Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

countries. By the 1850s it is apparent that the reciprocity that marked the high point of Anglo-
French antiquarianism in the 1820s and early 1830s had been not so much a convergence of
ideas as a brief intersection, a crossing of paths that were to lead in different directions. Until the
later 1840s, however, England and France each found in the other a mirror, or a sounding board,
against which it created its own relationship to a national, and to some extent a shared, past.
Anglo-French collaboration was also the context in which the Society of Antiquaries of London,
so generally torpid at this date, made its most important contribution with the initiative to
document the Bayeux Tapestry.
Anglo-French antiquarianism has never, as far as I am aware, been considered as a
discrete subject. There have been studies of Walter Scott’s influence in France 2 and of neo-
Norman architecture in England, 3 both of which will be considered further here as part of a
larger pattern. The Society of Antiquaries’ analysis of the Bayeux Tapestry has also been
studied, in the context of the Tapestry’s longer history although the most recent account, as I
shall argue, misreads the nature of the antiquarian collaboration and misses one of the most
enduring, if not perhaps the happiest of antiquarian contributions to modern understanding of the
past. 4 The individual antiquaries who feature in this chapter are Francis Douce, Walter Scott,
Dawson Turner and E H Langlois, with brief mention of John Gage, John Britton and John
Milner. None of them, with the exception of Scott, has been considered specifically in terms of
the relations between French and English antiquarianism.
The French Revolution and the war: 1789-1814
To say that the Revolution did for French antiquarianism what the Reformation did for English,
is to oversimplify, but there is a great deal in the comparison and it has been made, recently, by
2
I have relied chiefly on Wright, ‘Scott’s Historical Novels and French Historical Painting’ and Noon, Constable to
Delacroix .See also: Bann, The Clothing of Cleo and Painting History and Dargan, ‘Scott and the French
Romantics’.
3
Notably Mowl, ‘The Norman Revival’ and Stamp, ‘High Victorian Gothic and the Architecture of Normandy’. See
also Boucher-Rivalain, ‘Attitudes to Gothic in French architectural writings’.
4
Hicks, The Bayeux Tapestry.
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