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

works, this collective volume is comprised of fourteen articles, written by some of the leading authorities on Voltaire and the eighteenth century, each of whom offers a unique point of entry into the patriarch of Ferney’s life and work. After a concise introduction by the work’s editor, Nicholas Cronk, Geoffrey Turnovsky examines how a young man named François-Marie Arouet transformed himself into the renowned “Voltaire.” Cronk continues this reflection on authorial identity by examining the question through the prism of Voltaire’s relations with the publishing industry of his time. In chapter three, David Beeson and Cronk look at eighteenth-century definitions of the “philosophe” and analyze the ways in which Voltaire corresponded to and differed from this figure. Miguel Benítez examines Voltaire’s familiarity with the circulation of clandestine manuscripts and the role they played in his writings. John Leigh shows how England, one of the many places where Voltaire lived in exile, influenced his ideas on topics ranging from politics to poetry. In his contribution, Russell Goulbourne analyzes Voltaire’s theatrical works as well as the notion of “theatricality” that lay behind the many roles he played in his own life. In “Voltaire as Story-Teller,” Gianni Iotti examines what he sees as the “parasitical” nature of Voltaire’s language. Philip Stewart offers a fine and pedagogically useful reading of what today is Voltaire’s best-known work, Candide. Catherine Volpilhac-Auger analyzes the revolution Voltaire carried out in historiography, while Christiane Mervaud makes a compelling case for viewing his correspondence as “his masterpiece.” Olivier Ferret retraces the pamphlets and ensuing polemics that marked Voltaire’s life. In a similar vein, John Renwick, in “Voltaire and the Politics of Toleration,” demonstrates how Voltaire’s core belief of accepting difference manifested itself in his public involvement in several eighteenth-century causes célèbres. Graham Gargett explores Voltaire’s knowledge and various interpretations of the Bible. And Daniel Brewer closes the volume with an investigation of what he calls the “Voltaire effect,” or the strategic recuperation, often for political reasons, of Voltaire by subsequent generations. What emerges from The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire is thus a dynamic portrait of a writer who, during his lifetime, donned many “masks.” Indeed, the motif of the mask runs throughout the volume, tying together the articles and highlighting the rich and variegated career of France’s first truly great intellectual. In this volume, Nicholas Cronk has succeeded in assembling a wide array of articles which pull away Voltaire’s various masks in order to reveal important facets of a life lived in letters. In sum, The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire is a most useful work that will help students and teachers alike gain a better understanding of the man who compelled subsequent generations to refer to the eighteenth century as le siècle de Voltaire. Duquesne University (PA) Shane Agin BLIX, GÖRAN. From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology. Philadelphia: UP of Pennsylvania, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8122-4136-5. Pp. 310. $59.95. Focusing on French novelists, essayists, archeologists, and painters of the “long” nineteenth century (1789–1914), Göran Blix explores the counterphobic uses of real and virtual recreations of the distant past during a century of sudden, Reviews 161 violent, frequent political change. After the fall of the monarchy and the temporary eclipse of the Catholic Church, he explains, belief in the predictive power of historical precedents, and faith in a personal immortality, declined considerably. The collective constructs of “racial,” national, and human identity emerged as palliatives for existential insecurity. Modeled on paleontology and criminology, archeology developed during the final decades of the nineteenth century as a seemingly magical science that offered hope of reconstituting a vanished past. The total destruction of ancient Pompeii (near Naples) and its inhabitants in 79 AD, and its successful excavation nearly eighteen hundred years later (extensive from 1811 on), became the prime example of a triumphant recovery of an apparently lost past, of snatching constancy from the jaws of change. Many previous books have treated the problematic of cultural memory in nineteenth-century France, but Blix surpasses them through the wide range of...