The Archaeology of the French Revolution

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of both nationalism and archaeology as a professional discipline. The aim of this chapter is to show how this apparent coincidence was not accidental. This discussion will take us into uncharted territory. Despite the growing literature on archaeology and nationalism (Atkinson et al. 1996; Díaz-Andreu & Champion 1996a; Kohl & Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998), the relationship between the two during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has yet to be explored. The analysis of how the past was appropriated during this era of the revolutions, which marked the dawn of nationalism, is not helped by the specialized literature available on nationalism, as little attention has been paid to these early years. Most authors dealing with nationalism focus their research on the mid to late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the ideas that emerged during the era of the revolutions bore fruit and the balance between civic and ethnic nationalism (i.e. between a nationalism based on individual rights and the sovereignty of the people within the nation and another built on the common history and culture of the members of the nation) definitively shifted towards the latter. The reluctance to scrutinize the first years of nationalism by experts in the field may be a result of unease in dealing with a phenomenon which some simply label as patriotism. The term nationalism was not often used at the time. The political scientist Tom Nairn (1975: 6) traced it back to the late 1790s in France (it was employed by Abbé Baruel in 1798). However, its use seems to have been far from common, to the extent that other scholars believed it appeared in 1812. In other European countries, such as England, ‘nationalism’ was first employed in 1836 (Huizinga 1972: 14). Despite this disregard for the term itself until several decades later, specialists in the Weld of nationalism consider the most common date of origin as the end of the eighteenth century with the French Revolution as the key event in its definition.

Evolutionism and Positivism (c. 1860–1900)

This was the way that one of the executive members of the Swiss National Museum phrased, at the end of the nineteenth century, the changes that had taken place in the previous decades: the interest in the national past was replacing the former emphasis on the Great Civilizations. Another transformation that had occurred was that the study of prehistory, rather than the history of the Roman and medieval periods, was definitively on the agenda. This change of emphasis, which took place between the 1860s and 1880s, had been in motion throughout the century but had finally crystallized in the last two decades of the century. By then, nationalism had transformed its character into a predominantly conservative doctrine. Another adjustment was also apparent. The acceptance of evolutionism had emerged as a major scientific theory to explain change. Issues of nationalism, regionalism, and imperialism became intertwined with scientific theory and further nourished the interest in the remote past. The development of methods to study evolution in the natural sciences promoted a scientific approach to the prehistoric period. At the same time, this affected attitudes towards the Roman and the medieval past. In this chapter, therefore, I reject the view expressed by other historians of archaeology such as Trigger (1989: 148) and to a certain degree Sklenár (1983: 123–6), who think that nationalism constituted a threat to cultural evolutionism and its eventual dismissal. This, they think, took place when scholars moved towards the adoption of the culture-historical perspective in the first decades of the twentieth century. The following pages will reveal, however, that the belief in evolutionism was not contrary to the nationalist cause. Late nineteenth-century archaeologists believed in the evolutionary theories to a greater or lesser extent. Despite this, they also became deeply implicated in the construction of their national past, to a degree not seen in previous decades. Culture-history did not oppose evolutionism; it accepted its tenets and moved beyond them.

Archaeology and the Liberal Revolutions (c. 1820–1860): Nation, Race, and Language in the Study of Europe’s Past

There was no return to the Ancien Régime after Napoleon’s downfall in 1815. Firstly, the early nineteenth-century economy was increasingly strengthened by the industrial, imperial and trading expansion of the European powers throughout the world (Chapters 5 to 10), which helped to stimulate Western Europe’s financial growth. Adding immeasurable impetus to this movement was the territorial expansion of Russia and the US, and later in the century other countries such as Japan contributed by broadening their frontiers manifold (Chapters 9 and 10). Factors such as these accelerated the enlargement and aspirations of the middle classes, who were precisely the group leading most of the revolutionary activity in the first half of the nineteenth century. Secondly, the reforms in administration made the state machine more efficient than that of the Ancien Régime and this impeded a full restoration of the old order. Also, for the efficient functioning of the state, the enthusiasm with which educated individuals identified with the nation was extremely important to ensure their loyalty. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century socio-political revolutions had brought a series of new meanings to concepts such as conservatism, liberal, democrat, party, and the distinction between left and right (Roberts 1996: 21). For example, liberalism was a doctrine that favoured ‘progress’ and ‘reform’. It was also linked with the type of nationalism that the French Revolution had promoted with the sovereignty of nations and the belief that all citizens were equal in the eyes of the law (although at this time ‘citizenship’, as propagated by the proponents of this doctrine, mainly meant the prosperous classes and male citizens). For progressive liberals, it was not only the established states that had the right to be a nation. The nationalist sentiments and claims by Greeks, Slovaks, Czechs, Brazilians, Mexicans, Hungarians, and a myriad of would-be nations, illustrate the growth of the widespread notion of nationhood that reached to other people with distinctive pasts and cultures. Liberals also had to confront, or negotiate with, the reactionary forces that brought down Napoleon in 1815. They were mainly made up of the nobility, and also supported by conservative intellectuals.

Informal Imperialism in Europe and the Ottoman Empire: The Consolidation of the Mythical Roots of the West

‘Informal colonialism’ and ‘informal imperialism’ are relatively common terms in the specialized literature. The term ‘informal colonialism’ was coined—or at least sanctioned—by C. R. Fay (1940: (vol. 2) 399) meaning a situation in which a powerful nation manages to establish dominant control in a territory over which it does not have sovereignty. The term was popularized by the economic historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson (1953), who applied it to study informal British imperial expansion over portions of Africa. The difference between informal and formal colonialism is easy to establish: in the first instance, complete effective control is unfeasible, mainly due to the impossibility of applying direct military and political force in countries that, in fact, are politically independent. They have their own laws, make decisions on when and where to open museums and how to educate their own citizens. Yet, in order to survive in the international world they need to build alliances with the main powers, and that comes at a price. Many countries in the world were in this situation in the middle and last decades of the nineteenth century: Mediterranean Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and independent states in the Far East and in Central and South America. A simple classification of countries into imperial powers, informal empires and formal colonies is, however, only a helpful analytical tool that shows its flaws at closer look. Some of those that are being included as informal colonies in Part II of this book were empires in themselves, like the Ottoman Empire and, from the last years of the century, Italy (La Rosa 1986), and therefore had their own informal and formal colonies. The reason why they have been placed together here is that in all of them there was an acknowledgement of a need for modernization following Western-dominated models. They all had the (northern) European presence in their lands—at first primarily British and French, followed by Germans and individuals of other European states, mainly from other empires either alive such as that of Austria- Hungary or in decline like Sweden and Denmark.

An Alternative Account of the History of Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century

Historians of science (whether philosophers, epistemologists, historians of science, or sociologists of science) have been stubbornly reluctant to deal with archaeology in favour of other disciplines such as geology and medicine. Most histories of archaeology have, therefore, been written by archaeologists and this book is no exception. Being trained in the subtleties of stratigraphy and typology does not, however, provide archaeologists with the necessary tools to confront the history of their own discipline. Many of the histories of archaeology so far written revolve around a narrow, almost positivistic, understanding of what the writing of one’s own disciplinary history represents. This volume attempts to overcome these limitations. Questions addressed have been inspired by a wide range of authors working in the areas of history, sociology, literary studies, anthropology, and the history of science. It uses the case of nineteenth-century world archaeology to explore the potential of new directions in the study of nationalism for our understanding of the history of archaeology. Key concepts and questions from which this study has drawn include the changing nature of national history as seen by historians (Berger et al. 1999b; Hobsbawm 1990) and by scholars working in the areas of literature and political studies (Anderson 1991); transformations within nationalism (Smith 1995); new theoretical perspectives developed within colonial and post-colonial studies (Asad 1973; Said 1978); the relationship between knowledge and power (Foucault 1972 (2002); 1980b); and the consideration of social disciplines as products of history (Bourdieu 1993; 2000; 2004). Perhaps historians and sociologists of science’s lack of enthusiasm to engage with archaeology derives from its sheer lack of homogeneity. The term comes from the Greek arkhaiologia, the study of what is ancient. It most commonly encompasses the analysis of archaeological remains, but the emphasis on what body of data lies within its remit has always differed—and still does—from country to country and within a country between groups of scholars of the various academic traditions. For some it revolves around the study of artistic objects, as well as of ancient inscriptions and coins, for others it encompasses all manifestations of culture from every period of human existence.

Classical versus Islamic Antiquities in Colonial Archaeology: The Russian Empire and French North Africa

This chapter revisits the connection between nationalism and religion in a very different setting to that seen in the biblical lands (Chapter 6) and, to a certain extent, in Central, South, and Southeast Asia (Chapters 7 and 8). It analyses how religion is able to induce the creation of alternative historical discourses to those formed on the basis of the remains of the classical civilizations. On the one hand, the historical account about the Greeks, the Romans and other contemporary peoples influenced by them such as the Scythes still maintained their powerful allure as symbols of civilization and of one’s own empire. On the other, however, the weight religion had in the nineteenth century allowed for the search of the national origin in other periods with special significance for particular churches. Thus, the Byzantine period became appropriated as a Golden Age in the Russian Empire. In contrast, the Islamic past never acquired a similar status in the French colonies of North Africa. The religious undertones of particular archaeological periods were also used to undertake a racial reading of modern populations, and therefore had a direct impact on the colonization of the area. Yet, during the nineteenth century the effect of all this in archaeology was only limited, for the search for ancient remains stubbornly maintained a focus on the classical past. A comparison between the archaeology of the Russian colonies and of French North Africa reveals several similarities and differences which shed light on the processes guiding the development of archaeology in each of these areas. In both of them the historical narrative produced by the colonizers was one in which the classical periods were better regarded and valued more positively than others, following a hierarchy from classical to Byzantine, and then to the prehistoric and Islamic periods. Also, in both colonial areas archaeology was practised by many different actors: individuals from a breadth of occupations, and professionals belonging to many institutions, colonizers settled in the colonies as well as others coming from the metropolis. Nevertheless, this diversity was much more marked in North Africa than in the Russian colonies.

Conclusions

In this book explanations have operated at various levels, of which two will be highlighted here: top-down and bottom-up approaches. Regarding the first approach, it has been argued that archaeology’s emergence as a professional discipline needs to be understood within the framework of the appearance of nationalism as the political ideology that changed the way in which states were characterized, leading to their definition as self-governed nations. An overview of how nationalism, and, connected to it, imperialism and colonialism, affected the development and institutionalization of archaeology throughout the world in the nineteenth century has been provided in the introduction. In this final chapter I do not intend to repeat arguments put forward there. Instead, the following pages will further elaborate on the bottom-up approach, utilized throughout the work but not explicitly formulated. This concerns archaeologists’ role in the changes that led to the growing acceptance of nationalism and imperialism, and the increasing success of archaeology as a scholarly discipline. Nation, colony, empire, and state are abstract concepts that, in fact, represent communities of individuals whose agency is fundamental in the events that mark the history of these institutions. People successfully instil—or otherwise—the belief in the existence of a nation, an empire or a colony. Explorers, amateurs, and professionals played a vital part in the organization of the search for antiquities, claiming their undertakings were useful from a political point of view, and popularizing this vision through exhibitions, speeches, teaching, and publications. To understand correctly the mechanisms by which nineteenth-century archaeology related to nationalism it is important to stress that the political role played by most individuals involved in the study of antiquities was not the result of an imposition. On the contrary, free choice motivated them. The many analyses undertaken on the social provenance of archaeologists (for example Kristiansen 1981; Levine 1986; Mitchell 1998) show that a number hailed from the social elite and, importantly, that the great majority were from the middle classes. They, therefore, belonged to the strata in society leading the nineteenth-century revolutions. These were not enforced from above, but, quite the reverse, were voluntarily directed by the intelligentsia—the educated strata in the society mainly drawn from the middle classes—in their search for space in the political sphere.

The Early Search for a National Past in Europe (1789–1820)

In the nineteenth century, the allure of the past of the Great Civilizations was soon to be contested by an alternative—that of the national past. This interest had already grown in the pre-Romantic era connected to an emerging ethnic or cultural nationalism (Chapter 2). However, its charm would not be as enticing to the lay European man and woman of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who were much more under the influence of neoclassicism (Chapter 3). The Western European nations had no monuments comparable to the remains of Greece, Rome or Egypt. Before the Roman expansion into most of Western Europe in antiquity, there had been few significant buildings, apart from unspectacular prehistoric tombs and megalithic monuments whose significance was unrecognized by the modern scholar. Roman remains beyond Italy were not as impressive as those found to the south of the Alps. Because of this it seemed much more interesting to study the rich descriptions the ancient authors had left about the local peoples and institutions the Romans had created during their conquest. Throughout the eighteenth century the historical study of medieval buildings and antiquities had also increasingly been gaining appeal. In Britain their study instigated the early creation of associations such as the Society of Antiquaries of 1707, but even this early interest did not lead to medieval antiquities receiving attention in institutions such as the British Museum, where they would only receive a proper departmental status well into the nineteenth century (Smiles 2004: 176). In comparative terms, the national past and its relics were perceived by many to be of secondary rate when judged against the history and arts of the classical civilizations. During the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath, for example, the national past would not be as appreciated by as many people and antiquarians as that of the Great Civilizations (Jourdan 1996). This situation, however, started to change in the early nineteenth century. There were three key developments in this period, all inherited from Enlightenment beliefs, which were the foundation for archaeology as a source of national pride. The effects of these would be seen especially from the central decades of the century.

Colonialism and the Archaeology of the Primitive

Westerners encountered a wide variety of societies in their colonial expansion. Politically these were categorized from the most complex—the state societies in regions of Asia and North Africa—to those perceived as formed by savages and primitives, with the simplest types of political organization. Their entrenched belief in a philosophy of progression took Western scholars to assume an uneventful and unchanged past for these societies. It was commonly argued that savages did not have a history. Hence, they were considered as living fossils, as ‘survivals’ from earlier stages of culture long passed in Europe. In stark contrast to the awe that the ancient Great Civilizations had inspired in imperial Europe, the antiquities of primitive societies evoked a distinctly lesser regard. Instead of appropriating them as part of their own past, Western scholars remained unreceptive: no genetic links were created with the archaeology of the ‘uncivilized’, rather, they were considered to be a distorted image of the remote European—and, from the end of the century, also Japanese—past. This position was not completely new, for primitives had been regarded as a source of information with which to understand the prehistoric past in Europe since the eighteenth century, although at that time this was made within the biblical framework (Sweet 2004: 149–51). This chapter will aim, first, to explore how, during the nineteenth century, the archaeology of the primitive was used in the formation of the colonial discourse. Secondly, the following pages will also assess the interpretations Westerners provided to explain the presence of monumental antiquities in areas considered primitive and, therefore, without a distinguished past. It is important to note that the encounter with primitive societies not only took place within newly established colonies, but also within the frontiers of century-long political formations. This chapter, therefore, regards colonization as operating at two different levels. First, colonialism in the classical sense—based on territories appropriated by a foreign power in a different part of the world. Secondly, internal colonialism, a concept which in this book is employed to define the physical occupation by white settlers of territories usually inhabited by non-state societies, both within already defined boundaries of the state or in adjacent lands.

Colonialism and Monumental Archaeology in South and Southeast Asia

In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, political and economic power was concentrated in just a few countries. Having eclipsed the most mighty early modern empires—those of Spain and Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, The Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries— Britain, France, the Russian, and the Austro-Hungarian Empires became the major European powers. Later, these were joined by the newly formed countries of Germany and Italy, together with the United States of America and Japan. In these countries elites drew their might not only from the industrial revolution but also from the economic exploitation of their ever-increasing colonies. Colonialism, a policy by which a state claims sovereignty over territory and people outside its own boundaries, often to facilitate economic domination over their resources, labour, and markets, was not new. In fact, colonialism was an old phenomenon, in existence for several millennia (Gosden 2004). However, in the nineteenth century capitalism changed the character of colonialism in its search for new markets and cheap labour, and the imperial expansion of the European powers prompted the control and subjugation of increasingly large areas of the world. From 1815 to 1914 the overseas territories held by the European powers expanded from 35 per cent to about 85 per cent of the earth’s surface (Said 1978: 41; 1993: 6). To this enlarged region areas of informal imperialism (see Part II of this book) could be added. However, colonialism and informal colonialism were not only about economic exploitation. The appropriation of the ‘Other’ in the colonies went much further, and included the imposition of an ideological and cultural hegemony throughout each of the empires. The zenith of this process of colonization was reached between the 1860s and the First World War, in the context of an increasingly exultant nationalism. In a process referred to as ‘New Imperialism’, European colonies were established in all the other four continents, mainly in areas not inhabited by populations with political forms cognate to the Western powers. In the case of Africa, its partition would be formally decided at an international meeting—the Berlin Conference of 1884–5.