Regimes of Historicity: presentism and experiences of time

LET US NOW TURN FROM MEMORY TO ITS ALTER EGO, HERITAGE, while asking the same question as before: how are we to understand, in terms of time and the order of time, the proliferation and universalization of heritage that we have witnessed over the last quarter of a century? More precisely, what regime of historicity is implied by the phenomenon that some have described as the “meteoric rise of the heritage industry” in the 1990s? Did this taste for the past, for everything old, emerge suddenly as a kind of nostalgia for an older regime of historicity that had in fact long been inoperative? And how could it be reconciled with the modern regime, which for two whole centuries had pinned all “hopeful expectation” on the future, as expressed in Marinetti’s proclamations and prophecies? I shall suggest that our contemporary fascination with heritage can be understood as the expression of a crisis of time, and as a further sign of the emergence of presentism, which I have been exploring throughout this book. To broach these issues, I shall again move between different understandings of the notion of heritage in different epochs, with particular attention each time to the role assigned to the present.

In the period under consideration—and not forgetting that 1980 was decreed Heritage Year by the French government—heritage became a dominant and all-encompassing, if not all-consuming, category of cultural life and public policy. It was treated as though it were self-evident. Soon, all sorts of “new heritage objects” appeared, as well as “new heritage uses.” In France, the Historic Monuments Division of the Ministry of Culture, which previously had had a whole department to itself, was cut back, uprooted, and transferred to a Department of Heritage that included, most strikingly, an ethnology unit.1 Heritage Days were inaugurated in 1983, and by September 2002 they were attracting more than eleven million visitors to so-called heritage buildings. The results, duly recorded and publicized each year in the media, have become a kind of record to be broken the following year: the longer the queues, the healthier the figures! The only exception was 2001, when the Heritage Days had to be cancelled at the last moment due to the 9/11 attacks. Heritage days have now sprung up more or less everywhere. Thanks in large part to UNESCO’s programmes and conventions, heritage has become a universal phenomenon, and every year the list of Universal Heritage Sites of Humanity, which can be consulted on the World Heritage Center’s website, gets longer and longer: 730 in 2002. A National School of Heritage, set up to train future heritage curators, opened in Paris in 1991. And since 1996 one can even find a French Heritage Foundation, inspired, at least in its founding principles, by the United Kingdom’s National Trust (but it remains to date remarkably inconspicuous). Lastly, the Ministry of Culture’s Heritage Department has organized Heritage Debates (Entretiens du patrimoine) since 1984, where everything relating to heritage, including, recently, its “excesses,” is discussed.²

In Les lieux de mémoire, Nora argued that the history of France—or even France itself—was becoming a “heritage object,” insofar as the shift from one regime of memory to another had caused the regime of “memory-history” to give way to that of “heritage-history.” In this respect the wording of the 1993 law on heritage was striking: “Our cultural heritage is the memory of our history and the symbol of our national identity.” Heritage had gone over to the side of memory, incarnating the memory of history and, as such, becoming a symbol of identity. Memory, heritage, history, identity, and nation were seamlessly joined in the smooth language of law.

In this new configuration, heritage was linked to territory and to memory, which both operated as substrata of identity, that 1980s keyword. But there was nothing obvious about this identity. It was an identity aware of its own insecurity, teetering on the brink, or even already to a large extent forgotten, obliterated, and suppressed: an identity in search of itself, to be unearthed, pieced together, or even invented. In this sense, heritage came to define less what one possessed, what one had, than what one was, without being aware of it or without having been in a position to know it. Heritage could thus encourage collective anamnesis. To the “duty” to remember and, later, its public expression in the form of repentance was added something like the “zealous obligation” no longer toward the Plan, as in de Gaulle’s time—other times, other customs—but toward heritage, with the attendant requirements of conservation, renovation, and commemoration. At about this time, ecomuseums and social museums (at least in France) became the testing ground in which a new hybrid heritage, at the crossroads between the cultural, the social, and the natural, was explored.

How did this notion of heritage or patrimony, which had existed in private law since ancient times, come to dominate the field of collective cultural property? The term entered French dictionaries only recently.³ The International Convention on Natural and Cultural Heritage of 1972 is a useful indicator: “heritage” had moved over to the natural world, to be taken up by economists and legal scholars, before swinging back to an overwhelmingly cultural definition. On the way, however, it became clear that applying the concept of heritage to nature was nothing short of a coup de force. For heritage had always been “the archetype of the appropriated good…, in opposition, semantically, to the natural, the wild and the inappropriable. Natural entities are the class of objects whose characteristics make them least likely to be able to be integrated into a logic of heritage.”⁴

This remark is perfectly true, but it overlooks the fact that what defines heritage fundamentally is that it is something transmitted. The natural environment was qualified as “heritage” as soon as people realized that its deterioration, whether accidental or ordinary (pollution), temporary or irreversible, endangered its transmission. Hence the idea of making nature into a heritage object, so that it could benefit from legal protection and be preserved today for future generations. Taking the future into account involved acting in its name. So we appear to be on familiar ground again, within the modern regime of historicity. Yet is this future, and the approach to it, really the same as before?

The apparent self-evidence of the notion of heritage, which although recently established seems to have been overwhelmingly accepted, should not obscure the fact that it is a notion with a history: it did not exist in all places, nor at all times, nor in the same way. What was the situation outside of Europe, for example, and, more recently, in formerly colonized countries? A comparative analysis would identify how the notion emerged, how it circulated, and how it was received. In Europe, for example, heritage is a hybrid notion with a long history behind it. Scholarly studies tracing the concept back to its origins show that several conditions had to be fulfilled: a tradition of collecting, a concern for conservation and restoration, and the gradual elaboration of the category of the historic monument.5 These were necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the emergence of “heritage.”

For something else was required, namely a certain way of life that links together and gives meaning to such practices; a certain mode of relation to the world and to time; and some awareness, more often than not uneasy, that something (an object, a monument, a site, or a landscape) had disappeared or was about to disappear. In short, what was needed was a crisis of time. Adopting Krzysztof Pomian’s definitions, we can say that heritage objects are semiophores, or “visible objects endowed with meanings.”⁶ Clearly cultural heritage and social temporalities are inseparable, since heritage condenses the semiophores that a society produces at a particular time (and for a particular time). They are thus a sign of the type of relation to time that a society decides to establish. Heritage makes visible and expresses a certain order of time, in which the dimension of the past is the most important. More precisely, it is a past that the present cannot or does not want to relinquish entirely, whether the bond to it takes the form of celebration, imitation, banishment, reflected glory, or, simply, the possibility of visiting it. Is, then, the concern with heritage only or principally backward-looking? No, because we are dealing with a past—a certain past—whose visible embodiment is important for the present.⁷

So does that fulfill all the conditions? Yes, if one simply means to point out that all human beings or human groups become attached to certain objects that they have found, received, or cobbled together, however shabby they may be. No, if one is attempting to tease out the specificity of the notion of heritage in Europe, and the place it has come to occupy. In addition to the conditions enumerated above, and in addition to a certain relation to the world and to time, another factor was determinant: the high value placed on the trace, as such. And it leads us back to the life of Jesus, the passage of Christ on this earth, which became a foundational moment. The categories of presence and absence, of the visible and the invisible, were enduringly shaped by it. As we know, Constantine the Great had the Church of the Holy Sepulchre built around the empty tomb, that is, on the very spot that retained the trace of Jesus’s passage, and that thereafter was treated as the epicenter of the Christian faith. I have already mentioned how radically Christianity transformed the order of time, stretching time between an already and a not yet; and how later the weight of the already—the accomplished, the past, tradition—grew ever heavier as the Church became institutionalized within the Roman Empire.8

Moreover, the relation to time rested on concrete objects that bore witness to the life and Passion of Christ. The empress Helena, mother of Constantine, discovered the True Cross on Golgotha. There were also the Crown of Thorns, the stone across the Tomb, the Holy Lance, and the sacred swaddling clothes, which ended up in Constantinople, the new capital of the empire. Old Testament relics, like “Moses’s rod,” also had a precise role in the rituals of the religious calendar’s major festivals. The emperor was a new Moses, the heir to the kings of Israel, but he also acknowledged the authority of the “cross of Constantine.” Gilbert Dagron’s work on official ceremonials, minutely described with all their “sites of memory,” has revealed the workings of this priestly monarchy.⁹

Saint Louis managed to appropriate some of these elements for the benefit of the French monarchy, in particular the Crown of Thorns in 1239, which he placed in the treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle.10 Such emblems legitimating divine right had first been the signs by means of which the new “nation” of Christians could be recognized. Hence the rule that any altar used for worship had first to be consecrated, and often also authenticated by a relic. The cult of the relics of martyrs and saints prospered throughout the Middle Ages. People came to see and touch them, and remain in silent prayer before them. As spiritual treasures but also sources of material wealth, these semiophores were stolen and traded, and gave rise to pilgrimages and donations. Bodily relics belonged both to this world and the next: on the day of the Last Judgment the saints would surely claim them back.¹¹ While relics were traces of the past, testifying to the sanctity of their owners, they were equally signs fully existing in the present. They were incorporated into the rituals of the Church, where they were constantly reactualized, and where their role of intercession made them into ever-contemporary “objects,” functioning as particularly potent imagines agentes or sites of memory.

BEYOND THE CHRISTIAN WORLD, IT IS JAPAN THAT HAS MOST often attracted Western attention. The fact that almost immediately after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 legislation was passed protecting ancient artistic and architectural works makes it easier to establish comparisons with the European conception of heritage than in the case of other countries.¹² A first Heritage List was commissioned in 1871, followed in 1897 by a law on the preservation of ancient sanctuaries and temples, in which the notion of “national treasure” figured. The word “treasure” implied that the object’s value derived from something intangible (its divine origin, for example).¹³ At the time, religious (Shintoist) heritage was the primary focus. Then, in 1919, a law was passed on the preservation of historic and scenic sites, as well as natural monuments. Lastly, in 1950, a law on the protection of cultural goods included the category of “intangible cultural heritage” for the first time. We shall examine only two characteristics of this body of legislation and the heritage-related practices it codified.

The legislation provided for the periodic reconstruction of certain religious buildings. The fact that they were made of wood does not fully explain this provision, since the calendar for the works was fixed in advance, and involved exactly the same reconstruction every time. Such was the case in particular for the great Jingu Shrine in Ise: every twenty years the temple of the goddess Amaterasu, the mythic ancestor of the imperial dynasty, was to be rebuilt in Japanese cypress wood in exactly the same way. This ritual was established in the seventh century and has continued, naturally with some interruptions, until today (the next reconstruction was due in 2013). What counted most was that the form of the building should remain unchanged. Consequently, the Western dilemma of “preservation or restoration” was from the outset irrelevant.14 A Japanese person visiting Paris will be struck (or more precisely would previously have been struck) by the effort expended on protecting objects and historic monuments from the marks of time.¹⁵ The first concern of Japanese cultural policy was clearly neither how the objects looked, nor preserving the way they looked. There was another logic at work, a logic of actualization.

The label of “living national treasure,” as defined in the law of 1950, can help us understand this logic. It is conferred on an artist or craftsperson not as an individual author but insofar as he “is the bearer of important intangible cultural heritage.” Anyone, whether an individual or a group, who receives this title is obliged to transmit their knowledge, and receives an allowance for this. What this striking arrangement makes clear is that the object and its conservation count less than keeping alive a skill that is actualized in its transmission. Just like the wooden temples, the traditional arts are significant only insofar as they exist for and in the present. It follows that the notions that were pivotal in defining the concept of heritage in the West—the notions of original, of copy, of authenticity, and so forth—are not applicable in Japan, or at least are not invested with the same values. The past is not unimportant, but the order of time differs from that of Europe. Time is not essentially linear, and so a different representation of permanence and a different relation to the trace are operative. The above is simply a hasty sketch, the bare outline of a view from afar, but it is enough to defamiliarize the seemingly self-evident European conception of heritage. We can now return to a few moments in its long history, beginning when time was neither an actor nor a process, and when the model of historia magistra was unchallenged.

In order to situate the place of heritage in antiquity, or rather to repatriate it, could we not simply remind ourselves that “heritage” or “patrimony” derives from the Latin patrimonium, and that the Romans were great admirers of (above all, Greek) antiquities?16 Monuments, statues, and paintings were restored in the Greek city-states, in Rome, and throughout Italy; collections and famous collectors existed, such as the Attalids of Pergamon, Atticus, or the notoriously corrupt Verres in Rome; and a whole imperial legislation existed for the protection of urban centers.¹⁷ One could also mention the Library of Alexandria, even if its goals were less heritage-related than encyclopaedic, since it aspired to acquire all Greek and Barbarian books with a view to producing knowledge about knowledge, to knowing better and more.¹⁸ But what was nonetheless lacking was the category of the historic monument, which presupposes that a certain gap has opened up: a moment comes when a monument can be regarded as something other than what it was or had been for a long time. It becomes visible again, but differently, as a semiophore bearing, precisely, “artistic and historical values.”

We associate the Renaissance with this moment of renewed visibility: “The birth of the historic monument can be located in Rome around the year 1420.”¹⁹ A change in the order of time was required, namely a double movement in which the distance between present and past at once increased and was collapsed. The past is over, but it is still there as a resource or a model. This sort of relation to time was unknown in antiquity. It is perhaps what made Roland Mortier, the author of a pioneering study on the poetics of ruins, write that “the ruin—which was curiously non-existent for the Greeks—interested the Romans only as the material image of Destiny: it is not a presence but an absence, a void, the sign of a vanished greatness, the negative mark of greatness which has been destroyed.”²⁰ This claim is no doubt true from the point of view of a historical psychology, but it is also true that ruins were present both in the landscapes and even in the minds of Greeks and Romans.

I shall take but one example, that of Pausanias, the author of the Description of Greece. Here we have a classical author who would seem to come extremely close to an awareness of something like cultural heritage, someone who, in the second century A.D., decided to visit Greek sites of memory. He was frequently portrayed in the modern period as an antiquarian busy writing the first Baedeker or Blue Guide to Greece. True, his book is a trip through the key sites of Greek history and memory. At one point he even chastises present-day Greeks for their instant admiration of the treasures of other nations, while they remain blind to the marvels of their own. People are always praising the Egyptian pyramids, he says, but no one makes even the briefest mention of the Treasury of Minyas or the ramparts of Tiryns, which are no less magnificent.21 In selectively evoking certain sites, Pausanias behaves as though he were tracking down a long-lost and long-forgotten Greek identity. But he is, rather, constituting it in the very movement of his journey. As he states, “my narrative must not loiter, as my task is a general description of all Greece.”²² This was Pausanias’s way of returning to Herodotus’s original project, but at a time when there were no more erga (great feats) to be preserved from oblivion, and when all that remained were, precisely, ruins of former times. Rome had been in power for well over three centuries by then.

But one should not imagine Pausanias, a Greek from Asia Minor, as a distant precursor of Prosper Mérimée, a kind of Inspector of Historic Monuments on his rounds.²³ His ten books—starting in Athens and ending in Delphi—have nothing to do with compiling inventories, listing buildings, or, even less, recommending measures for conservation. The Treasury of Minyas and the city of Tiryns, for instance, had lain in ruins for many a long year, and had it not been for Pausanias’s knowledge and his way with words, they would have been nothing other than what they were then, namely a few collapsed walls. He often chose to describe elements as still standing that no visitor could have seen intact even decades previously. Moreover, he felt under no obligation to describe everything a traveler would be able to see, since he deliberately ignored anything later than 150 B.C., treating the Hellenistic period as more or less nonexistent. All in all, his work contains more things known through written or oral sources than actually seen. As for restoring Greek temples, or recommending their restoration, the issue quite simply never arises.²⁴ All one needs is his book.

One of the key figures referred to for the theorization of monuments and cultural heritage, who was rediscovered in the early 1980s, could usefully be cited at this point. In 1903, as chair of Vienna’s Commission on Historic Monuments, Alois Riegl had been asked to draft a new law on their conservation, and suggested that they be listed according to their “commemorative value.” His starting point was therefore neither classical antiquity nor the Renaissance, but well and truly the present, and what he called the “modern cult of monuments.” Riegl’s analysis of this “cult” and his attempt to accommodate it led him to divide monuments into three categories, according to their different “commemorative values.” First came “intentional” monuments, erected in antiquity and during the Middle Ages. Then with the Renaissance came the “historic” monument, which we mentioned above: “People began to appreciate the monuments of antiquity anew…because of an increasing appreciation of their artistic and historical values.” Lastly, whereas the nineteenth century focused exclusively on the monument’s historical value, “the twentieth century appears to be [the century] of age-value.” This last category, of monuments with age-value, “embraces every artefact without regard to its original significance and purpose, as long as it reveals the passage of a considerable period of time.”25 Ancient and modern are thus linked, with historical value accompanying modernity and even required by it.

Bearing in mind these points, which themselves have a history, I shall now return to the Greek and Roman worlds. Of course in antiquity practices such as preservation, restoration, and collecting were not unknown, but the question is what meaning could they have in the absence of the artistic and historical monument (in Riegl’s sense). I shall go a little further with this question, using an example involving Augustus. In his Res Gestae, a short work written to his greater glory and destined for posterity, he wrote in the first person feci, “I completed,” “I built” (followed by a list of temples and monuments) and, immediately afterward, refeci, “I rebuilt, restored, reconstructed” (followed by a list of 82 temples for Rome alone). The same refeci was also used to mean “repair,” for example, the Via Flaminia and a number of bridges.²⁶ As for feci, although one might assume that it referred to new buildings, this was not necessarily the case. Thus the temple of Feretrian Jupiter, supposedly “built” by Augustus on the Capitol, is in fact one of the oldest buildings, traditionally dated as originating with Romulus. So Augustus must have been referring to a restoration.²⁷ As regards shows of power and the benefits anticipated, there seems to be little difference between the two activities, with refeci being as important as feci, and maybe even more so for an emperor who wished to be regarded as one who has re-founded Rome as its restitutor.

Similarly, Suetonius reports that Vespasian undertook the restitutio of the Capitol, which had been destroyed in a fire. In other words, he rebuilt it. At the same time he had three thousand bronze tablets, which had melted in the fire, “restituted” (they were in fact archives).28 But how could they be restituted if they had been destroyed? Obviously, by using copies stored elsewhere. Hence restitutio did not mean restituting, but actually re-making, producing anew, based on a copy from somewhere else. Restoring, restituting, reconstructing, or making afresh—all these operations were covered by the term restitutio. In the Renaissance, the humanists saw themselves as agents of the restitutio, in all senses, of Rome’s splendor.

Restoring a monument thus meant that an authoritative instance reestablished it as an “intentional” monument by adopting and reaffirming the monument’s original intention. In so doing, the power in question also confirmed its own legitimacy, and made the return to law and order visible. In the case of Rome, restoration meant a solemn reaffirmation of the eternity of the Urbs and of the ongoing contract between it and its gods. Restoration, in this sense, is integral to any intentional monument. The logics of the novus ordo saeclorum and of refoundation were championed during Augustus’s reign, since he styled himself as the restitutor (restorer) of tradition in all fields, including the urban environment.²⁹

Since antiquity was a time of “inertia and not creative development,” as Paul Veyne put it (with a nod to Bergson),³⁰ building meant building for today, but also and equally, for eternity. Nowadays, by contrast, one tends to build for today, and today alone, with the result that buildings are anything but durable, even if we pretend to be surprised by this. In thirty years, according to a historian of architecture, “they will no longer exist.…We will not even be able to afford to maintain them in their original state, because they will have to be constantly rebuilt.”³¹ Will they be rebuilt as they were originally, or given a supplementary “facelift,” as one sometimes says? One way of introducing something new is to play, precisely, on the paradox of the durable and the ephemeral, by transforming a monument into an event. This is Christo’s strategy in wrapping up buildings. When “wrapped,” the monument’s everyday invisibility and its drab patina of historical time fall away, showing it to be strikingly contemporary and endowing it, temporarily, with a new visibility.

As for preserving the external aspect of buildings and cities, let us attempt to define or date the moment when it became important. A first-century imperial senatus consultum aiming to preserve urban centers has come down to us, but according to specialists, its goal was above all to prevent and control speculation.32 Yan Thomas has devoted a remarkable study to the legal dimension of urban ornamentation, in which he shows that the ornatus (marble decorative elements, columns, etc.) in their totality were considered to be attached not to particular monuments but to the Town, and that as such they were under the jurisdiction of the ruler.³³ One can find, from the first to the fourth century, a whole panoply of legislation concerning the aspect, form, and appearance of buildings, and reading between the lines, the spectacle of towns threatened with being dismembered, demolished, and reduced to ruins. However, what seems to me most important here is that “such damage was criticized not so much because of its ugliness but because it betrayed the indifference of the powers that be, the disasters brought about by civil war and the incapacity to ensure an eternity of time: neglecting buildings or allowing them to get defaced signalled the triumph of a dilapidation (vetustas) which was directly contrary to the supposed eternity of Rome, Italy and the Empire.”³⁴ As a general rule “re-using spolia, breathing new life into the marble ornaments, was an attribute of the ruler’s majesty.”

Thus “the Eastern Emperors continued to exercise their jurisdiction over Roman marble ornaments for a time, even though Rome was governed by its bishop.” Then the movement reversed, from centrifugal to centripetal, and it was no longer a case of spoils pouring into Rome to constitute “a bodily universality,” but quite the contrary, everything “wrested from Rome would end up constituting the Roman substance of the Christian world.”³⁵ For instance, Charlemagne had the mosaics and ornaments of the imperial palaces of Ravenna and Rome transported to Aachen, with the pope’s consent.

In fifth-century Italy under the Ostrogoths, Cassiodorus, a Roman senator, describes how Theodoric, the king of the Ostrogoths, was worried about the upkeep of his palace, whose beauty was threatened by “the approach of old age.” So he decreed that the “ancient monuments” be returned to their “originary splendor,” while having “new ones built on the model of the old.”³⁶ But apart from that, his administration continued to oversee the reuse of blocks of marble, columns, and other precious materials.³⁷ In 608, Pope Boniface IV authorized the reuse of the materials from pagan temples (having himself been authorized to do so by the Byzantine emperor Phocas), and in particular the Pantheon, which was converted into a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The logic of spoils was thus still largely operative. Reuse of materials was above all the sign of the spectacular triumph of the new religion.

Returning to Rome once more, Trajan’s Column is a striking example of the changes taking place. How was the column regarded by the Romans? An edict of 1162 provides for its protection on the grounds that “We wish for it to remain intact as long as the world endures.” Even if Rome was no longer assured of eternity, it would still like to last as long as the world! Since the column could no longer figure as the intentional monument of a triumphant Rome, it came to be identified with something else: Rome’s emblem and a patriotic symbol. It thus came to represent Rome in the present, but the requisite detachment was still lacking for it to be considered a historic monument. The above examples suggest the composite and transitional role of the monument, on which different systems of understanding temporarily converged. The intentional monument no longer quite fitted, but the historic monument was not yet an available category either.

In France, the first conservation order has always been attributed to Francis I, who, on a visit to Nîmes in 1533, decreed that the buildings adjoining, and masking, the Maison Carrée should be knocked down. However, the order was never carried out.38 Besides, the very same Francis I did not hesitate to have “the great tower of the Louvre,” that is, the fortified keep erected by Philip Augustus (its foundations have now been laid bare within the Grand Louvre complex), razed to the ground. As late as 1788, Louis XVI, without batting an eyelid, signed an edict decreeing the demolition or sale of a whole series of châteaux: the château of la Muette and of Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne, and those at Vincennes and Blois. Crown assets might well be inalienable in theory, but economic necessity had reasons of its own. The first two were demolished, and the Revolution saved the two others.³⁹

It was in 1790 that the expression “historic monument” [monument historique], coined by Louis Aubin Millin, was used to refer to a building for the first time.40 “Only in 1790?!,” you might reasonably exclaim. Are we to infer that prior to this date France had no historic monuments, or at least none perceived as such? Maybe that would be a slight exaggeration, but let us add a significant detail here: the very first historic monument described by Millin was the Bastille, which was being dismantled at the time—so, at once a historic monument and earmarked for demolition. The purpose of Millin’s inventory was precisely to record those buildings and objects that had suddenly become “property of the nation,” and whose status and visibility had been radically transformed by this. Through his work, these objects were changed into semiophores of a completely new sort.

Cicero painted an unforgettable picture of Varro, the patron saint of antiquaries, whose vast body of work, most of which has not survived, included forty-three volumes of Antiquities:

When we were sojourning and wandering like foreigners in our own city, your books, I may say, escorted us home, and enabled us at length to perceive who we were and where we lived. You have revealed to us [aperuisti] the age of our fatherland, its chronology, the laws of its religion and priesthoods, the plan of our home and foreign administration, the position of our territories and districts, the titles and descriptions of all things divine and human, with the duties and principles attaching to them, and you have shed a vast amount of light on our poets and on Latin literature in general and on the Latin vocabulary.⁴¹

The scholar of antiquities is one who opens people’s eyes to what they could not see before, and helps them understand the meaning of gestures made and words spoken without understanding why. Although he probes the past and reminds people of it (commemorat), he also contributes knowledge that is useful for living in Rome today. With the Republic in crisis and its aeternitas under threat, there is no question of proposing a nostalgic itinerary through the forgotten or destroyed Rome of yesteryear. The crisis of the present makes the present forgetful, and that is what must urgently be remedied.

Moving on to Renaissance Rome, my question will be how the relation between past and present was envisioned at a time when monuments and sites were acquiring a new commemorative value (on which Riegl was to base his classification). What would be the status of all those monuments in ruins, and all those texts so passionately pored over and edited?42 Was this historia magistra’s triumphal moment, in the form of the reactivation of classical models? And if so, was this vision and use of historia magistra simply backward-looking?

I shall begin with a letter from Petrarch written in the spring of 1337. He had already recounted the emotion he had felt on first entering Rome (which was larger than he had imagined). Then, in this long letter to his correspondent, the Dominican friar Giovanni Colonna, he undertook a lengthy description of classical Rome on the pretext of recalling their walks in the city together, and inserted it into a meditation comparing pagan and Christian wisdom. The itinerary started with Evander’s palace and went all the way through the history of Rome, including the grotto in which Constantine the Great was supposedly cured of leprosy, and the place where Peter was crucified and Paul decapitated. It would have been fitting material for a De viris illustribus or a dramatized tale from the Early Church.⁴³

Like Varro, Petrarch wanted to show the Romans their own city, since they had become blind to it. But in actual fact the letter was written not in situ, but later, in his study (despite the words “on my journey” that figured in it). His descriptions were inspired by other works, “principally…Livy, Florus, Suetonius, the Scriptores Historiae Augustae and Pliny the Ancient.”⁴⁴ The stroll through history is above all a stroll through texts. As regards the experience of time, Petrarch makes a distinction, which has since become famous, between two times: “Our conversation was concerned largely with history [historiis], I being more expert, it seemed, in the ancient [in antiquis], by which we meant the time before the Roman rulers celebrated and venerated the name of Christ, and you in recent times [in novis], by which we meant the time from then to the present.”⁴⁵ So the “new” history, which had started with Constantine, was still in force.

Moreover, Petrarch’s list of famous names, proper names, and place-names does not lead to some meditation on ruins, but rather to a direct moral condemnation of the present. Petrarch insists on the dire ignorance of the Romans of his time: “I do not deplore only the ignorance involved (although what is worse than ignorance?) but the disappearance and exile of many virtues. For who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?”46 This marks the first appearance of what would become a major theme for the humanists, namely the renovatio (renewal) of Rome. Knowing Rome would already be reinstating it, renewing its imperium, and confounding the false doctrine of transfer of political and cultural power (translatio imperii et studii) to outside of Italy. This theme also precipitates the first exchanges between philology and reality, words and things: recovering the purity of Latin would be (like) restoring Rome.

A century later, Lorenzo Valla would champion through his textual scholarship the identification of Latin with Rome. For him, language was the real: “Rome as empire has disappeared but Rome as Latin lives on.”⁴⁷ Hence restoring Latin to its former excellence was the same thing as refounding Rome. That is the ultimate meaning of renovatio for Valla. Livy in particular embodies the splendor of the empire: he is Rome. Restituting Livy’s text is therefore, Valla states, an act of restitutio in patriam, “a restitution of (in view of) the fatherland” and a refusal of the doctrine of the transfer of political and cultural power.⁴⁸ Valla’s struggle was for Rome to exist again in Rome. More specifically, he called for a new Camillus, who would come and save the nation and drive out the Gallic—French—oppressors. Philology, polemics, politics, and concern for the present were all tightly interwoven.

In 1448, and still in Rome, Poggio Bracciolini published On the Inconstancy of Fortune, which contained a long description of the ruins of Rome. A colorful and many-sided figure, who occupied important positions in the Roman Curia, serving several popes, Poggio became an epigraphist, in Rome, a manuscript-hunter, and a translator. He also produced meticulous critical editions. At around the same time, Flavio Biondo, Cyriacus of Ancona, Leon Battista Alberti, and Lorenzo Valla also spent time in Rome, which had attracted a whole scholarly community. Petrarch’s words deploring Romans’ ignorance of Rome were no longer applicable, nor was a predominantly text-based description of the Eternal City. Poggio’s portrayal is still today qualified by modern archaeologists as “decisive for the birth of scientific archaeology.”⁴⁹ Yet what is the real status of the ruins detailed by Poggio? What relation to time do they imply?

Poggio’s treatise is in the form of a dialogue in two parts. The description of ruins is followed by a meditation on fortune, which is based on several classical authors. Poggio and his friend Antonio Loschi first view the city from the top of the Capitoline Hill, from which it resembles an “immense cadaver laid out rotting and eaten away all over.” The corpse’s remains are then identified. After reminding the reader of all his work salvaging inscriptions and identifying buildings, Poggio inserts a long list of monuments into the text. His descriptions are quite different from Petrarch’s abstract and historical digest; we are genuinely accompanying Poggio as he walks through the city and punctuates his progress with an “I saw,” “I read [on an inscription],” “I noted.”

In further illustration of this, the dialogue ends on a carefully prepared inversion. Contemporary vicissitudes of fortune are no less significant and influential than they were in the past, Poggio maintains. Now as then, what is lacking are the writers capable of rendering these. However, the situation could change: “I am not one to forget the present for the sake of remembering the past,” Poggio announces forcefully. “I am not so attached to antiquity, so wholly attentive to her and her alone that I would despise men of our time and consider that nothing comparable with what was achieved in former times is achieved today, or would allow the historian’s talent to shine.”50 We have seen therefore that from one description of Rome to another, and from one century to the next, there are clear differences. But what comes across equally strongly is the constant focus on the present.

Flavio Biondo, who was in Rome at the same time as Poggio, wrote his lengthy descriptions of Rome’s monuments there, for which Varro’s Antiquities were the core reference and model. He conceived his three-volume Roma instaurata [Rome Restored], published in 1447, as a contribution to Eugene IV’s great project of renovatio. He also defended the Rome of his day, considering its fame and majesty to be linked to the papacy. His focus on the topography of ancient Rome and the names of its monuments, and his detailed presentation of Rome as a great model, were designed to complement the concrete restoration work undertaken by the pope. So in presenting this “mirror” of ancient Rome, he was also working for the benefit of the present.51 Likewise Leon Battista Alberti, who perfected a new method of mapping monuments, using polar coordinates and a set scale, for the restoration work planned by Pope Nicholas V. Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae also contained a message for contemporary architects. In it he declared that he treated Rome’s monuments first as “a lesson in construction, then as an introduction to the question of beauty…where the architects of the Quattrocento may come and learn from the example set by these remains.”⁵²

In summary, can one infer from the above that the “artistic and historical” value of monuments only really emerged when principles of conservation were introduced by papal brief? That is, when Paul III took the first preventive measures, in 1534? But we have already seen, through Yan Thomas, that Roman emperors were far from indifferent to the ornatus; and here the papacy, as in other matters, simply followed suit. Of course the declared concern for conservation was not enough to prevent pillage, nor even the reuse of materials; the sheer number of papal briefs is an indication of this. Antiquities were resources for Rome, in all senses of the term: it lived off them and on them. Even Pope Nicholas V, who saw himself as the restorer of the Eternal City, did not hesitate to treat the Forum, the Coliseum, and the Circus Maximus as travertine quarries. Similarly, Pius II published a bull against these practices while at the same time cannibalizing the Villa Hadriana for the construction of his own palaces. It is not insignificant in this light that the director of antiquities at the Vatican bore the title, granted by papal bull in 1573, of “Commissioner of Treasures and other Antiquities, and of Mines.” By putting treasures, antiquities, and quarrying on the same level, “the papal administration revealed…that the control of antiquities was an instrument of power.”⁵³

The interest in preservation coincided with the establishment of the first museums. In around 1470, Pope Sixtus IV offered “the Roman people” a collection of antique bronzes, to be exhibited on the Capitol. Shortly afterward, his nephew Pope Julius II created a rival museum, in the Vatican, the Villa Belvedere collection.⁵⁴ A century later, it would be the turn of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, housing both ancient and modern works.⁵⁵ The juxtaposition of the two is clearly significant. Although the past and the present were not yet separated, a new regime of visibility for such objects had been introduced.

In 1515, Raphael was commissioned by Pope Leon X to make a comprehensive map of Rome. Adopting Poggio’s image of Rome as a corpse, he described how he “sees with immense sorrow as it were the corpse of this noble fatherland thus horribly lacerated, when once it had reigned in majesty over the entire world.” Despite this vision, he made a clear distinction, as director of Roman antiquities, between buildings that were “old and very old, until the Sack of Rome,” and those built subsequently by “Goths and other Barbarians”: the former were to be preserved, the latter not. So there was some awareness of a break, a before (of value), and an after (valueless). But preserving the old did not mean one should not tamper with it. One could preserve the memory of something by noting down the inscriptions on it, but one could equally remove the travertine facing from the Coliseum and the Baths of Diocletian in order to use it for the newly designed St. Peter’s Basilica, itself built over the ruins of the Old Saint Peter’s Basilica erected by Constantine the Great.56

I shall now turn to our last Renaissance visitor to Rome, Michel de Montaigne. He was in Rome for a few months between November 1580 and April 1581, departing with the title of “Roman citizen.” The Essays leave the reader in no doubt as to the strength of his attachment to the city and his long-standing familiarity with the Romans of former times, as he himself states: “I knew the Capitol and its plan before I knew the Louvre, and the Tiber before I knew the Seine.”⁵⁷ Also, seeing the very places “which we know to have been frequented and inhabited by persons whose memories are recommended in story, moves us in some sort more than to hear a recital of their acts or to read their writings.”⁵⁸ Montaigne was sensitive to the commemorative value of sites, but he also immediately made the link to the present: it would be ungrateful, he remarked, to despise “the relics and images of so many worthy and valiant men as I have seen live and die, and who, by their example, give us so many good instructions, knew we how to follow them.” Through the mediation of the example to be imitated, the “relic” could become meaningful in and for the present. Montaigne thus reactivated and adopted the Ciceronian model of historia magistra.

The image we have of Montaigne through his Travel Diary is that of an insatiable tourist, rapidly becoming more knowledgeable than his guide, as his secretary admiringly noted: “in a few days he could easily have reguided his guide.” However, from isolated remarks, one might get the impression that Montaigne was not at all interested in ruins: “one saw nothing of Rome but the sky under which it had been grounded and the outline of its form;…those who said that one saw at least the ruins of Rome affirmed too much, for the ruins of so awe-inspiring a machine would bring more honour and reverence for its memory: it was no more than a sepulchre.”59 In fact quite the opposite is true. Montaigne refers to the tomb and not even the ruins of Rome, since the world, “hostile to her long domination,” had fallen upon this body and, after breaking it to pieces, “buried her very ruins.” What was still visible was thus nothing compared to what was buried. To consider Rome as a tomb was in fact a way of paying homage to its past grandeur, and presenting a variation on the theme of the injustice of fortune that Poggio had expounded earlier.

Thus from Petrarch to Montaigne the ruins of Rome took on increasing significance. However, although their grandeur endured, they were increasingly ruins. They were still legible for Petrarch through Virgil and Livy, but by Montaigne’s time they were nothing but a tomb. On the one hand, these ruins appeared more distant and less enchanting; erudite procedures such as epigraphy were needed to bring them back to life. On the other hand, like the past of antiquity in general, they remained closely bound up with the present. That is where the exemplum played a powerful role, since humanism was constellated around the paradox of a “hopeful expectation turned toward the past,” in Alphonse Dupront’s striking formulation, or equally “the vision of a new world rebuilt upon an ancient word,” in Francisco Rico’s terms.⁶⁰ The Renaissance broke new ground, but it “needed an example, and it could be none other…than the entire reality known through texts of the ancient world in all its radiant splendor and self-sufficiency, prior to the birth of Christianity.”⁶¹ The Renaissance’s audacity consisted in choosing this particular past. Hence the “order of reverence,” which was also an order of time. Antiquity was no more, and yet its example was authoritative.

So the movement went once again from the past to the present, in accordance with the logic of historia magistra. But at the same time, the declared break in continuity that gave rise to the Middle Ages made the classical past into an “available” present, immediately accessible. Or, to put it differently, it was “a kind of eternal within easy reach.” This was the real meaning of renovatio, the watchword and rallying cry of the humanists: at once to recall and to begin afresh. The philosophy of “returning” of course implied a philosophy of time, but one should add, with Dupront again, that it expressed “a certainty about time, a plenitude of the present.” The Renaissance humanists “did not get as far as a modern philosophy of progress, which requires time to be ongoing; time stopped with them.…This feeling of a time which they alone occupied expressed their positive dependence, since it was through this very plenitude that the succession could be achieved.”62 Christian time, in which the present inaugurated by Christ would open onto eternity on the day of the Last Judgment, defined the limits of their world.

WHEN JOHANN JOACHIM WINCKELMANN LEFT DRESDEN and set foot in Rome for the first time, in 1755, both his approach and what he perceived were totally different from Montaigne’s experiences. No ruins, no corpse, but rather statues. For Winckelmann, who was going to blaze the trail to the Greeks for the Germans, Rome meant antiquity itself, that is, the place in which Beauty resided. In order to come closer to it, he had decided to forsake Lutheranism and convert to Catholicism. For him, the journey to Rome represented the promise of a new birth: a rebirth. Thirty years later, Goethe would be equally moved on seeing Rome for the first time, and would likewise experience a kind of rebirth. On his arrival on 29 October 1786 he lodged at the Bear Inn, as had Montaigne before him, and on 3 December he obtained the new Italian edition of Winckelmann’s History of Art, noting that “the history of the whole world attaches itself to this spot, and I reckon a new birthday—a true new birth from the day that I entered Rome.”⁶³

There is a paradox here, however. Rome is the place of Art and yet art is not Roman but Greek. The Romans simply copied the Greeks.64 So why Rome and not Athens, which Winckelmann in the end never visited, despite often planning to do so? It was to Rome that Winckelmann was again heading, unable to tear himself away, when he was assassinated in Trieste. The reason was that Athens was an ideal, and not, or no longer, a place one could really reach. By contrast, John the Evangelist’s injunction “Come and see” could be applied to Rome, and Winckelmann used the expression on several occasions to encourage his correspondents to come and look for themselves.⁶⁵ But at the same time the experience of Rome fell short of total plenitude. It was also shot through with absence, since what the person who had learned to look saw was the trace of what was no longer visible. In such circumstances, learning to see meant choosing to develop a historical eye, in order to accommodate the loss. This was Winckelmann’s startling conclusion to his History of Art in Antiquity: “we…have as it were only a shadowy outline of the subject of our desires remaining; but this arouses so much the greater longing for what is lost, and we examine the copies we have with greater attention than we would if we were in full possession of the originals.”⁶⁶ Hence every birth, even a new birth, is also a separation and an awareness of a distance that thereafter remains unbridgeable. This break is at once recognized and denied, or rather, it can produce aesthetic enjoyment, and also a history of art. It signaled that times had changed: Winckelmann is much closer here to Chateaubriand than to Poggio.

The Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, or Letters to Miranda (called after their addressee, General Miranda) were published in 1796. Their author was a certain Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, who was already quite well known at the time. He was born into the Parisian bourgeoisie, and spent many years in Italy.⁶⁷ On returning to France he compiled a Dictionary of Architecture. In 1791, he was commissioned by the National Assembly to oversee the transformation of the St. Genevieve Church into a temple devoted to the memory of great men. In his treatise Considerations on the Arts of Design, also published in 1791, he drew on Winckelmann in lauding the “just proportion” of the Greeks, who had taken “nature as a model.”⁶⁸ He sat in the Legislative Assembly, on the right, and was arrested and then liberated in the wake of 9 Thermidor. Found guilty of “inciting armed insurrection” against the Convention during the 13 Vendémiaire, Year 4, he went into hiding in Paris between October 1795 and July 1796.

In his letters, Quatremère de Quincy criticized the seizure of works of art by the “Great Nation,” in the form of the French Army of Italy acting on the instructions of the Directoire. “The arts and sciences have long formed a Republic in Europe,” he wrote, and so it was as a “member of this Republic,” whose ideals the Enlightenment had promulgated, that he was taking the floor. Anyone seeking to appropriate these “common goods,” he claimed, would be committing a crime against learning and reason, and against the betterment of humanity.69 So Quatremère de Quincy was protesting in the name of the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment. He also summoned Cicero to his cause, citing the latter’s criticism of moving Greek works of art, since “these things [statutes] lose their value in Rome,” because in order to appreciate them one requires “the peace and philosophical serenity of Greece”;⁷⁰ he appealed to the authority of Winckelmann, whom he read and admired, as the first to “bring the genuine spirit of observation to the study of antiquity. He was the first who thought to analyze antiquity and specify the periods,…and discover[ed] a method.”⁷¹ It was as an art historian who had found a “method” for “analyzing times” that Winckelmann impressed Quatremère. Without Rome, Quatremère argued, Winckelmann’s project would have been inconceivable, and now no one would be able to pursue it. Unsurprisingly, Quatremère praised Pope Nicholas V for being the first power to have had “the idea of reestablishing ancient Rome down to the very last edifice.” This was an interpretation of restitutio or renovatio as the restoration of ancient monuments for their own sake alone.

Quatremère’s Letters are not just one more lamentation on the dismemberment of the corpse of Rome. On the contrary, he is concerned with the future of art, and takes the future into account in his arguments. He is convinced that the arts in Europe will soon take on a “new aspect,”⁷² due to the way in which the ancient world is currently coming to light through the enthusiastic efforts that he himself is following closely. That is precisely why Rome must remain what it has always been, namely the only “home” of antiquity. The doctrine of imitation again takes pride of place: what, after all, are the antiquities of Rome if not a “great book” whose pages have been destroyed and dispersed by time? Or, in another image, the Eternal City is a “museum” which is “immovable…in its entirety.” Moreover, the country itself, with its light and landscapes, is also part of this museum. A certain Pirro Logorio, an antiquarian and architect in the service of the cardinal of Este in the mid-fifteenth century, declared, as self-appointed historian of Italy’s “population of statues,” that were they to be uprooted from their original scenery and context they would “as it were die a second death.”⁷³

So artists would always have to undertake the journey to Rome if they wanted to “learn to see.” Consequently, the institution of the museum, as conceived by the Revolution in the name of reason and with a view to instruction, could not but be roundly condemned, in the name of the role of place in preserving memory, and in the name of a certain idea of heritage. The Museum of French Monuments would soon be the target of this essential hostility toward the museum and the gesture of museification. But for the time being, the issue was Rome and Italy. We must, says Quatremère, maintain the unity of this scholarly collection, this museum which is Rome and indeed the whole of Italy, in the face of those who seek to dismantle it and bring it to Paris: “Rome has become for us what Greece once was for Rome.”74 While the doctrine of the “final home” for humanity’s artistic masterpieces was being elaborated in Paris, Quatremère was defending a localized and rooted conception of heritage, according to which transplanting meant mutilating. Any attempt to dismantle artifacts was “an attack on science and a crime against public instruction [un crime de lèse-instruction publique].”⁷⁵ Genuine instruction involved and must involve making a detour via Rome. The stakes were nothing less than artistic progress itself. Two centuries later, Marinetti would want nothing more than to “get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it [Italy] with innumerable cemeteries.”

In terms of the major categories of thought and action mobilized, this shift corresponds to a move from intense politicization to growing concerns with time. A good example of this transition can be found in the decree of 14 August 1792. Its preamble insists that “monuments raised to ostentation, prejudice and tyranny should no longer continue to offend the eyes of the French people.” Here again we have the theme of a people “offended by the sight” of the emblems of despotism. But not all the articles of the decree stipulate the removal or destruction of these emblems, and some paradoxically recommend preservation and conservation. In the following months, and particularly in the policies of the interior minister, Roland, a conservationist discourse began to emerge, to the greater glory of France, and with educational ends. The obvious instrument for the implementation of this policy was the museum. For Roland, the Louvre was to become a “National Monument” whence, as in Greece, the arts could shine forth.

A new argument emerged during these months of lively and conflictual debate. It tended to associate the Revolution with cultural heritage or even to treat national heritage as an emanation of the Revolution. The arts, the sciences, and philosophy were the Revolution’s creditors; the Revolution should now make good and repay them for preparing the ground for its emergence. There is a debt to be repaid, and the new present acknowledges this. A cardinal text of 15 March 1794, which established doctrine and allowed the two contradictory discourses to be articulated, was the Instruction of Year II, on the manner of inventorying and conserving, throughout the Republic, all the objects that could be useful to the arts, the sciences, and teaching (Instruction de l’an II sur la manière d’inventorier et de conserver, dans toute l’étendue de la République, tous les objets qui peuvent servir aux arts, aux sciences et à l’enseignement). There was no cause to be “offended by the sight” of these monuments of the past, because henceforth they belonged to the nation. On the contrary, such testimonies could be instructive for all. “The lessons of the past can be assembled by our century, to be transmitted, with new pages, to posterity.” The Instruction stressed that free peoples can find “models” in the arts of antiquity, and hence that one of the most important tasks was to “cultivate a taste for and encourage the teaching of” this area of study, “which links Greece and Republican Italy to a regenerated France.”78

At almost the same time (13 février 1794), François-Étienne Boissy d’Anglas brought to the attention of the Convention a treatise entitled Some Ideas on the Arts, on the Need to Support Them, on the Institutions Which Can Ensure Their Progress, and on Various Institutions Necessary for Their Teaching (Quelques idées sur les arts, sur la nécessité de les encourager, sur les institutions qui peuvent en assurer le perfectionnement et sur divers établissements nécessaires à l’enseignement).⁷⁹ In this text on the arts, time (both the future and the past) and history play an important role. Time, he wrote “can complete the great work of regeneration of the human spirit.” Regeneration is not immediate, like the holy sacrament of baptism or the Holy Spirit descending at the feast of Pentecost; it involves a question of time, a “horizon.”⁸⁰ And one should not make a tabula rasa of the past, because from it comes a legacy to be transmitted: “Preserve the monuments of the arts, of the sciences and of reason…, for they are the prerogative of the centuries and are not your private property. You may only have them in your possession with a view to ensuring their conservation.”⁸¹ We should note this expression “prerogative of the centuries.”

Henceforth, time would have supreme authority over these accumulated masterpieces. It became history’s great protagonist, bearing a legacy that on this occasion was well and truly “preceded by a testament,” and a binding one at that. And Greece, despite the fact that its greatness was so far in the past (as France’s would be one day), was nevertheless exemplary. How so? Precisely because what saved Greece was the “reciprocity” established between culture and freedom, by which it escaped the ravages of time. “Even after their [the Greeks’] demise, they still appear, thousands of years later, to be a model of a civilized and free nation.”⁸²

So there had been a phase of intense politicization in which time was short-circuited, condensed into the searing apprehension of the present alone, or else introduced only as an absolute beginning. This gave way gradually to an awareness of time stretching back to the past and opening onto the future. In its demise, to cite Boissy d’Anglas once more, despotism had bequeathed a vast legacy to a regenerated France, and “it restituted to it [France] for the centuries to come and for the whole of the universe the immense storehouse of all human knowledge.”83 Regeneration legitimated restitution, understood as the return of an object to its rightful owner. But one should add immediately that this restitution was a far cry from the active restitutio of the humanists, in which the past was recuperated for the sake of the plenitude of the present, since after the Revolution the works were only held in safekeeping in the name of the centuries to come and the universe as a whole. Time restitutes and one must restitute to it; that is how we gain a perspective onto the future. But what can such a legacy mean for whoever receives it? The idea of restitution generates the novel and acute problem of the conservation and restoration of semiophores.

The doctrine of freedom that the new France incarnated, and the theory of safeguarding works for the future, and being accountable for them to posterity, were combined in the most striking way in the idea of a “final home,” which I mentioned above. The notion drew on a mystique of the nation and of freedom, combined with some pure sophistry to justify what was simply pillage. The masterpieces of the past, the argument went, were waiting for France to “liberate” them by at last hosting them on its soil. Only then could the message they had been bearing since their creation be fully communicated. “Are the masterpieces of the Greek republics,” abbé Grégoire asked, “to adorn a nation of slaves?.”⁸⁴ Of course not, and the Louvre, where they would “leave the tyrants behind,” was ready to receive them. This extreme understanding of the role of the museum and of cultural heritage was what sparked Quatremère de Quincy’s condemnatory pamphlet, even if he was anyway essentially hostile to the museum in principle.

The festivities of 9 Thermidor 1798 brought these subtle reasonings to a close. On that occasion, François de Neufchâteau, the minister of the interior, made an extraordinary speech in celebration of the triumphal entry of works of art seized by Napoleon in Italy: “With religious fervor preserve this estate bequeathed to the Republic by the great men of every century, this repository entrusted to you as a mark of the esteem in which the whole universe holds you…their sublime paintings are the testament by means of which they bequeath to the genius of freedom the task of providing them with a true apotheosis and the honor of awarding them the true laurels they have deserved.”85 Repository, testament, laurels—the picture is complete. France both is a repository and is called upon to pronounce a last judgment. The works of art are an inheritance based on a testament, but one which has waited a long time to find its true beneficiary, who now becomes aware of her election. The link with the past is not only reestablished, bracketing out the centuries of despotism, but it is reactualized, and a relation to the future is introduced, founded on the new obligations acknowledged by the testament’s beneficiary. This is how the model of historia magistra comes to be revived. Or, more precisely, through the intermediary of national-universal cultural heritage, a renewed form of historia magistra takes shape in an attempt to articulate at once an appeal to the past and an openness onto the future. It is a way of sealing over the rift in time—or at least getting by with it.

There was another Revolutionary museum, the Museum of French Monuments (Musée des Monuments français), against which Quatremère de Quincy mounted dogged and, at the end of the day, successful attacks. This museum gradually materialized on the basis of the national treasures held in the Couvent des Petits-Augustins, under the aegis of Alexandre Lenoir. Quatremère, whom Napoleon had marginalized due to his Letters, was showered with honors by the Restoration and named permanent secretary to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1816. Thereafter he had every means at his disposal to act. Several texts prepared his offensive, including his Moral Considerations on the Destination of Works of Art, published in 1815, in which he condemned these deposits made supposedly in the name of “conservation,” where the works transferred “lost their effect in losing their cause”: “Who can enlighten us,” he asked, “as to what these statues signify, since their poses no longer have a purpose, their expressions are just grimaces, and their details have become enigmas?…What do they convey, these mausolea without tombs, these doubly empty cenotaphs, these graves which death no longer quickens?”⁸⁶

And if that were not clear enough—since every word already targeted Lenoir—Quatremère added, “Moving all these monuments, gathering together all their decaying fragments, classifying their debris methodically, and claiming that this recomposition is a practical lesson in modern chronology is to make oneself into a dead nation for a living cause; to attend one’s funeral during one’s lifetime; and to kill Art in order to write its history; yet this is not its history, it is its epitaph.”⁸⁷ Clearly Lenoir’s own epitaph and that of his museum were writ large.

A pupil of David, Lenoir identified totally with his museum-in-the-making at the Couvent des Petits-Augustins. In 1791, he was appointed as “Guardian” to the “Parisian deposit of artistic monuments” (Dépôt parisien des monuments des arts), which had become national assets. Then, in 1794, he was named curator of what he managed to get recognized a year later, after many trials and tribulations, as the Museum of French Monuments.88 Lenoir had devoted the intervening years to intensive lobbying, while also compiling inventories, purchasing, salvaging, restoring, reconstituting, and even making from scratch all sorts of objects, statues, portraits, and cenotaphs, with increasing interest in the Middle Ages.⁸⁹ Like Quatremère de Quincy, Lenoir looked to Winckelmann, whose bust presided over the entrance to the museum. The only foreigner on the premises, Winckelmann was present on two accounts, first—or still—as prophet of Athens and of freedom, but also and perhaps above all as the inventor of the history of art. As the author of Reflections on Imitation and of a History of Art, he was a figure attentive both to the politicization of the arts and to their relations to time.

Thus, under the watchful eye of Winckelmann, Lenoir succeeded in transforming his repository into a museum, that is, with works arranged historically. Not, however, according to the canons of a history of art, but such as to reveal progressively, in Lenoir’s words, “a genuine history of the French monarchy in monuments.”⁹⁰ This is what Quatremère contemptuously referred to as a “practical lesson in modern chronology.” And yet it was a visit to this museum—“there, and there only”—that gave Michelet the most “vivid impressions of history.” As he wrote in The People, “In fancy I filled those tombs—I felt the dead, as it were, through the marble; and it was not without some terror that I visited the vaults, where slept Dagobert, Chilperic, and Fredegonda.”⁹¹ Thus, setting out from Winckelmann, and in the latter’s company, Lenoir marked out a path which led the visitor through the national antiquities “successively from century to century,” as he stated in his Notice. The order of time began to leap forward by century, and at the same pace the visitor advanced toward the light. Our cultural heritage, the antiquity that belonged to us historically and was properly ours, was finally neither Greek nor Roman but medieval. In the bric-a-brac of his repository, the mostly self-taught Lenoir could thus dream on, cobbling fragments together, restoring works, and building up contexts such as to produce, ultimately, the first visual representation of a post-Revolutionary “national history.”⁹²

Quatremère, however, put all his energies into getting this first historical museum closed down, even if it was in fact a quite different venture from Vivant Denon’s Louvre and had nothing to do with the doctrine of a “final home.” He finally succeeded in 1816: he dispersed the collections, restituted monuments to churches and families, and made over the premises to the School of Fine Arts. What was unpardonable in Quatremère’s view was that the museum should be the product of vandalism. That was his final word, even if the rift of the Revolution had also generated a theory of inheritance and a philosophy of time, and even if the Museum of French Monuments was far from being the only national institution founded between 1793 and 1795 to be devoted to or involved in conservation: the National Archives were established, the Muséum central des arts, the former King’s Library, and the Conservatoire des arts et métiers. Although these had been created in response to particular needs, they became the matrix in which new relations to time, linking past and present, began to be expressed.

The Revolution was a moment of collective appropriation. Its protagonists “felt proud to see a family inheritance become a collective legacy” (l’orgueil de voir un patrimoine de famille devenir un patrimoine collectif).93 Just as there was a transfer of sovereignty, so there was a transfer of property, in the name of the Nation and into the Nation’s name. That was the first episode, which was genuinely political and presentist, soon to be followed by a second act, in which time was recognized as a protagonist in its own right, in two forms. First, the “long” time which restituted and to which one must restitute; and second, the time of immediacy, embodied in the novel experience of acceleration. The old order of time had shattered, and after an initial period of tabula rasa, the emergent modern order was still uncertain of its direction.

Indeed, how to pass from destroying to preserving? Destruction had been carried out with excitement, frenzy even, and tenacity, whereas preservation had to be rationally justified at least. The solution found was to mobilize the idea of heritage and especially to make time into an agent. Time gives, and to time we must entrust. This was a way of linking the past to the present, and on to the future. A thoroughly reworked form of historia magistra could thus be (re)introduced, opening onto a future and in no way denying the rupture with the present (on the contrary, France’s regeneration precisely qualified it to host this consignment of masterpieces from the past). It was a historia magistra compatible with the modern regime, in phase with it, and able to formulate it by linking the categories of time differently. Quatremère remained premodern, at least concerning the arts, because there was no change in his relation to the past. There was no gap in time, no transitional period, and there neither could nor should be. It became clear on his appointment as the permanent secretary to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1816 that for him all roads emanated from the French Academy in Rome and that the history of art ought to tread an unbroken path from an instructive past right up to the present.

By contrast, all those writers who experienced discontinuity, rupture, and acceleration—for example Chateaubriand, again, for whom these were the inexhaustible source of his writing—felt their relation to time to be profoundly altered. For some, the past became an object of nostalgia, burdened by regret for what had disappeared, by the nevermore of real or mostly fantasized loss. Soon the young Romantics would explore this theme with all its variations. On its publication in 1802, Chateaubriand’s Genius of Christianity met with instant public, and even political, success.94 Despite describing as “something of a distraction” his “walk[ing] among the ruins” of what had only recently been churches and monasteries, he encouraged his readers to “look back with regret on the days that are past”—and all the past. He wanted to convert his “distraction” (which was simply a watered-down version of the “offence to the eyes”) into regret.

With Gothic churches, the past was indeed distant, and even very distant, since “the forests of Gaul” themselves “were introduced” into their architecture. It was the recent past, however, which re-emerged as he wandered through Versailles, that place where “all the splendors of the religious age of France had been brought together. Scarcely a century has elapsed since these groves rang with the sounds of festivity, and now they are animated only by the music of the grasshopper and the nightingale.” The immediate past appeared with the evocation of a deserted Saint-Denis: “the bird has made it her resting-place; the grass grows on in shattered altars; and, instead of the eternal hymn of death which resounded beneath its domes, naught is now to be heard save the pattering of the rain that enters at the roofless top, the fall of some stone dislodged from the ruined walls, or the sound of the clock which still runs its wonted course among empty tombs and plundered sepulchers.”95 In short, the entire past of pre-Revolutionary France, which was a religious past, could be “converted” in this way. One set of ruins followed another, linked by the steps of the visitor. The path even took in the empty tombs, which spoke of the death of the monarchy and of the “religious age” itself. Yet Chateaubriand trusts, despite everything, that if only we would let ourselves be touched by this past, we would understand that it points to a future, which should again be religious.

The nineteenth century was a crucial period for the development of a politics of cultural heritage, its future orientations, and its instruments. But for that very reason, this period has tended to monopolize scholars’ attention ever since memory and heritage came to occupy such an important place in public debate and academic research. So I shall move on swiftly here, on my path back to the issue of our contemporary preoccupation with heritage and the relations to time subtending this. Les lieux de mémoire has mapped the nineteenth-century field, giving due prominence especially to the July monarchy, with its new institutions devoted to history, its inventories, and its policies on national memory. The figures of Arcisse de Caumont, Mérimée, and Viollet-le-Duc are given a fitting place in the work alongside François Guizot, the driving force behind these innovations.

A department of historic monuments was created after 1830, within the Ministry of the Interior. Through its activities restoring and listing buildings, the past of pre-Revolutionary France became the business of central government. Louis-Philippe decided to transform Versailles into a history museum (ending in 1830), to recall the glory of the national past, with painting after military painting hung in the Galerie des Batailles. Viollet-le-Duc started on his large-scale restorations in 1840, from Vézelay to Carcassonne via Notre-Dame de Paris and many others. Proust and Rodin meanwhile deplored the way he “ruined France.”⁹⁶ National history was consolidated, a process that continued under the Third Republic.⁹⁷ The legislation of 1887 and 1913 encapsulated what would for a long time be the official doctrine on historic monuments.

The 1887 law was very restrictive, applying only to historic monuments “of national interest.” It was extended slightly in 1913 to take into account “the public interest from the point of view of history or art.” However, within this extended definition, only monuments of national interest were protected by being listed. After the separation of Church and State, Barrès’s campaign around the “the pitiful plight of the churches of France” (1911) came up with a different definition of cultural heritage: all, and not simply the finest or the most representative, of France’s churches should be protected, because “through the church which sinks its foundations deep into the accumulated dust of generation upon generation of our ancestors, the latter still reach up to life, and what the church proclaims is what similar monuments standing in every village across France have proclaimed throughout the centuries.”98 But this decentralized and locally rooted conception of cultural heritage was not acceptable to the lawmakers, and postwar reconstruction further reinforced the centrality of the Department of Historic Monuments.

Even later, in 1959, one of the tasks awaiting André Malraux as the very first minister for cultural affairs was to “make the major works of humanity…accessible.” The logic was still that of the historic monument and the masterpiece. In 1982, twenty-three years later, Jack Lang in the same role had the task of “preserving the national and regional cultural heritage, and that of different social groups, for the benefit of society as a whole.”⁹⁹ In the wake of France’s 1980 Heritage Year, heritage had thus diversified and become more decentralized. Meanwhile, Germany was examining the extension of the notion of the monument, while England was pondering the phenomenon of the “Heritage Industry.”¹⁰⁰

During that period, the rising tide of heritage, in tandem with that of memory, began to submerge more and more areas. Just as people declared or demanded commemoration of just about anything, so everything was, or could be ordained to be, heritage. A similar inflation was at work in both fields. The transformation of objects into museum pieces or heritage eventually won the day, encroaching ever further on the present.¹⁰¹ The need, for example, to stipulate that “no living architect’s work can lawfully be a historic monument”¹⁰² clearly points to the tendency of our present to transform itself instantly into history, as mentioned above.

One particular sign of the impact of the theme of heritage and of the associated changes in relations to time can be found in policies concerning urban rehabilitation, renovation, and renewal. These seek to create museum pieces while at the same time keeping places alive, or better still, to revitalize through rehabilitation. Does this mean a new museum, without the limits of the museum—a kind of museum coextensive with the community? A museum genuinely of society rather than about society? Such a vision naturally implied moving beyond the category of the historic monument and conceiving urban heritage protection in a holistic way. The shift from the Athens Charter of 1931 to the Venice Charter of 1964 embodied this move.103 Paradoxically, the result has been that the most authentically modern urban developments today take the form of the historic past spruced up to modern standards. Taken to its logical conclusion, all we preserve are façades.

When this past happens to be lacking—adding to the malaise of deprived urban neighborhoods or dormitory towns—it is simply invented. Urban heritage sites are produced in order to bolster identity. A history is chosen, which then becomes the history of the town or district, one’s own; a history discovered, rediscovered or unearthed, and then displayed. Everything revolves around it, even literally. For example, at Port-de-Bouc in France, the shipyards, which closed in 1966, were chosen as the location of the central square. At Épinay-sur-Seine, the Eclair Film Studios similarly became the focal point of the town’s identity. Heritage introduced an element “of temporality and singularity.” But, an anthropologist asked, can one both consume cultural heritage and live in it?¹⁰⁴ Senart, a new urban cluster of one hundred thousand inhabitants, treated the problem differently. It built a city center (or “a space of centrality,” in the words of its developers) a full thirty years after its inauguration in 2002. Called the “Carré Sénart,” it provides this town-in-the-country with a central green space that currently accommodates a vast shopping mall, understood as the first link in the town’s future “life-hub.”¹⁰⁵ The development’s sole ambition seems to be to connect the natural environment (or rather, the natural environment signposted as heritage) with consumption.

“Heritage” has also become extremely diverse. One example among many would be the French Heritage Foundation Law which, in its concern to be inclusive, itemized “protected cultural heritage,” “local cultural heritage” (the “connective tissue” of national territory), “natural heritage” (including the “notion of landscape”), “living heritage” (animal and plant species), and intangible heritage (including traditional know-how, folk traditions, and folklore).106 The “gene pool” as heritage is already a familiar expression in the media, and “ethical heritage” has come on the scene. No one can ignore the increasing pace at which heritage is constituted—one could even say produced—more or less everywhere. A series of international charters coordinated, shaped, and enshrined this movement (even if ratifying, and respecting, such charters can be two very different things).

The Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments, the first of the series, was concerned only with major monuments and ignored the others. The Venice Charter, thirty years later, had a much wider range of objectives, including “the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites.” The first article also gave a much broader definition of the historic monument: “The concept of a historic monument embraces not only the single architectural work but also the urban or rural setting in which is found the evidence of a particular civilization, a significant development or a historic event. This applies not only to great works of art but also to more modest works of the past which have acquired cultural significance with the passing of time.” The preamble emphasized heritage protection in particular, and introduced the notion of a common heritage of humanity: “People are becoming more and more conscious of the unity of human values and regard ancient monuments as a common heritage. The common responsibility to safeguard them for future generations is recognized. It is our duty to hand them on in all their manifold authenticity.” Heritage was conceived as a set of testimonies, however minor they might be. As with any act of witnessing, our responsibility was to acknowledge them in all their authenticity, and to assume additionally a responsibility toward future generations.

Instrumental in this growing awareness around heritage was the campaign to save the Abu Simbel temples during the building of the Aswan Dam in 1959. The case received extensive media coverage and alerted public opinion to the issues on a grand scale. Miraculously enough, the distant past and modern technology seemed to work together on this occasion, and the future did not erect itself on the ruins of the past. On the contrary, the operation gave them the chance to remain visible in the future, as a sort of duplicated semiophore. Malraux’s speech during this campaign expressed this aspect admirably: “Your appeal is historic, not because it proposes to save the temples of Nubia, but because through it the first world civilization publicly proclaims the world’s art as its indivisible heritage.” And the parting shot: “In days when the West believed its cultural heritage had its source in Athens, it could nonetheless look on with equanimity while the Acropolis crumbled away.”

The more “heritage” (or at least its concept) was fleshed out, the more the “historic monument” (or its category) withered away. As we have seen, the 1913 law replaced “of national interest,” as the only criterion for listing a monument, with “of public interest from the point of view of history or art,” thus extending the notion’s field of application. But today the sovereign privilege of defining the nation’s memory-history finds itself challenged by partial, particularist memories (of specific groups, associations, businesses, local communities, and so forth), all of which wish to be deemed equally legitimate or even more legitimate than the others. The nation should no longer be imposing its own values but rather safeguarding with all speed what in the present moment, immediately and even urgently is considered to be “heritage” by the various social players.107 The monument itself tends to be replaced by the memorial. It is less a monument than a site of memory, through which one seeks to keep a memory alive, to maintain it as a living memory and to pass it down. History, as Daniel Fabre observes, tends to merge into the past, perceived as “a relatively undifferentiated entity, more to do with sensation than with narrative, giving rise to emotional participation rather than analysis.” The producer of local history, Fabre rightly points out again, is less concerned with history than with an “emotional past” to be made present and palpable using all available technology.¹⁰⁸ It is a classic case of a presentist use of the past.

The number of associations whose declared focus was cultural heritage or the environment (“minor heritage”) came to 2,241 between 1980 and 2000. The vast majority were established after 1980. Since they sometimes gave wider definitions of “heritage” than the official categories of the ministry involved with “major heritage,” they tended to upset the administrative classification machine. Moreover, the associations’ battles to have such heritage recognized at least partly accounted for the value they ascribed to it.109 The initiatives were mostly to do with local heritage, in which memory and social space could be combined to produce a sense of territory and of continuity for those living there: “Heritage associations show that since memory is not a given, it cannot be lost—but it can be constructed. They devote themselves to the creation of a symbolic universe. Hence heritage should not be viewed in relation to the past but in relation to the present, as a category of action of the present on the present.”¹¹⁰ And, as a key branch of the leisure industry, heritage is the site of important economic stakes. When the recommendations of guidebooks are taken up by travel agents, heritage enters the globalized world. “Adding value” to heritage thus brings it ever closer to the market economy, exposing it to the market’s rapid rhythms and temporalities.

NO CENTURY CAN RIVAL THE TWENTIETH FOR ITS FASCINATION with the future, for building and butchering in its name; and it certainly went the furthest, in line with the modern regime of historicity, in producing history written from the vantage point of the future. But, especially in its last third, it was also the century in which the category of the present expanded most sharply. The present became something immense, invasive, and omnipresent, blocking out any other viewpoint, fabricating on a daily basis the past and the future it needed. The present was already past before it had completely taken place. But from the end of the 1960s, this present showed signs of disquiet in its search for roots and its obsession with memory. In the contemporary attempts to mend the thread of tradition, in Michelet’s terms, one could say that neither thread nor tradition is self-evident. Confidence in progress has given way to a desire to preserve and save—but preserve what and whom? This world, our world, future generations, ourselves.

Hence the world appears to us already as a set of museum pieces. Torn between amnesia and the desire to leave nothing out, we try to foresee today the museum of tomorrow and to assemble today’s archives as though it were already yesterday. And for whom if not for us? A good example of this process is the demolition of the Berlin Wall: it instantly became a museum object and just as immediately, a commodity, with pieces of the Wall going on sale duly stamped with “Original Berlin Mauer.” It is heritage that defines what we are today. The movement whereby everything must be transformed into heritage, a movement itself caught up in the spell cast by the aura of the duty to remember, remains a distinctive feature of our present and recent experience. It signals a certain relation to the present and a certain form of presentism.

In my overview of how the notion of heritage developed, there is one aspect I have already noted, but whose importance should be explored further: the transformation of the natural environment into heritage. UNESCO provides a good way in, since it is both a powerful echo chamber and a vast, worldwide laboratory, in which theories are developed and principles laid down.¹¹¹ In 1972, the General Conference adopted the “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.” The text seemed to include everything in its scope: heritage is global, cultural, and natural. And why an international convention? The preamble gave an unequivocal answer: because universal heritage is increasingly threatened with destruction “not only by the traditional causes of decay, but also by changing social and economic conditions which aggravate the situation with even more formidable phenomena of damage or destruction.” This led to the introduction of a new notion, that of “protection.” “Protection,” which is the responsibility of the international community as a whole, should be mobilized for “cultural and natural heritage of outstanding universal value.”

But what is heritage of “outstanding universal value”? How can the “universal” and the “outstanding” be associated? According to what criteria? Relatedly, how to draw up a list of world heritage? These were some of the questions addressed by the numerous expert meetings. They all concluded that the selection criteria should be enlarged. No longer should the emphasis be on the historic monument (and thus on Europe), but rather on the notion of “cultural landscape.” The formal definition of authenticity should not exclude other definitions (one need only think of Japan) and an anthropological understanding of culture should be adopted.¹¹² In 2002, the World Heritage List numbered 730 items; 175 countries had ratified the convention, which was thereafter redescribed as an instrument of sustainable development.

Moreover, some fifty years after Lévi-Strauss’s enjoinder in Race and History to take the “fact” of diversity seriously, UNESCO’s director general announced that a new international convention was in the pipeline, on intangible cultural heritage this time, understood as a “mirror of cultural diversity.” This further expansion of the notion of heritage was preceded, in 2001, by a “Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity.” Today, UNESCO wants to bring together its commitments to cultural diversity, biodiversity, and sustainable development by linking them through a common focus on protection or, better, through the imperative to preserve.113 But what is really at stake? Protecting the present or preserving the future? Both, of course—and yet it is not necessarily a pointless question. For does the reasoning work back from the future to the present or out from the present toward the future? We shall come back to this. At all events, according to the director of the Center for World Heritage, preservation should be envisioned not in terms of a year or two, but “for ever.”

Thus, at least since 1972, culture and nature have been united under the single notion of “heritage,” defined as both cultural and natural. In France, the first stage in the recognition of nature as heritage began as late as the 1960s, with the creation of nature reserves, that is, circumscribed protected areas. The reserves, which were open to walkers, aimed to preserve the local flora and fauna. For the first time an official text talked of “natural and cultural heritage.”¹¹⁴ The following stage was that of ecomuseums. The fact that they multiplied so rapidly was the most visible—and also, some argued, the most significant—expression of the new heritage policies, in which associations played a major role.¹¹⁵

“Preservation” was the key term again, but of skills, ways of doing things, and landscapes, rather than of objects. The heritage in question was intangible and actualized. The ecomuseum was inseparable from a particular territory, but it was always an inhabited territory, part of the natural environment, to be sure, but as the matrix of a social group. Max Querrien, one of the key architects of the concept of “ecomuseum,” wrote, “The ecomuseum’s heritage is really collective memory, from which an identity emerges which, in its singularity, sees itself as grappling with present history and giving birth to the future.” That is why it is, essentially, “more concerned with saving skills than with preserving objects in museums.” It aims to “draw attention to the things which generally pass unnoticed.”116 The ecomuseum’s aim and mission were to make visible what is commonly overlooked, what soon no one will be able to see, or what already one can only glimpse.

So was the ecomuseum a “degree zero” museum or a museum coextensive with the community at large? It must not, we are told, merely see its role as

fostering nostalgic regret for the natural, material and human heritage which is disappearing, or has already disappeared—and which should most certainly be consigned to memory since it constitutes the roots without which nothing new can grow.…Its role is rather, by explaining the lessons which can be drawn from the past, to help build the future; its role is to be one of the instruments (as at once agent and place) of both technological and social transformation. It must be able to explain the adaptable and ingenious spirit of our ancestors, as an example for those faced with difficult changes today.…The ecomuseum must teach this knowledge to ward off despair and help life rise from the ashes.¹¹⁷

This set of guidelines was as prescriptive (it should, it must) as it was ambitious, since the ecomuseum’s theoreticians wanted at once to avoid attachment to the past, nostalgia, and tourism, and for the ecomuseum to constitute an interactive and transitional space between the past and the future. The ecomuseum should be a pedagogical project, with lessons to teach, in a visitor-friendly and even playful environment. It should not encourage imitation of the past, since its very identity stemmed from a break in time, involving a particular awareness of the end of (industrial, artisanal, or agricultural) activities and ways of life. The ecomuseum was a museum in the present, seeking to produce a living site of memory.

The ecomuseum’s function was thus construed as eliciting memories and raising awareness. Through it, society (a community) was urged to become aware of its heritage. Its advocates would say that this sort of museum had no visitors, only “inhabitants,” and that it aimed to “mobilize cultural heritage to creative and not solely museum-focused ends.”118 Clearly the hopes vested in it were immense. In the way it appealed to memory, it both manifested the crisis affecting the modern regime of historicity, and constituted a response to it, a response of the present and directed at the present, yet anxious to avoid the trap of presentism. Was it successful, or could it be, as “inhabitants” transformed into “visitors” and even into tourists among other tourists? At all events, nature reserves and ecomuseums helped highlight the transition from an aesthetic view of nature to a heritage-oriented one, in which memory and territory were interwoven. With this last stage in the rapid transformation of everything into heritage, “heritage” had become universal and the concept had reached its limit. It brought with it a concern, or even a duty, to preserve not only what had long since disappeared, but also what had recently disappeared, and even what was just about to disappear, in a sort of anticipatory speculation on the transformation of use-value into age-value.

WHAT DID (AND STILL DOES) THIS PROLIFERATION OF HERITAGE imply in terms of changing relations to time? It was undoubtedly the sign of a break between past and present, experienced, for example, as a feeling of accelerating time. Or—and this was Pierre Nora’s starting point—as a sign that one regime of memory had tipped over into another.¹¹⁹ Our overview of the development of the notion of heritage has shown that it certainly never thrived on continuity, but rather on breaks in and challenges to the order of time, combined with all the fluctuations between absence and presence, visibility and invisibility by which the constant and constantly changing ways of producing semiophores were shaped and oriented. And it all started a long time ago with the intrusion of that inaugural absence, Jesus, into what became—and would long remain—the Western tradition. This set in motion a new order of time. The trace left by the event was indestructible and unforgettable: the trace itself.

Cultural heritage is a way of overcoming, that is, at once acknowledging and reducing these breaks by identifying, selecting, and producing semiophores. In the longue durée of Western history, the notion has gone through several states, each of which has corresponded to periods of heightened questioning of the order of time. One resorts to heritage in times of crisis. Given these “moments” of heritage, it is impossible to settle on a single meaning of the term. Across the centuries, heritage-type practices have shaped different times of heritage. These correspond to different ways of articulating the present and the past, in the first instance, but with the Revolution, the future too; the times of heritage thus reflect different ways of articulating past, present and future.

After the catastrophes of the twentieth century, the numerous breaks in continuity, and the momentous acceleration of time we have experienced—so palpable in our everyday lives—the fact that memory and heritage have come to the fore is hardly surprising. One could even ask why it took so long. The answer would surely be that they could not appear in an instant, and also that earlier the time was simply not right. The order of the world and of time had made it well nigh impossible for them to take shape, since a whole series of conditions had first to be fulfilled, including generational ones, as we mentioned at the outset of this journey through time(s). However, what distinguishes the contemporary burst in heritage activity from the preceding phases is the variety of its forms and its strongly presentist character, while the present itself has extended immeasurably (it is at least sixty). We saw several signs of this: the memorial is more popular than the monument, or the latter is resuscitated as a memorial, and the past is more popular than history; conjuring up the past in the present in an emotionally engrossing way is preferred to the values of distance and mediation; the current primacy of the local goes hand in hand with the quest for a “history all one’s own”;120 and, lastly, heritage is itself affected by acceleration, through the imperative to act quickly, before it is too late, before evening falls and the light fades to a darkness that may be total.

Remembrance and commemoration, whether construed as objects of a demand, a duty, or a right, are the other phenomena which have, like heritage, emerged both in response to presentism and as a symptom of it. Heritage, however, has an additional dimension as regards experience and, ultimately, the order of time. The redefinition of the natural environment as heritage, which is probably the most momentous and novel extension of the concept, unquestionably points toward a future, or to new interactions between present and future. This might suggest that we have moved out of the closed circle of the present, since concern for the future is integral to this redefinition of heritage. Except that this future is perceived not as a promise or a “principle of hope,” but as a threat. That is the reversal we have witnessed. And since we are also the cause of this threat, it is accepted that we must take responsibility for it, as from today, since we failed to do so in the past. Hence our exploration of heritage and its regimes of temporality has led us unexpectedly from the past to the future, but to a future which is no longer to be conquered or brought into being, if need be by brutalizing the present. This future is not a radiant horizon guiding our advancing steps, but rather a line of shadow drawing closer, which we ourselves have set in motion. At the same time we seem to be caught on the treadmill of the present and ruminating upon a past which simply won’t go down.