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

After which he went on to give a detailed and unexceptionable account of the building, its
statuary and the various documentary sources for its history. This first volume was well received
and the project eventually ran to five, the last of which appeared in 1799. By that time, however,
Millin had spent a year in prison. What had begun as an academic exercise primarily to
document the monuments of France, not so different from the passive or iconographic
antiquarianism of earlier years, turned with the events of the Terror into an active and hazardous
attempt to preserve them from destruction. It was not the 14 July 1789, but 20 June 1791, the day
on which the flight of the French royal family was intercepted at Varennes, launching a wave of
violent destruction, that pitched French antiquaries into an active, not to say dangerous
relationship with their subject matter. This was the beginning of the ideological iconoclasm for
which the Abbé Gregoire coined the word ‘vandalisme’ when, at St Denis, the Benedictine Dom
Germain Poirier watched while ‘en trois jours on a détruit l’ouvrage de douze siècles’ [in three
days they destroyed the work of twelve centuries]. 10 It was to be in what E-H Langlois later
called ‘l’impitoyable creuset révolutionnaire’ [the merciless crucible of the revolution] that
modern French antiquarianism was forged. 11
At this point most British antiquaries could do no more than read their newspapers with
growing curiosity and alarm, but on a collector as rich, well-placed and intrepid as William
Beckford (1760-1844), the opportunities of such upheaval need not be lost. Beckford was in
Paris, with only occasional breaks, from October 1790 until May 1793, shopping. ‘Happy, aye
thrice happy are those who in this good Capital and at this period have plenty of money’ he
wrote, ‘their kingdom is come, their will is done on earth, if not in heaven.’ 12 Only after the
outbreak of war between England and France was his progress impeded when he was arraigned
before the Committee of Public Safety and was lucky to escape with his life. Agents and dealers,
however, continued to buy for him for the rest of the decade. Exceptional as Beckford was in
most ways, his activities demonstrate the fact that the antiquarian enterprise never entirely
stopped. The collection and dispersal of objets d’art and antiquities continued to some extent
throughout the Terror and the revolutionary wars. For the French themselves activity was
10 Réau, Histoire du Vandalisme, p.288.
11 Langlois, St Wandrille, p.295.
12 Quoted in Wainwright, ‘Lucifer’s Metropolis’, p.83.
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