Material for History. National Antiquarianism und Its Narratives in France between the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century.

• Applicant: Dr. Lisa Regazzoni
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 262291181

The aim of this project is to explore the role of antiquarian monument research in the construction of historical narratives in French between the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.The beginning of the eighteenth century saw a growing interest in French antiques, Celtic, Gallic and medieval alike. Understanding the process that led to the appreciation, registration, preservation and embedding of these native antiquities in a national narrative is one of the research concerns. Hence it is first of all important to show how antiquities became valuable historical sources, initially serving universal Christian and parochial narratives and, beginning in the mid-1790s, national history, how the autochthonous in the form of archeological evidence struggled for prestige in competition with classical Greek and Roman remains, how with the agency of this novel historical source and through specific narratives the origins of civilization shifted from southern Europe/the Middle East to France. Finally, it will be determined what understanding of historiography antiquarian monument research transmitted and the ideological implications this entails. Such an undertaking pursues three aims. In a first step it reconstructs the epistemological innovation that got underway in France at the end of the seventeenth century. It observes the modification of the antiquarian method, which, faced with the question of the origin of a specific geographic-cultural entity (the Judeo-Christian cultural space, the town, the province or the nation), discovered a new type of source and reinterpreted vast pre-Roman monuments as historical sources. Secondly, the study seeks to analyse the narratives that emerged with and accompanied these native antiquities. Apart from the universal historical narratives examined, which were used in opposition to the ambitions of atheists, sceptics and Gallicans, and the parochial narratives that expressed anti-absolutist aspirations, the focus will be on the belated “nationalizing” of the Celtic narrative and its transformation following Napoleon’s expansion policy. Consequently a further research aim is to re-examine the genealogy of French nationalism by investigating its increasingly patriotic significance and its identity with the help of innovative material sources, a reference to the colossal ancestral legacy of the French. Thirdly, the project intends to query and revise the conventional image of antiquarian research. The pioneering question to be answered here is not to what extent the antiquarian method contributed to the emergence of nineteenth-century history, but in what historiographical paradigms antiquarians were thinking and what type of national history they intended and were able to construct.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants