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

The subject of Göran Blix's illuminating study may have occurred to other scholars of nineteenth-century France, but in his hands the realized project becomes nothing less than an investigation of the ways in which a collective nineteenth-century discourse on the past represented an urgent response to the anxieties and desires of the present. Thus, although he provides a valuable account of the way archaeology in the Romantic period sought to break with an emphasis on the aesthetic worth of the artefact (or on its value as treasure), Blix's concern is not with the history of archaeology as such. Instead, using the period's fixation with the 'lost worlds' of Pompeii and Herculaneum as his central point of reference, he focuses on the way a 'rhetoric of excavation' pervaded the vast array of cultural practices that together directed their gaze on the past: literature, philology, painting and, above all, historiography, which, of all the discrete manifestations discussed, was still more pivotal than archaeology itself. (A major contribution is made to our understanding of Michelet, here dubbed 'the great resurrectionist'.) The unfailingly discriminating discussion encompasses a prodigious range of often obscure or neglected texts. Of the 15 painters whose work is represented in the illustrations, the majority are likely to be unfamiliar to all but the most historically minded student of French neo-classical and Romantic art. Just as the geographical range extends beyond Campania to encompass the Middle East and the prehistoric lakes of Switzerland, Blix makes judicious use of non-French examples where appropriate: Carlyle is especially prominent, but there is an incisive discussion of Macaulay. The writings adduced are shown to be characterized by 'a modern anxiety of mortality', an elegiac fear of forgetting or being forgotten. (Hegel is therefore rapped over the knuckles for failing to take account of the 'question of amnesia'.) This being a Romantic phenomenon, there is constant discovery of the impossibility of the ambitious goals set. The fascination comes from the strategies writers devised in order to accommodate the inherent contradictions. These included attempts to overcome the tyranny of the verbal by an acknowledgement of the ontological supremacy of the visual, which is shown to lead to some striking features in the writings of the French Romantic historians. A welcome final chapter investigates the way the 'archaeological' gaze was harnessed to certain political agendas. Blix's study will be of particular interest to scholars of Gautier, Hugo and Chateaubriand. (The succinct readings of Le Roman de la momie, Hugo's poem 'Lui', and the chapter in Les Misérables entitled '1817' are outstanding.) Balzac's inevitable inclusion is notable for a discussion of Louis Lambert as 'a telling example of philology as bodily resurrection', though, curiously, the references to Herculaneum and Pompeii in Physiologie du mariage, Béatrix and Honorine go unmentioned. In all cases, however, the original text lies buried, with even poetry being quoted solely in English translation. The errors are mainly typographical, but the reference to 'Portici d'Auber's revolutionary opera, La Muette' (p. 230) presents a trap for the unwary.