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  • Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-siècle France
  • Dominic Janes
Emery, Elizabeth, and Laura Morowitz. Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-siècle France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. xii + 295. ISBN 0754603199.

The Middle Ages have never gone away, but at certain times they have been a focus of greater attention, either from scholars, or from the mass of the population. One such period of "revival" was the French late nineteenth century. Many Anglophone readers will be more familiar with its equivalents in Victorian England and will approach Emery and Morowitz's study from the point of view of making a comparison. This is precisely what the book itself does not set itself to do. The authors' desire is to examine culture in France from c. 1870 to c. 1905 on its own terms. Developments in the rest of Europe are not treated, and nor, save for a few paragraphs is the "other" medieval revival in nineteenth-century France, that of the early part of the century. Yet it was this period of romanticism and its aftermath that provided what the authors identify as the two competing paradigms of the later revival. The first can be considered in the light of Chateaubriand's Le Génie du Christianisme (1802) which "evoked the Middle Ages as a peaceful time in which a naïve but powerful faith controlled the lives of the worshippers. One of the aims of his book was to prove that the fine arts flourished because of Christianity" (17). The other paradigm is seen as stemming from Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), which focussed on the people of the city of Paris: "paradoxically, he envisioned the cathedral, one of the most sacred of places, as a symbol of freedom from the constraints of religion" (17).

The ongoing importance of these two literary works signals something very significant to us. Despite the rising demand during the nineteenth century for "authentic knowledge" about the Middle Ages derived from scholarship the reasons behind the popular revival lay not in academic investigation, but in the contemporary usefulness of the Middle Ages as a popular concept. To some extent, one can argue that the full development of scholarly investigation helped to bring about the end of the revival. For what the historians found was by no means what the people of the late nineteenth century were necessarily expecting them to find. The potential of the Middle Ages as a basis for revivalism was partly derived from popular ignorance about its true nature. The point was that the Middle Ages could be imagined in ways that made it useful to contemporary society.

It is Emery and Morowitz's contention that the Middle Ages was needed in late nineteenth-century France to a much greater extent than it had been earlier in the century. In the early nineteenth century the Middle Ages appealed most to those who were nostalgic for the one-time power of the Catholic Church in France. Medievalism was, therefore, not simply a romantic, but also a reactionary phenomenon. A number of enthusiasts kept interest in the Middle Ages going through the middle of the century, but it was the Franco-Prussian war that led to the dramatic need for a popular appreciation of the Middle Ages. To some extent this might appear paradoxical. After all, revolutionary France had championed republican classicism, and the gothic past could popularly be foisted off as a barbaric and Germanic cultural hang-over. However, defeat in the [End Page 395] Franco-Prussian war led to a period of intense introspection in which the roots of France as a nation came under close scrutiny.

The problem was that France had previously been understood as being the product of a Gallo-Roman population onto which had been grafted a Germanic (Frankish) aristocracy. In order for society to strengthen and unite these elements had to be somehow unified. Medievalist imaginings could achieve this difficult feat. The essence of France could be seen to have been formed in the medieval period. The cathedrals and Christian monuments of France could be seen by religious and secular viewpoints alike as glorious...

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