14, 173, 173 n.62 Voltaire, 30 n.13, 31 n.16, 94, 125, 159, 223; on catastrophes, 167–68, 167 n.43 Voyage de l’Arabie Pe´tre´e, 157 Walpole, Horace, 13 n.7, 160 Weichardt, Carl, 87; The Temple of Augustus, 80 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 13–14, 17, 21, 42, 50, 55, 60–61, 145; and divination, 124; Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen, 11–13 Witness: agency of, 119; history and, 110, 141– 42, 188; mesmeric, 112–13; monument as, 9, 23, 58, 125; nature as, 58–59, 125–27, 126 n.47, 148, 227; reproducing experience of, 42, 86, 89, 106, 110, 141 Wordsworth, William, 41–42 Zola, Emile, La Cure´e, 175

09-26-08 11:04:11

PS

PAGE 308

acknowledgments

This book has been a few years in the making, and I owe a large debt to a number of colleagues and friends who, during that time, have discussed the project with me, read early drafts, commented on presentations, and given me helpful bibliographical advice. I especially want to thank the faculty members at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University whose input was instrumental for the project: in the first place, Antoine Compagnon, who unerringly identified key theoretical problems and whose incisive comments always made me rethink my arguments. I also had the pleasure of discussing my work frequently with Dominique Jullien, whose astute insights, critical feedback, and steady supply of literary references helped shape the project. I am especially grateful to Priscilla Ferguson, who was truly unsparing with her advice, criticisms, and guidance and who somehow found the time to comment on every page of every draft. As the project was taking shape, I also benefited a great deal from the suggestions of Franc¸oise Me´lonio, Claudie Bernard, Henri Mitterand, and Andreas Huyssen. The book continued to evolve when I came to Princeton University, in large part thanks to the stimulating environment of the Department of French and Italian. The careful readings of David Bellos and Suzanne Nash helped identify problems and points that needed further development. Marie-He´le`ne Huet and Franc¸ois Rigolot kept my spirits up with their generous support and mentoring, and all my colleagues at Princeton have made this an ideal environment for research. Lionel Gossman has long been an inspiration, and I have had the good fortune to be able to discuss our common interests on a number of occasions. There are too many scholars and colleagues who have enriched this book for me to name them all, but let me here thank Hall Bjornstad, Dan Edelstein, Martine Lavaud, Bettina Lerner, Paule Petitier, Gise`le Se´ginger, Geoffrey Turnovsky, and Catherine Witt. I also owe a great debt to my readers at the University of Pennsylvania Press, Jacques Neefs and

................. 17036$

$ACK

09-26-08 11:04:17

PS

PAGE 309

310

acknowledgments

Maurice Samuels, both of whom were ideal critics, generous, attentive, and unsparing in their constructive advice and whose close scrutiny has helped improve, shorten, and clarify my arguments. In addition, I owe many sharp insights on historical consciousness to the graduate students at Princeton in my seminar on the use and abuse of history. It would not have been possible to research and write this book without the generous financial support I have received over the years, from Columbia University and Princeton University, as well as from the AmericanScandinavian Foundation. Summer research grants and fellowships from Columbia enabled me to travel to France on several occasions and conduct research at the Bibliothe`que nationale in Paris. Princeton’s generous leave policy also made it possible to finalize the book, as did two summer grants from the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Let me also thank Hans and Eva, my parents, who have always generously supported me and who once financed my reading habits without asking too many questions. They unwittingly set me on this career path by telling their children to read voraciously and then graciously accepted the consequences. To Patricia Sellars I owe a debt I can never repay: she gave the gift of literature at a difficult moment. But my most important, vital, and unfailing support for many years now has come from Bozˇena, my wife, who has lived with this book as long as I have and to whom it is dedicated.

................. 17036$

$ACK

09-26-08 11:04:18

PS

PAGE 310