Abstract
At the Time of the French Revolution (Beginning 1789), France destroyed buildings, sculpture, paintings, artifacts, and books as well as manuscripts, which, if not trashed or burned, were stolen and sold on the international market—much of this ending up eventually in the British Library or the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. As a vivid example, the largest medieval church in Europe, the Abbey of Cluny, which had been attacked by the Huguenots during the French religious wars in 1562, was sacked and destroyed in 1790 by revolutionary mobs. The library at Cluny remained one of the most important in Europe, with a large collection of valuable medieval manuscripts. Besides the attack of the buildings, the 1562 sacking was the first assault on these prized legacies of the medieval period, leading to their destruction or dispersal. But during the 1790 riot, even more burned. Fortunately, the Cluny town hall safely hid some of these valued possessions.
Les longs souvenirs font les grands peuples. (Long memories make great people.)
—M. de Montalembert
All translations, unless otherwise noted, are the author’s
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Notes
Abbe Gregoire, “Rapport sur les destructions operees par le vandalisme, et sur les moyens de le reprimer,” suivi du Decret de la Convention nationale, Comite d’ instruction publique, 1793 (Paris: De l’imprimerie nationale, 1794), 1–28.
For the text of “Motion en faveur des Juifs” (1789), see Josiane Boulad-Ayoub, L’Abbe Gregoire: ApologPte de la Republique (Paris: Honore Champion iditeur, 2005), 138–57; for the “Memoire en faveur des gens de couleur” (1789), see Boulad-Ayoub, L’Abbe Gregoire, 159–80.
For analysis of Gregoire’s life and career, see Rita Hermon-Belot, L’Abbe Gregoire: La Politique et la Vérité (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000); Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
Abbe Gregoire, Memoires de Gregoire, Ancien ev2que de Blois, preface by Jean-Noel Jeanneney, intro. by Jean-Michel Leniaud (Paris: Editions de Sante, 1989), 346.
Emile Male, L’Art religieux duXIIIe siecle en France: etude sur l’iconographie du moyen age etsur ses sources d’inspiration (Paris: A. Colin, 1902).
As quoted in Reau, Les Monuments detruits de l’artfrancais, 1:68.
Riau, LesMonuments dAtruitsde l’art frarrFais,1:77.
See Riau, LesMonumentsdétruits de l’artfraneais,1:19–25.
See Gamboni, 31–39.
For a list of the legislation passed in the 1790s, see Riau, Les Monuments detruits del’art francais, 1:380–84.
“On doit etre encore effraye de la rapidite avec laquelle, au moment de tout regenerer, les conspirateurs dimoralisaient la nation et nous ramenaient par la barbarie a l’esclavage. Dans l’espace d’un an, ils ont failli détruire le produit de plusieurs siecles de civilization” (Abbe Gregoire, “Troisieme rapport sur le vandalisme,” Convention Nationale, instruction publique [Paris: P’Imprimerie Nationale Des Lois, 1794], 2).
“Symbolic capital” is Pierre Bourdieu’s term for the power (cultural, social, economic, or political) that comes from the possession, performance, or display of symbolic value, as for example, a cultural heritage that is claimed by a particular people, wearing certain brand named clothes, having attended an ivy league school, or having visited certain places. See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. and intro. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 72–76.
See Jean-Pierre Babelon and A. Chastel, “La Notion de patrimoine,” Revue de l’art 49 (Paris, CNRS, 1980; repr. Liana Levi, 1994), 5–32; for collective memory, again, see Halbwachs, On Collective Memory.
Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 35–39; Flood, “Between Cult and Culture,” Art Bulletin, 652; Riau, Monuments Detruits de l’Art Franyais, 1:384–95; Pierre Bourdieu, Les regles de l’art. Genese et structure du champ litteraire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992).
Jean-Pierre Babelon, “The Louvre: Royal Residence and Temple of the Arts,” in Realms of Memory:TheConstruction of theFrenchPast, 3 vols., ed. Pierre Nora, English ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 3:278; Yveline Cantarel-Besson, La naissance du musAe duLouvre: La politique museologique sous la Revolution d’apres les archives des musies nationaux, 2 vols. (Paris: Ministere de la Culture, editions de Ia Reunion des musees nationaux, 1981).
Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 87–88.
See Jean Hubert, “Preface,” in Les premiers travaux de la commission des Monuments historiques 1837–1848: Proces-verbaux etrelevesd’architectes, by Francoise Berce (Paris: A. and J. Picard, 1979), ix.
For the history of historical monuments in the nineteenth century in France, see Berce, DesMonumentsHistoriques au Patrimoine du XVIIIe siecle a nos jours, 11–50; for the idea of national patrimony in the revolutionary ideology, see Frederic Rucker, Les Origines de la Conservation des Monuments historiquesenFrance (1790–1830) (Paris: Jouve & Cie, 1913).
See Peter Fritzsche, “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, ed. Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 62–85; Fritzsche, “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity,” in The American Historical Review; Peter Fritzsche, “Chateaubriand’s Ruins: Loss and Memory after the French Revolution,” History and Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past 10, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 102–17; and Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present.
For the role of Thomas Gray and other English poets, see Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (1928; repr., London: John Murray, 1962), 28–45; also for French writers, see Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siecle French Culture (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 2001), 11–43.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On German Architecture,” in Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, trans. Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff (New York: Suhrkamp, 1986), 4.
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© 2008 Brenda Deen Schildgen
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Schildgen, B.D. (2008). Making the French Nation: Liberating France, AbbÉ GrÉGoire, and the Patrimony of the Middle Ages. In: Heritage or Heresy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613157_7
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