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

Chapter Seven: The Uses of Archaeology

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 Génie 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 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 Régime 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 Génie 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-Sébastien Mercier gives a telling example of this attitude in the article he devoted to the ‘‘Demolition of the Petit Châtelet,’’ 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 202 chapter 7 cells . . . seemed to reveal to the frightened eyes of passers-by the victims swallowed up in their darkness’’ (1:1305...