From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology

From Paris to Pompeii

French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology

Göran Blix

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2009 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blix, Göran.

From Paris to Pompeii : French romanticism and the cultural politics of archaeology / Göran Blix.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4136-5 (alk. paper)

1. Archaeology—France—History—19th century. 2. Archaeology—History—19th century. 3. Archaeology—Philosophy. 4. Archaeology and history. 5. France—Intellectual life—19th century. 6. Romanticism—France—History—19th century. 7. Secularism—France—History—19th century. I. Title.

CC101.F8B55    2008

930.10944—dc22

2008025519

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

Neoclassical Pompeii

CHAPTER TWO

The Antiquarian Comes of Age

CHAPTER THREE

The Archaeological Turn

CHAPTER FOUR

The Specular Past

CHAPTER FIVE

Body Politics

CHAPTER SIX

Lost Worlds and the Archive

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Uses of Archaeology

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

WHEN THÉOPHILE GAUTIER ridiculed the claims of progress in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835–36), he could imagine no better insult than to forecast the future exhumation of Paris by disappointed archaeologists. What if tomorrow a volcano opened its jaws at Montmartre, he mused, and buried Paris under a shroud of ashes and a tomb of lava, just as Vesuvius did earlier at Stabia, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and in a few thousand years the antiquarians…exhumed the cadaver of the dead city, what monument would remain to testify to [our] splendor?¹ None, he suggests, only helmets, lighters, and ugly coins, and these archaeologists would be tempted to conclude that Paris was nothing but a barbarian encampment (50).

Beyond Gautier's sarcastic reminder here that art trumps utility as a measure of civilization, the device that he uses—evaluating his own culture from a future perspective—points to a radically new experience of time that arose in the nineteenth century. The age of archaeology had begun: writers and artists were embarking on a massive enterprise of retrieval which involved resurrecting extinct animals, lost languages, buried civilizations, and human prehistory. The past was becoming a new frontier as the age of exploration drew to a close and as an exotic aura of novelty came to color the past. Like the Ancien Régime, the entire past seemed an endangered species in a time of rapid change that underscored the fragile and mortal character of civilizations; the Revolution, and later capitalism, had opened a palpable gap between past and future that broke the chain of tradition and undid the predictive, stabilizing power of historical examples. In this context of turbulent change, much nineteenth-century writing exhibited a tangible anxiety of loss and gave free rein to an urgent archival impulse that reflected the period's sense of its own mortality much more than the nostalgic desire to emulate golden ages characteristic of revivals.

The mortality of cultures was a key experience of modernity: if history had come to resemble a drawn-out apocalypse more and more, this was in large part due to the rapid and relentless transformations that were changing the face of France. Every day, Balzac complained, something vanished from Paris—a type, a building, a practice—provoking a sense of homelessness that Haussmann's midcentury urban reforms would only aggravate. In response to this ceaseless internal exile, romantic writers embarked on a vast salvage operation that made them record their own culture compulsively, ostensibly to convey an exact image of it to future readers: fashions, customs, speech habits, social types, private life. The more ephemeral a thing was, the more urgent it was to embalm it in writing. Balzac of course cast his literary project in such terms, presenting the Comédie humaine as that book which we all regret that Rome,…Persia, and India have unfortunately not left us on their civilizations.² Balzac's comparison reveals the close link between retrieving the past and the modern fear surrounding the fugitive character of the present. The period's fascination with lost worlds, such as Pompeii, and its urge to resurrect them in words and images can be seen as the flip side of the vast journalistic project of recording the modern world, and both endeavors were symptomatic of a culture that had grown hyperconscious of its own mortality.

Gautier's analogy of Paris and Pompeii was no random juxtaposition, then, but an image that associated past and present destruction. Pompeii would indeed often serve as a cipher for Parisian fears throughout the century, as if Paris were also destined to vanish in a catastrophic upheaval or expire slowly as history moved on; the disaster could take many shapes: revolution, transformation, or decline, but in the big picture they all blended into the same somber archaeological allegory. The specter Gautier evoked was moreover a commonplace of nineteenth-century literature: take Joseph Méry's burlesque story, for instance, The Ruins of Paris (1856), in which two archaeologists from the Atlas Phalanstery in North Africa tour the muddy remains of Paris and Marseille in 3844 and confuse France with ancient Rome. The satirical thrust of such fictions would seem to suggest that Paris was not worth grieving, but their critical edge in fact always masked a deeper anxiety of impermanence. Indeed, Gautier would live to witness the realization of his own prophecy during the violent suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, in the aftermath of which he penned a visionary reportage on the ruined city: it seems as if two thousand years have passed in a night, he wrote, and as if Paris were a dead city reduced to some scattered debris on the banks of the deserted Seine.³ Pompeii and Paris had here become twin cities: the burnt papers of the ministry of finance floated in the air like "the lapilli of this Vesuvius opened in the heart of the city" (622).

Gautier's archaeological imagery was in fact a vital component in the nineteenth-century vision of history and of itself. Both past and present carried the imprint of an entropic time that condemned all things to an ephemeral existence marked by ceaseless becoming rather than by any enduring identity. This elegiac view is no novelty, of course, but it grew into an all-encompassing outlook that included not just men but also cities, species, cultures, languages, and nations. At the same time, the transcendent horizon that had formerly guaranteed the soul's immortality began to erode, as human life gravitated increasingly around a purely earthly existence. A central argument here will be that as the religious faith in the afterlife declined, inclusion in collective secular identities, such as race, nation, or humanity, emerged as a weak form of compensation: though death was becoming more final, individuals also survived, to a greater degree, in the group. In a telling meditation on oblivion, Ernest Renan confessed to being haunted in a village cemetery in Bretagne by the millions and millions of beings that are born and die…without leaving a trace, but he also expressed the reassuring conviction that these obscure children of the hamlet…are not dead since Bretagne still lives, and they have contributed to making Bretagne.⁴ And when Bretagne is no longer, France will [still] be; and when France is no longer, humanity will still be. The reckoning with mortality thus provokes a long chain of secular assimilations whose function is to guarantee that not a single word that has served the divine work of progress will be lost (262).

All the silent and seemingly futile sacrifices of the nameless masses thus help pave the collective path to the future, so that nothing, and no one, is truly lost, and every life becomes absorbed into an ideal, perfectible humanity. This compensation is of course radically diminished not only by the loss of self but also by the mortal nature of entities like Bretagne and France; in principle it led to an infinite regression, which could only dissolve, in the end, in the empty abstraction of the universe. This is where archaeology comes into the picture: it was widely regarded as a magic science capable of undoing the work of erosion and of rescuing even the most traceless beings from amnesia, and in that capacity it offered an imaginary guarantee that nothing was truly lost and that every life left some kind of legible trace. Archaeology thus underwrote the myth of an earthly memorial survival that could plausibly take the place of immortality. The promise of assimilation into larger collective beings, such as France, and the strength of one's commitment to them were partly a function of their power to absorb and perpetuate the group's memories. This postreligious memorial burden of the collectivity helps explain the urgency with which many Romantics turned to archaeology.

This thesis is not offered as a totalizing explanation; religion clearly remained a vital force throughout the century and indeed regained some lost ground at the outset with Napoleon's Concordat. But by and large faith was becoming a private matter that no longer framed public life, while the modern secular nation was taking its place as the horizon of collective life. It is at the level of this global trend, rather than of individual beliefs, that archaeology performs its role as a guarantor of memories; indeed, its promise in no way challenged religion with an overtly rival discourse, and Catholics often adopted its rhetoric of memory to defend an enduring Christian identity. The decisive shift does not take place at the level of individual beliefs but turns on the loss of a public form of transcendence that transforms the earthly community into the site of a secular immortality. Archaeology emerged in this context as a modern myth that secured memorial survival on three overlapping levels: the persistence of personal traces, the individual's assimilation into the collectivity, and the relative longevity of the group's identity.

This seems to charge archaeology with a rather heavy symbolic burden, at least when measured against its marginal role before it was professionalized in the second half of the century. Up until then it was marked by amateur efforts, provincial antiquarian societies, and sporadic public subventions, but the claim here is also not that this nascent field carried this burden alone or directly. This book is not about the rise of archaeology as a professional discipline,⁵ but about its broader mythical impact on romantic culture. Indeed, as an idea, it quickly shaped the consciousness of the period, left a large cultural footprint, and gained a symbolic prestige that far outweighed its real impact. Naturalists, geologists, historians, philologists, and writers all adopted its rhetoric of excavation, its interpretation of material remains, its vision of stratification, and its promise of resurrection to reinforce their own efforts to reconstruct the past. Thus the naturalist Cuvier saw himself an antiquary of a new species while the philologist Renan promoted a linguistic archaeology that would retrieve the primitive world from beneath the numerous strata of people and idioms.⁶ Michelet consistently presented his history as a national archaeology, while writers revived lost worlds from Carthage and Pompeii to medieval Paris and the Ancien Régime.

Wherever the past had to be reconstructed, archaeology proved to be a useful and elastic model that was easy to exploit. With the rise of historical consciousness and the modern perception of things as changing entities without stable essences, the archaeological image of a ceaseless stratification of the past became a useful master metaphor: texts, languages, nations, landscapes, and minds also changed constantly and deposited their pasts in invisible strata that might be excavated, reconstructed, and revived. The entire past was taking the shape of a vast archival accumulation in which heterogeneous records (words, fossils, monuments, relics, psychic traces) came together in a single great imaginary deposit.⁷ Thus when Élisée Reclus evoked the prehistoric Swiss lake dwellers discovered in the 1850s, his rhetoric blurred the frontiers between geology, philology, and archaeology: wherever historical monuments and written testimony [are] lacking, there begins the role of the geologist. He explores the strata deposited by the water, sand grain by sand grain; he exhumes the gnawed bones, the pottery, the debris of every sort already gathered in the stratified archive, and the study of these objects allows him to conjure [these] vanished people from oblivion.⁸

This symbolic confusion would be an obstacle for a narrowly conceived history of the discipline, but this fluidity, conversely, provides the basis for my claim that a diffuse archaeological gaze marked much of romantic culture. The field's undisciplined and amateur character even reinforced its global impact by making it available for appropriations and imaginary uses. Balzac's use of the term in Le Cousin Pons gives a good illustration of this extreme flexibility; there Pons, an impoverished art lover, claims it as the master science that informs his strategy of collection: archeology comprises architecture, sculpture, painting, jewelry, ceramics, cabinet-making, a very modern art, lace, tapestry, in fact all the creations of human labor.⁹ Archaeology also formed the core of Balzac's own practice of observation, which sought above all to expose the secret histories of the characters, buildings, and objects that peopled his novels: archeology is to social nature, he wrote, what comparative anatomy is to organized nature.¹⁰

Such broad and flexible uses were to some degree authorized by the vague nature of the field itself; both as a term and practice, archaeology was replacing an older antiquarian culture that had declined steadily during the eighteenth century, but not without inheriting some of its imprecision: did it study words or material remains, artistic works or every trace of human culture? Was it an aesthetic or historical discipline? Could it look beyond classical antiquity to the national past, or further back, to prehistory? The courses on archaeology in the early nineteenth century were mainly art-historical and focused on the development, dating, and quality of artistic forms, but at the same time the modern idea of a strictly material science of past civilizations was gaining ground.¹¹ By the time Napoleon III ordered excavations at Alésia to unearth material for his History of Julius Caesar (1865–66), archaeology had successfully carved out its own niche beside philology, art history, and history, not least because the midcentury recognition of man's prehistoric existence had made the need for a science of nonverbal and nonartistic traces obvious.

While the field's loose boundaries no doubt facilitated its broad appropriation, its central concern with past civilizations had emerged quite early,¹² and it was chiefly this meaning that nourished its mythical appeal as a science of memory. No discovery played a greater role in the establishment of this myth than Pompeii; the theme of countless poems, novels, paintings, plays, operas, and travelogues in the nineteenth century, most notably Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), this city embodied a contradiction that lay at the heart of archaeology's power of enchantment: it had been abruptly annihilated and just as suddenly resurrected, and this stark contrast of violence and redemption provided an irresistible melodramatic script for the comprehension of history; while conceding that history was a violent process that littered the past with vibrant cultures, it also dissociated ruin and amnesia and suggested that lost worlds might leave imperishable traces. Loss and memory were cemented into a single felicitous narrative at Pompeii, which had of course both perished and survived thanks to the 79 C.E. eruption, as if its death had been the vehicle of its preservation. This fantasy—a leitmotif of Pompeian writing—accounts for the city's great popularity with Romantics as well as for archaeology's symbolic appeal. Accordingly, I here take Pompeii as a thread to study the global impact of archaeology on romantic culture. It is not a book about Pompeii and does not purport to relate the city's discovery or reception systematically, but it is the central example to which I return again and again, just as it was the example that inevitably came to mind when Egypt, Assyria, or prehistoric sites were excavated. In La Légende des siécles, Hugo marveled at the enormity of oblivion by wondering how many Herculaneums and Pompeiis / Lie buried in the thick ashes of history!¹³

Much of the corpus studied here thus deals directly with Pompeii and, in the interests of breadth, draws on a wide range of genres, such as travel narratives, erudite reports, fictional resurrections, and visual reconstitutions. Beyond this central example, I also make selective use of archaeological texts on Egypt, Assyria, France, and prehistory; the works of Chateaubriand, Mme de Staël, Gautier, Hugo, Renan, and, to a lesser degree, Scott and Carlyle lie at the center of my corpus. In addition, I also often turn to the works of the major romantic historians, Augustin Thierry, Prosper de Barante, and Jules Michelet. The inclusion of historiography can be justified on two grounds: on the one hand, romantic history drew abundantly on archaeological rhetoric; on the other hand, my reading of archaeology identifies it as the central trope that structures modern historical consciousness.

There are of course a number of major studies of romantic historicism (notably by Stephen Bann, Linda Orr, Ann Rigney, Claudie Bernard, and Maurice Samuels), to which I owe a great debt but which do not grant archaeology a central place. By foregrounding the archaeological rhetoric of romantic historicism, my aim is to deepen our understanding of it as a modern secular theology and partly to take issue with its dismissal as a picturesque, spectacular, or naïvely ideological enterprise. While history certainly helped forge national identities, heal the breach of the Revolution, and legitimize new regimes, my focus on archaeology subordinates these functions to a deeper existential concern with the being of the past—to a specifically modern preoccupation with the imperishability of memories. Archaeology, or rather its myth, affirmed that nothing perishes, that earthly existence itself embodies a form of immortality, and that the tragic historicity of modern life carries with it a secular ontology that neutralizes its fragile and fugitive character.

The book is divided into three parts and moves progressively from a concrete study of the archaeological gaze to its broader theoretical implications. Part one examines the birth of a modern archaeological outlook in the early nineteenth century and begins by looking at the early reception of Pompeii, which was marked by a narrow focus on artworks and a slightly brutal effort to extract them. Chapter 2 then turns to the romantic revival of the antiquarian as a modern heroic archaeologist, no longer a bespectacled savant, and shows how the gap between erudition and imagination narrowed in Romanticism. In Chapter 3, I return to Pompeii to show how interest shifted from art to the intimate image it furnished of a civilization known chiefly from its textual accounts and to argue that this new archaeological gaze turned artifacts into documents whose meaning both illuminated and depended on their setting. At this point, I turn briefly to the debate about the museum sparked by the French Revolution and use the Pompeian example to argue that both opponents and adherents of the museum shared a similar contextual outlook but ironically disagreed, as it were, in the name of their archaeological understanding of monuments.

Part two then turns to the poetics of resurrection in history and literature to show how writers mobilized the archaeological gaze to make the past present once more. Two metaphors are central here: vision and the body. Chapter 4 analyzes the use of visual tropes to produce presence and interrogates the implicit ontological stakes of this operation. In Chapter 5, I look at presence in physical rather than optical terms and explore the desire, at once religious and erotic, to reanimate, touch, and commune with the body of the past. Lastly, in part three, I address the broader cultural, philosophical, and political implications of archaeological thought. Chapter 6 examines the romantic myth of the lost world along with the catastrophic view of history it encodes, before reading these as a meditation on the existence of an indestructible archive that safeguards memories. Finally, in Chapter 7, I turn to the pragmatic uses of archaeological rhetoric and show how its secular theology of memory fueled a broad range of ambitions to renew modern society; by securing the past, archaeology had also established a reservoir of energy to nourish the future, and this mythical idea galvanized dreams of artistic, social, and political rejuvenation. By way of conclusion, I consider the exhaustion of the archaeological myth at the end of the century, when it finally lost its power to neutralize the experience of rupture, violence, and oblivion.

All the foreign texts cited here are my own translation, unless the reference is to an English edition. For the sake of brevity, full references occur only in the bibliography.

ONE

Neoclassical Pompeii

OUR MODERN CONCEPTION of archaeology as a science that unearths even the humblest vestiges of the human past with extreme care and sophistication emerged only gradually over the last two centuries. Archaeology itself, it is true, is as old as history, and evidence pushes the human preoccupation with its own monuments far back into the remote past. The Renaissance is clearly a cultural rebirth that is fueled by the archaeological rediscovery of antiquity. Nonetheless, the meaning of the term archaeology will here be restricted to a radically new type of relation to the past and to its remnants which emerged roughly at the turn of the eighteenth century, during the shift from neoclassicism to Romanticism. Interest in the fragmentary remains of past cultures underwent a major transformation at that point which completely redefined and reconfigured the archaeological object—from its status and meaning to the way culture related to it. Overall, this shift in perception can be characterized as the transition from a purely aesthetic gaze to a historicizing gaze: the excavated fragment—be it a ruin, a statue, an inscription, a coin, or a vase—was formerly viewed chiefly as an art object, to be appreciated for its aesthetic merit, and either to be held up as a model of beauty or to be found shortcoming with respect to the ideal. In the nineteenth century, the fragment began to be viewed increasingly as a monument, document, or clue, in short, as a memorial device which furnished historical evidence about the past. Dating the vestige became of paramount importance, and the fragment was now endowed with a new type of value, no longer just aesthetic but primarily historical and hermeneutic: insofar as the unearthed object was the witness and survivor of a vanished past, it enabled the viewer to reconstruct and reimagine the world to which it had belonged. From possessing an intrinsic value (beauty), it receded into a network of associations, became absorbed in a historical context, spoke not of itself but of the world in which it was embedded. It is this major shift in attitudes to historical objects that I call the birth of archaeology, which I investigate in this part.

The Past as Buried Treasure

The rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum offers an exemplary illustration of the birth of a modern archaeological gaze. Buried during the August 24, 79 C.E., eruption of Vesuvius witnessed by Pliny the Younger,¹ and only truly unearthed in the mid-eighteenth century (Herculaneum in 1738, Pompeii in 1748), the two Campanian cities stand out as the most spectacular archaeological find of the Enlightenment. Two and a half centuries later, the sites have not yet been fully exhumed, and about a third of Pompeii's surface remains unexcavated. No other modern discovery has had an equal impact on the popular romance of archaeology or on the decorative arts. An instant sensation, the cities attracted travelers on the Grand Tour, influenced neoclassical painting, and set off a long-term trend in decoration, inspiring, for example, the Pompeian ornamental scheme of Napoleon's castle at Malmaison and the pottery of Josiah Wedgwood.² In the nineteenth century, this ornamental inspiration gave way to the intense romantic drama of the doomed cities, reproduced endlessly in poetry, painting, and theater, most famously in Bulwer-Lytton's historical disaster novel, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). The twentieth century kept this mythical event alive by transferring it to film, and directors of toga movies from Luigi Maggi (1908–9) to Sergio Leone (1959) kept turning to Bulwer's classic melodramatic script. The extraordinary fame and mythical fascination of the buried cities make them an ideal seismograph to test changes in the popular perception of archaeology and its cultural role. The major shift I want to map here is the one from an image of Pompeii as a curious site of artistic treasures, prevalent in the eighteenth century, to the romantic myth of the city as a lost world magically restored by the powers of archaeology. Between 1750 and 1830, Pompeii is transformed from a grave to be robbed into the image of a lost civilization; in the process, a sweeping change has occurred—in the nature of the object exhumed, in the value attached to the artifacts, and in the gaze of the beholder.

The first contact with Herculaneum, before real excavations began, occurred as early as 1711, when a well was dug for the Prince d'Elbeuf's new country house at Portici. Several costly marbles, including a statue of Hercules, were exhumed from the pit to the prince's delight. It turned out that his well had been sunk right into the richly adorned proscenium of Herculaneum's theater, but the significance of this find largely escaped him. In dire need of money, he had the pieces smuggled to Rome for restoration, then on to Vienna, as a gift to his cousin, the Prince Eugene of Savoy. This mercenary extraction and illicit private transaction set the tone for much to come at Pompeii and Herculaneum. The cities would in fact be treated largely as underground treasuries, mines brimming with artworks, graves to be robbed for the king's collection of antiques. Excavations undertaken in 1738 by Charles de Bourbon, King of Naples, were pursued to enlarge his private collection: tight security around the digs limited access, and restrictions on the right to draw the antiques ensured the king's monopoly on the prestigious finds. It was fortunate, one traveler noted in the 1770s, that Elbeuf had struck upon the most beautiful statues at the outset, because their discovery sparked a much greater curiosity, one which might not have been sustained, unless, at the outset, such interesting finds had been made.³ The search was on for artistic masterpieces; the cost of the digs was to be suffered for the value and prestige they would bring to their royal patron. It was this high expectation that propelled the digs.

Charles III, like all princely collectors, derived cultural prestige from the artifacts he hoarded at the Museo Borbonico in Portici. This musuem drew curious visitors from afar, attracted dignitaries, and quickly built an international reputation; it also helped put Naples on the map of the Grand Tour as an indispensable stop. Goethe called the museum the A and Ω of all antique collections in 1787.⁴ Since access to the excavations was restricted and the right to draw the objects rarely granted, curiosity in Europe far outpaced the supply of information, and illicit sketches, reports, even artifacts, stolen by underpaid workers and sold to wealthy visitors, began to circulate abroad. An Observations sur les antiquités de la ville d'Herculanum, replete with inaccurate sketches drawn from memory, was published by Cochin fils and Bellicard, after their visit in 1750. The great neoclassical art historian Johann Winckelmann penned a Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen in 1762, another unauthorized report responding to the Europe-wide demand for news, and was highly critical of the poor conduct of the excavations and the way cultural politics clashed with the interests of science. Charles III deflected criticism while courting interest in the finds by appointing a fifteen-member Accademia Ercolanese to study and publish the artifacts (1755). Between 1757 and 1792, this academy issued a multivolume work with accurate plates entitled Le Antichità di Ercolano, not for commercial sale but to be bestowed, as Jean Seznec writes, on the happy few—even Winckelmann had to make a plea to get the first volume.⁵

Much was no doubt lost due to the king's jealous secrecy and use of slave labor at the excavations. When Lord Hamilton, the longtime British ambassador in Naples, guided foreign visitors to Vesuvius and Pompeii, he also often showed off his private cache of memorabilia. Goethe passed through in 1787 and reports that Hamilton led him into his secret den of art and junk, where he spotted two lovely bronze candelabras, strangely resembling those in Portici: they might, he suggests, have slid sideways from the Pompeian shafts and lost their way into this place.⁶ Stressing the private and treasure-like nature of Hamilton's illegal collection, Goethe notes that, as knight of these hidden treasures, he can exhibit them only to his most trusted friends (426). His commerce in antiques of course only mirrors the period's broader view of them (in which the king participates) as priceless treasures to be mined, extracted, and stashed away. Indeed, Goethe regrets this pillage-style excavation, which leads to such abuses, and wishes it were undertaken systematically by true German mountain-men (276). Laments of this sort touching the poor quality of the excavations and assessments by travelers and savants of the finds as artistic treasures, as unique aesthetic objects to be bought, sold, hoarded, and copied, reveal a great deal about the eighteenth-century attitude to the material past. In what follows, that relation will be explored under two main headings: as grave robbery without method and as a purely aesthetic assessment. The two are not unrelated: it is because only artistic values are perceived beneath the ground that valuables can be excavated with violent disregard for the site's archaeological integrity.

The motif of the buried treasure in archaeology is no neutral metaphor in this setting but points to a mindset favorable to pillaging. Pompeii and Herculaneum are of course priceless treasures, but the reiterated use of this figure by eighteenth-century visitors reveals the narrow framework in which it was possible to grasp these fragments of antiquity. The man often judged to be the father of archaeology, Winckelmann, himself appeals in his Sendschreiben to the hope of finding treasure (Schätze) in calling for more aggressive digs at Herculaneum. Given the certainty, he writes, of finding treasures of which our forefathers had no idea, the work is advancing in a rather sleepy fashion. No more than fifty laborers, counting the slaves from Algiers and Tunis, are there altogether (79). The use of slaves or prisoners also jeopardized the very booty to be mined at such low cost.⁷ If science partook in the excavations, it did so without thwarting the primary purpose of enrichment and without instituting methods to protect the myriad objects and ruins of lesser interest. The antiquarians Cochin and Bellicard remark bluntly that "the temples which have been discovered near the Forum and the plunder [dépouilles] from many private houses have enriched the cabinet of the King of the Two Sicilies.⁸ They note also that everything of value has been removed from the surface of the walls and transported into [his] cabinet" (53). The square cutouts left in the walls from the detached frescoes struck many visitors but without inspiring much indignant comment. The abbé de Saint-Non makes only the technical comment in his Voyage pittoresque (1777) that it had been necessary to use great precautions to succeed in removing them from the depths of Herculaneum without breaking or damaging them.⁹ This cultural strip-mining of the buried ruins testifies to the predominantly aesthetic gaze that the period brought to bear on antiques: the artifacts existed as discrete objects, independent of their frame and easy to detach from their material and cultural context; what mattered was their artistic merit and cultural prestige—everything else could be neglected. This grave-robbing mentality would not be seriously questioned until the turn of the century. The poet Giacomo Leopardi's complaint that extinct Pompeii returns to daylight…[but] by worldly greed reveals how the Romantics would evaluate this neoclassical retrieval of antiquity and points to the argument that artworks possessed their full meaning only in their original settings.¹⁰ This was the polemical position that Quatremère de Quincy, the late classic, and Chateaubriand, the early Romantic, would famously adopt against the museum.

The vision of the buried past as artistic treasure translated directly at Herculaneum into roughshod means of excavation. The goal of finding and extracting what was valuable at low cost promoted the hiring of cheap labor, unmethodical digs, poor treatment of artifacts, neglect of records, and overall abuse of the site under investigation.¹¹ Tunnels were dug quite at random or merely to secure the quickest access to the artworks, according to the Président de Brosses, who, in 1739, was among the first visitors at Herculaneum: excavating blindly…they have only dug a few low and narrow tunnels at random.¹² When they could not find an entrance and were frustrated at this failure, Cochin reports, the workers pierced through the wall facing them and penetrated into the room.¹³ Space constraints made it impossible to expose entire sections of the city to view, and once rooms had been plundered they were refilled with dirt to clear the passageways. Once a room has been dug out on all sides and thoroughly searched, Winckelmann says, another room of equal size is excavated across from it, and the new dirt removed to the facing room.¹⁴ Cochin corroborates this observation.¹⁵ No coherent image of the city could take shape given this profit-oriented method of tunneling: they clear spaces, refill them, and the underground presents a new face every six months (50). In this way, goods were extracted and the city reburied as the excavations progressed to more impressive finds.

Visitors often had harsh words for the conduct and management of the excavations. Goethe's desire to see German Bergleute run the operation foreshadows the critical and often nationalistic remarks that foreign tourists would offer. The Spaniard Alcubierre was the man Charles III first appointed to direct the excavation: he was as unacquainted with antiques as the moon with crabs, Winckelmann wrote, and made himself guilty through his inexperience of gross damage and the loss of many beautiful things (79). But his incompetence largely reflects the groping state of archaeology and its profit-oriented outlook in the eighteenth century.¹⁶ Winckelmann indignantly relates how a large public inscription was found, its metallic letters detached and thrust into a basket, before a copy had been made of the text. The paramount concern, he insists, was to find out what these letters meant, and that nobody can now say.¹⁷ He also caustically relates the fate of some bronze horses, deformed by the lava, which were loaded up on a carriage and thrust into a pile in the castle courtyard at Naples, whereupon they were melted down and recast as busts of the king and queen, an irresponsible usage (81–82). In 1785, the Président Dupaty blamed the slow progress on the bad management and indifference of the employers,¹⁸ and seventeen years later Creuzé de Lesser updates this critique by calling for scientific excavations which neither proceed too fast nor falter whenever more profitable terrain beckons. It was not until 1813, under the French occupation, that a real work-site was established, the count Kératry would later boast¹⁹—with some justification, however, since the intermittent French tenure of the region [1798–1815] was an active period in the history of Pompeian excavations, during which the first real attempts at actual reconstruction of certain areas to a pre-eruption state took place.²⁰

As Philippa Levine has shown, it was only slowly, in the course of the nineteenth century, that archaeology emerged from antiquarianism as a science with a genuine method.²¹ The distance traveled from 1800 to 1850 can be measured in part by Ernest Renan's 1865 review of Mariette's work in Egypt, which he calls the greatest scientific enterprise of our century and situates at the antipodes of bric-a-brac archeology, praising its refusal of the frivolity of the elites, the stupidity of the public, and that vain quest for museum objects which reduces science to a pale amusement.²² Mariette announces the end of archaeology as grave robbery: he neither seeks "those spectacular objects that impress the idle viewer [le badaud] nor attempts to enrich his museum at the expense of the monuments, as the Germans had done in Berlin, acquiring their Egyptian collection by plunging saw and axe into precious monuments" (369). Not that such practices did not continue, especially in colonial territories, or were virtuously eschewed by the French: let us recall that André Malraux, father of the musée imaginaire, set out in search of