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Introduction When théophile 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 Régime, 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 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 Comédie 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 Méry’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...

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