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

Chapter Three
Revolution to Restoration: cross-Channel antiquarianism
There were, throughout the period, strong links between antiquarian endeavours in
Britain and France, particularly between English antiquaries and their counterparts in Paris and
Normandy. Contrary to what might be expected revolution and war were no absolute obstacle,
they were indeed in some ways positive incentives to collaboration. By the same token the co-
operation that characterised the Napoleonic era and its immediate aftermath, tailed off after the
July Revolution of 1830, diminishing noticeably towards the middle of the nineteenth century.
This chapter considers the ways in which Anglo-French antiquarianism developed and,
while it included a considerable interest in historic architecture, moved beyond it into the broader
area of social history, the ‘manners and customs’, to use a popular contemporary phrase, of the
past. This antiquarian interest in what Walter Scott called the ‘vie privée’ of earlier times fed
directly into the arts, especially those of fiction and painting, and artistic concerns were
reciprocally felt in antiquarian writing and activity. 1 The material remains of the past, including
those of the recent past, assumed in this context unprecedented importance. In the relations
between England and France we see the fusion of romance and reality emerging into
antiquarianism as narrative, not only a subjectively lived but a publically enacted relationship
with history.
There is also to some extent in the period a reversal of roles between France and England.
At the end of the eighteenth century French antiquaries, in so far as they existed at all, envied the
English the resources and the social and cultural support available to them. By the midnineteenth
century the position had shifted with many of the English feeling that antiquarian
matters were better managed in France. At the same time the trade in ‘salvaged’ antiquities
which were pouring into Britain from the Continent put a strain on relations between the two
1 Scott, Ivanhoe, p.8
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