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

at least one French scholar. 5 There had been antiquaries in France before 1789 as there had been
antiquaries in England before 1535. There were, most notably, the five volumes of Bernard de
Montfaucon’s Monumens[sic] de la Monarchie Française, published from 1729-33. The age of
the encyclopédistes had laid the ground work for a more systematic investigation of the past, but
this was still embryonic. 6 There was no substantial body of antiquarian knowledge, no
community of antiquarian activity. The Revolution therefore posed both a challenge and an
opportunity to the preservation of the past, or rather it presented first an opportunity and then a
terrifying and urgent challenge.
One of the first acts of the French Constituent Assembly after the Revolution was the
annexing of church property, which it effected on 2 October 1789. The property of the émigrés
and of the Crown was soon added. Thus in France, as in England, 1789 saw the beginning of that
process of development from passive to active antiquarianism, but on a much more dramatic
scale and at accelerated speed. It was, in one sense, accomplished overnight. As Françoise
Choay, puts it:
Du jour au lendmain, la conservation iconographique abstraite des antiquaires cédait place à une conservation réelle.
[From one day to the next the virtual preservation of monuments by illustration gave way to actual preservation.] 7
The project to document all this newly-acquired state property began at once and on 11
December 1790 the antiquary and naturalist Aubin-Louis Millin presented the first volume of his
account of the Antiquités nationals ou Receuil de Monuments, a work in which the phrase
‘monument historique’ was used for the first time, to the National Assembly. 8 Lest anyone
should doubt where his sympathies lay Millin’s first subject was the Bastille, which he
characterised as France’s most important monument: ‘par la terreur qu’inspiroit son existence, &
par la joie universelle qu’a causée sa chute.’ [For the terror that its existence inspired and the joy
that was occasioned by its fall.] 9
5
Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, p.60.
6
Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, p.50 makes a detailed comparison of England and France at the
beginning of the eighteenth century.
7
Choay, L’Allégorie du Patrimoine pp. 77-78. As elsewhere, unless stated, the translation is my own.
8
Choay, L’Allégorie du Patrimoine, p.77
9
Millin, Antiquités Nationales ou receuil de monumens, unnumbered first page.
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