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

and equal administration of the laws’. 106 As the idea of ‘patrimoine’ or national heritage began to
take hold over the following decades and the state set up provincial museums and moved to
protect historic buildings, de Caumont and his contemporaries would be well placed to profit
from developments. For others, those like Langlois, who remembered the horrors of war and
iconoclasm or could like Victor Hugo imagine them, the interaction of past and present was to
play a more troubling and complex role in the recreation of the new France.
Walter Scott, E-H Langlois and the antiquarian dance of death: 1815-1837
In France, as in Britain, interest in the material remains of the past now ranged far
beyond the well-established territories of architecture and topography into the social history of
‘customs and manners’. Painting, fiction and fashion all reflected aspects of antiquarianism and
increasingly a desire to inhabit and reanimate the world of the past as narrative. Here, too, the
model came from Britain with the novels of Walter Scott. Within these widely shared
enthusiasms, however, there were broad national differences which Scott and E-H Langlois
could be said to embody. To put simply a difference whose complexity will become clear as this
chapter goes on, Scott’s was the benign view of the olden times, a vision of ‘merrie England’
where if there were battles, betrayals and grisly murders, there was also a happy ending for
anyone who deserved one or at worst a romantic death.
For Langlois, as for Victor Hugo, whose shadow looms over French antiquarianism as
Scott’s does over British, the past was a darker, more dangerous place, its barbarities more
resonant with recent history. The mass of the French people had experienced the violence of the
Revolution and its aftermath at first hand, while for most of the British there had been, in the
event, no more than the noise of war. The difference is evident in the use that Scott and Langlois
made of the quintessential antiquarian theme of the Dance of Death. Scott, having used it in ‘The
Field of Waterloo’, invoked its imagery again in the preface to Ivanhoe while Langlois devoted a
two-volume study to the subject. There could be no more apt metaphor for the narrative
106 Turner, Tour in Normandy, 1, p.97.
133