Exquisite Reality: Photography and the Invention of Nationhood, 1851–1900

evivalists that sites of architectural patrimony are not legacies of oppression
but repositories of collective history. 6 Until the invention of the printing press
made literature accessible, Hugo argued, architecture was the primary means
by which culture was preserved and kept alive.
Hugo’s call for legal protection for monuments and historical buildings
resulted in the establishment of the Commission des monuments historiques;
his friend, the novelist and playwright Prosper Mérimée, was
appointed its director. In 1851 the commission sent five artists, all members
of the Société Héliographique, in five directions across France to document
the nation’s architectural patrimony—an assignment known as the Mission
Héliographique. 7 Romantic literature—including the novels of Hugo and the
plays of Mérimée—was not far from the minds of the five, and its influence is
strongly felt in the photographs from their survey.
Charles Soulier, for example, framed Notre-Dame from across the
Seine in winter, the church’s narrow flying buttresses rising like tendrils from a
smoky grove of trees (fig. 14). Édouard Denis Baldus photographed the Maison
Carrée, the first-century CE Roman temple in Nîmes that was the inspiration
for Paris’s Église de la Madeleine and Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia State Capitol,
from an oblique angle, ignoring the hyper-rational geometry of its square
façade and rendering the famously white marble as dark, and its portico cast
in shadow (fig. 15). By framing the scene from askance, the temple’s repeating
columns echo the rhythm of the fence posts that separate the monument from
the street before it, and its outline is interrupted by a single standing oil lamp.
In Baldus’s image, the light—either the intellectual light of history, or the
reflected gleam of marble—comes not from the building. Instead, illumination
comes from the simple oil lamp, the product of civic services tended by an
unseen laborer. Just as in Hugo’s novel, architecture becomes the backdrop for
a story of modern French life.
Light is also the primary language of a photograph of the interior of
Rouen Cathedral taken by the Bisson brothers studio (fig. 16). Shot from an
elevated position anchored to the right-side wall of the church’s fourteenthcentury
nave, the image gazes toward the apse and high altar. Hazy light
casts long horizontal shadows from the unseen windows of the nave, and the
apse’s windows glow. The height and delicacy of the stone pillars, culminating
in steeply pointed archways, gives the architecture the evanescent quality
30