Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (review)

Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay. By Kevin D. Murphy. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 200. $45.00.)

The subtitle best labels the essential contribution of this study: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay. Here Kevin Murphy offers a history of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's architectural theory and practice, and the effort, general if not concerted, to restore the medieval monuments of France. He wants, as well, "to understand the romantic and rationalist strains that coexisted in Viollet-le-Duc's thinking" (p. 10). As for architectural history and French history tout court, he tries to show "the particular view of restoration that this project illustrates" and to "situate Vézelay on the contested terrain of nineteenth-century Burgundy and on the embattled figurative territory of the French architectural patrimony" (p. 7). The study is based on records of the repair and restoration supervised by French government commissions: material from the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothèque et Archives du Patrimoine, the departmental archives of the Yonne, and the Bibliothèque Municipale of Auxerre.

Centerpiece of the book is chapter 4, "Viollet-le-Duc and the Re-invention of Vézelay." Here Murphy shows the combination of originality and historical reconstruction that Viollet-le-Duc effected--or sometimes only affected--with special attention to his passage from romanticism to classicism: "Early on in his Italian travels the architect evidenced a lingering Romanticism in his understanding of medieval buildings. . . . But by early autumn of 1836 Viollet-le-Duc could praise classical architecture, along with the best buildings of the Middle Ages, for their rational restraint" (pp. 74-75). The background story to this is a romantic rationalism movement and the earlier influence of Abbé J.-H. de Cordemoy. Murphy contrasts the Duban, Labrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer "rationalist" efforts at "romantic" restoration with the creation of a new nineteenth-century aesthetic by Viollet-le-Duc. The problem here is that the classicism of the Romantics is difficult to isolate. According to Pierre Moreau in Le Classicisme des romantiques (1952), the romantics revered authentic Greco-Roman culture in contrast to neo-classicism and Enlightenment rationalism. Viollet-le-Duc's rationalism may simply have been romantic classicism.

But Murphy's study is so heavy with broad analytic goals that analysis of nineteenth-century appreciations of neo-classicism, classicism, and the various romanticisms must be omitted.

In the first two chapters--on Guizot, Mérimée, Viollet-le-Duc, and on the "nationalization of restoration"--we are distracted by a parade of philosophical and historiographical velleities marching under the etiquette of Memory and Modernity, the book's title. Citing Jurgen Habermas and Françoise Choay, Murphy says, "Both authors argue that modernity is characterized by a sense that the world has entered a new era, fundamentally disconnected from the rest of time, which is thereafter relegated to the status of 'history'" (p. 18). Clear enough. But Murphy labors the issue, using names and interpretative variations without any possibility of making real use of them. By the end of the book he is talking about Stephen Bann's "use" of Roland Barthe's distinction between histoire and discours, histoire representing "dispassionate archeological investigation," and discours, the "author's [Viollet-le-Duc's] dream of mythological completeness" (p. 51). Most of this could have been said without the litany of the philosophers.

The background of the book is French national and local history, the "deeper tensions between church and state, center and periphery" (p. 134), and readers may enjoy a review of these enhanced by the specific study of curé and mayor, government and religious figures in Vézelay (Yonne) during the reign of Louis-Philippe. Murphy makes a contribution to the study of the career and thought of Viollet-le-Duc (compare with Pierre-Marie Auzas, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, 1814-1879, reissued in 1979), and the history of the department of...