Collections of Egyptian monuments … are generally formed with the sole aim of clarifying the history of art – the techniques of sculpture and of painting from different periods and diverse national traditions … But the important and numerous collections of Egyptian monuments with which royal munificence has recently endowed the museum of Charles X, must, as it were, serve as a source and as evidence for the entire history of the Egyptian nation, and so need to be coordinated on a different plan; it is necessary, indeed essential, to consider both the subject matter and the particular purpose of each monument, and that rigorous knowledge of one or the other of these things should determine the position and rank that the monument ought to occupy. In short, it is necessary to display the monuments in a manner that presents as completely as possible the sequence of gods, and of Egyptian rulers, from the primitive period up to the Romans, and to label objects in a systematic order that relates to the public and private life of the ancient Egyptians.
(Jean-François Champollion’s ‘Descriptive Notice’ setting out his intentions for displaying the Egyptian collection at the Louvre Museum, 1826–27)
Controversy swirled around Champollion whenever he was in Paris. Part of the reason was his ‘all or nothing’ personality, which typically inspired loyalty or enmity, seldom tepidity – as witness the unwavering support he received from the duke of Blacas and from Dacier, the permanent secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, as opposed to the long-standing hostility of baron de Sacy and Jomard, editor of the Description de l’Égypte. Even the moderate Young, a man who made very few enemies over his lifetime, was to some extent provoked by his French counterpart’s temperamental behaviour.
There was also the unavoidable fact that whatever Champollion did trailed his republican political past in Grenoble, with its whiff of Jacobin sulphur, and his elder brother’s obvious support for Napoleon Bonaparte during the Hundred Days in 1815. Some of the French nobility and their supporters certainly overlooked his political reputation, but the majority, such as the baron of Haussez, most likely distrusted Champollion on principle. Indeed, according to Hartleben, when Champollion was due to be appointed at the Louvre in 1826, not just the royal court but half of the capital were apparently under the impression that he had been one of the diehard leaders of the Terror in 1793. To scotch this fantastic rumour, Champollion-Figeac procured his brother’s birth certificate, dated 23 December 1790, which the minister in charge of the appointment personally showed to the king.
Yet another reason was Champollion’s choice of subject: ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptian chronology potentially challenged the religious orthodoxy that had become government policy under Charles X – despite the pope’s blessing of Champollion’s work in 1825. It undoubtedly challenged the prevailing classical and art historical orthodoxy, given Egypt’s pre-classical antiquity and the respect in which it was held by classical authorities such as Herodotus and Pliny. Champollion himself believed that ancient Egypt was the source of much that was revered in the civilization of ancient Greece, and that Egyptian art and architecture were in some ways superior to the art and architecture of the Greeks.
Such revolutionary opinions were bound to displease many Hellenists and Latinists; all of the followers of Johann Winckelmann, the German archaeologist and art historian who had popularized the Neoclassical movement in Europe in the second half of the 18th century; the curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the Louvre, the count of Clarac; and the director of the Louvre, the count of Forbin, who presided over this great collection of classical and Neoclassical art, for whom Egyptian art was a decided interloper. Even the Egypt-minded Dominique Vivant Denon, Forbin’s predecessor as director of French museums until 1816, had doubts. In his fine book recounting his Egyptian travels during Napoleon’s expedition, he described the temple of Karnak at Thebes in the following terms:
It is the pomp, then, of the Egyptians that we behold at Karnak, where are piled not only quarries but mountains, fashioned with massive proportions, and where the execution is feeble in the outline and rude in the masonry; barbarous reliefs, and hieroglyphs without taste and without colouring, in a state only of coarse sculpture. There is nothing of the sublime, either in the dimensions or the executions of the work, except in the obelisks, and some facings of the outward doors, which are of a chastity truly admirable.
What is more, Champollion was in a position to provide textual evidence to support his unorthodox views because he could read the hieroglyphs, unlike virtually every other scholar. His response to Egyptian art was therefore not merely an aesthetic one, like Denon’s and that of the classical specialists, but also a historical one, based on his rapidly growing knowledge of the individual pharaonic rulers whose works he had identified at Turin. Such a preoccupation with the chronological development of Egyptian art sounds normal to the ears of the modern museum-goer, but in 1826 it was decidedly novel. For those scholars who disliked Champollion and his views, one possible response was simply to deny the truth of his decipherment. This was what several of his philological opponents, notably Julius Klaproth and Gustavus Seyffarth, chose to do, both in the 1820s and in the years after Champollion’s death. Another response was to reject his candidacy for the Academy of Inscriptions. Amazingly, Champollion, for all his Europe-wide celebrity, would not be elected to his native academy until 1830, after being turned down in 1827 and 1829.
Portrait of Charles X, king of France, by Horace Vernet. He ruled from 1824 to 1830.
(Musée des Beaux Arts, Dunkirk. Photo Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library.)
His early letters from Paris to his friends in Italy, whence he had recently returned, provide a vivid picture of his embattled state as he tried to impose his vision of an Egyptian gallery on the authorities in charge of the Louvre, while dreaming of his embryonic expedition to Egypt. In mid-November 1826, Champollion wrote to Rosellini in Pisa:
In spite of Paris and her pomp and ceremony, I have returned to the past and the present brings me no benefit. Imagine a man who loves peace and quiet yet finds himself all of a sudden thrown by duty into the bowels of machination and intrigue directed against himself and his studies. My life has become a fight. I am forced to extract everything I need, none of those who are supposed to assist me is willing to do it. My arrival at the Museum has disturbed the whole place, and all my colleagues are conspiring against me, because instead of treating my position as a sinecure, I busy myself with my department, which inevitably makes it appear that they are doing nothing with theirs. This is the nub of the matter. It requires a battle to get hold of a nail. Fortunately the minister is on my side, but I regret having constantly to involve him and weary him with all these political manoeuvres. How I long to be camped on the deserted plain of Thebes! Only there will it be possible for me to find at the same time both pleasure and rest. Come quick, we shall talk in Tuscan, and that at least will be a relief from the muddy bowels of this moral and physical Babylon.
A few days later, he continued in the same vein while writing to the Abbé Gazzera in Turin:
I have a magnificent ground-floor room for my large pieces, and four rooms on the first floor of the [Louvre] Palace. So I shall soon be in the midst of painters, architects and masons, and that will not be without difficulties if things move ahead. You rightly suspect that I have encountered hostility from certain people [i.e. Forbin, Clarac and others] who allow themselves not to approve the decisions in my favour of the duke of Doudeauville [the king’s minister] and the viscount of La Rochefoucauld [the king’s aide-de-camp, and Doudeauville’s son], people who raise, and will continue to raise, a thousand little obstacles to what I require, whatever that might be. I fight each day to the best of my ability, but my side has won only because our excellent duke of Blacas is in Paris and has taken in hand the direction of the business … May the Great Amun-Ra preserve him for us!
Anyone who has tried to start something original within an established institution will recognize something of Champollion’s situation and conflicts at the Louvre. His compensation for all the office politics was, of course, that he was surrounded by a feast of unique and wonderful objects, entrusted to his personal care as curator. The Salt collection consisted of nearly 5,000 pieces: large sculptures; a huge stone sarcophagus; bronze, gold and porcelain objects; paintings; and excellent papyri. Further acquisitions arrived in 1827: a colossus from Rome (‘the brother of your Stuffed King’, Champollion remarked to Gazzera); some magnificent ancient gold jewellery presented to Charles X by the pasha of Egypt; exquisite enamels; and a gold seal of one of the Cleopatras.
The most important of all these new acquisitions was a second collection put together by the French consul Drovetti. It had been offered to the king of Sardinia-Piedmont, but against the advice of his ministers he had declined to purchase it for the Egyptian Museum in Turin, so the French government had stepped in. Champollion enthused about this bonanza to Gazzera, somewhat tactlessly:
It includes Egyptian jewels of an unbelievable magnificence, necklaces, rings, bracelets, earrings made of gold and enriched with enamel. These are no doubt the cast-offs of a Pharaoh, and the majority of the objects carry royal legends: for example a cup in solid gold, decorated with a bas-relief showing fishes playing in the midst of lotus blossoms, is offered to King Moeris by the ‘Royal Secretary in charge of tin, silver and gold’ …
One can hardly wait for the return of the king [Charles X] to deliver these rare objects into my hands. Moreover, this collection contains statues, 50 Egyptian or Greek manuscripts, 500 scarabs, vases, 80 stelae, etc etc. We are finishing up as finer and richer than your collection, which could have been the Premier one and did not wish it.
(Champollion’s reading of these hieroglyphs was almost, but not quite, correct. Today’s reading would be ‘Royal Secretary in charge of lapis lazuli, silver and gold’. Starting from the left, signs 1 and 2 – the sedge plant and the scribal palette – mean ‘Royal Secretary’; signs 3 to 7 – concluding with the leg – mean ‘lapis lazuli’; signs 8 to 10 – including three dots and a collar – mean ‘silver’; signs 11 and 12 – another three dots and another collar – mean ‘gold’. The order of the five signs for ‘lapis lazuli’ is unusual, and must have been adopted for calligraphic reasons, which may help to explain Champollion’s failure to recognize the word.)
To understand what Champollion was up against as Egyptian curator, we need to know a little about his chief opponent, the count of Forbin, director of the Louvre. A now-forgotten painter, he was nonetheless a figure of considerable note in the Paris of his day. Born in 1779, and thus only a decade older than Champollion, Forbin hailed from an aristocratic family who had suffered during the Terror; his father had been guillotined in Lyons in 1793. Forbin trained as an artist in Paris, in the studio of the history painter Jacques-Louis David, who championed the Neoclassical style. Then he married an heiress, moved to Rome, turned himself into an accomplished dilettante, and was appointed the chamberlain of the sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, Princess Pauline Borghese, whose lover he also became. Later, he served with distinction in Napoleon’s armies in Portugal and Austria, but left the army and retired to Italy in 1809, where he took up history painting, wrote a novel and played no part in the final years of Napoleon’s empire. Returning to Paris after the restoration, Forbin was appointed director of museums by Louis XVIII, at a time when Napoleon’s loot had to be returned to Italy and other countries. In 1817, Forbin led an expedition of French artists, on board the frigate Cléopâtra, to purchase Greek and Roman works of art from the Levant. The expedition eventually reached Cairo in 1818, where Forbin concluded his journey, without going south to Thebes. Not much was acquired from this trip, but in 1820 he enjoyed a coup in purchasing for the Louvre the recently discovered Venus de Milo. He also persuaded Louis XVIII to buy David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women and Leonidas at Thermopylae, and Théodore Géricault’s controversial The Raft of the Medusa.
A clash of taste between Forbin and Champollion was inevitable. Champollion wanted to show ‘Egyptian antiquities in Egyptian rooms’. Forbin, unmoved by ancient Egyptian art, wanted a décor of Neoclassical paintings inspired by Greece, Rome and the Bible throughout the museum, as of course did Clarac. Forbin acquiesced in Champollion’s demand for a draughtsman assistant, his friend Jean-Joseph Dubois, who had illustrated a book of Egyptian divinities, the Panthéon égyptien, for Champollion in 1823–25. But the director got his way with the main décor of the Egyptian rooms.
At least Forbin chose subjects connected with Egypt for the ceilings, which were painted by contemporary French history painters inspired by David’s art. For example, Abel de Pujol’s L’Égypte sauvée par Joseph (‘Egypt Saved by Joseph’) shows a biblical scene with the addition of a Ptolemaic temple from Philae for décor. Adrien Guignet’s Joseph expliquant les rêves de Pharaon (‘Joseph Interpreting the Dreams of Pharaoh’) also takes its cue from the Bible, this time borrowing the papyrus-shaped columns of the hypostyle hall at Karnak. François-Edouard Picot’s L’Étude et le Génie des arts dévoilant l’antique Égypte à la Grèce (‘Study and Genius of the Arts Revealing Ancient Egypt to Greece’) is an allegorical tableau. This ludicrous painting depicts Greece as a kind of superwoman, wrapped in a red toga, standing on a cloud and accompanied by angels, while cherubim whisk away a white sheet from bare-bosomed, dusky Egypt, who is seated on a throne flanked by lions and Egyptian paraphernalia. The top of a pyramid and an obelisk – but no sphinx – can be glimpsed floating in the distance. So much for the genuine revelation of Egypt launched by the Greek section of the Rosetta Stone. Champollion’s opinion of this particular avant-Hollywood travesty of his vision of Egypt and Greece is not recorded, but he was naturally opposed to Forbin’s general décor. ‘Contrary to all the received wisdom, Champollion vehemently accused Joseph’ – Jacob’s son in the Bible, appointed vizier of Egypt by Pharaoh – ‘of having reduced Egypt to poverty with his usurious speculations,’ wrote Hartleben.
For all his professional frustrations and his continuing health problems – made worse by the climate of ‘Babylon’, which had sickened him even as a teenaged student in Paris – Champollion worked extremely hard on the new gallery. He was keenly aware that France’s Egyptian collection was now the finest in the world outside Egypt, and began to refer in correspondence to ‘my’ pieces and ‘my’ museum. He also knew from his discussions with the minister Doudeauville that he could expect to receive no royal support for his and Rosellini’s proposed Egyptian expedition until the new Egyptian gallery was finished. Its planned formal opening on 4 November 1827 was delayed by the late completion of Ingres’s famous painting Apothéose d’Homère (‘The Apotheosis of Homer’) and of Forbin’s various commissions for the Egyptian rooms. The opening finally took place on 15 December, in the presence of Charles X, scarcely more than a year after Champollion had begun work; and it brought its Egyptian curator the official kudos for which he and his brother had hoped. The compromises he had been obliged to make with French artistic convention and royalist officialdom were tolerable, Champollion accepted, for the sake of the new knowledge he would gain in Egypt.
He was consoled, too, by a happier home life during this period – perhaps the happiest he would ever experience. The Champollion brothers had now moved from 28 Rue Mazarine to number 19 in the same street, where they lived with their two families as a ‘colonie Grenobloise’. Although Jacques-Joseph would never approve of Jean-François’s marriage to Rosine, his wife, Zoé, now formed a close relationship with her sister-in-law. They were ‘like true sisters’, according to Hartleben, and the children of the two families got on well. Jacques-Joseph’s children regarded their little cousin Zoraïde ‘as a beautiful gift’, who behaved with a spontaneity and independence that provoked endless astonishment. At the same time, their affectionate uncle enjoyed entertaining his nephews and nieces with stories, amusing drawings and riddles.
Moreover, Champollion’s relationship with his student Rosellini was going from strength to strength. The young professor had arrived from Florence in December 1826 and stayed in Paris for about a year, taking advantage of the golden opportunity provided by the work on the gallery to shadow his teacher. In October, Rosellini married Zénobie Cherubini, the daughter of the composer Luigi Cherubini, who had been born in Florence but worked most of his life in Paris. Champollion was one of the witnesses to the marriage. In the following year, the composer’s son Salvador would join the Champollion–Rosellini expedition to Egypt.
There was even an opportunity to repair his ruptured relationship with his erstwhile rival Young. The English polymath had abandoned work on the hieroglyphs in 1823 after observing Champollion’s spectacular progress, but had recently taken up the demotic script, partly as a result of receiving a letter in Latin written in May 1827 by Champollion’s friend Peyron from Turin. Peyron told Young:
You write that from time to time you will publish new material that will increase our knowledge of Egyptian matters. I am very glad to hear this and I urge you to keep your word. For, as Champollion will witness, and other friends to whom I have mentioned your name, I have always felt, and so do many others, that you are a man of rare and superhuman genius with a quick and penetrating vision, and you have the power to surpass not only myself but all the philologists of Europe, so that there is universal regret that your versatility is so widely engaged in the sciences – medicine, astronomy, analysis, etc. etc. that you are unable to press on with your discoveries and bring them to that pitch of perfection that we have the right to expect from a man of your conspicuous talents; for you are constantly being drawn from one science to another, you have to turn your attention from mathematics to Greek philosophy and from that to medicine, etc. The result is that there are some mistakes in your books that you yourself might well have corrected.
From this time until his death two years later, Young worked assiduously at his Rudiments of an Egyptian Dictionary in the Ancient Enchorial Character; Containing All the Words of Which the Sense Has Been Ascertained. And it is pleasant to record that Champollion assisted him. In the summer of 1828, Young visited Paris to accept his recent signal honour of being elected as one of the eight foreign associates of the French Institute’s Academy of Sciences. From there he wrote to his friend Gurney that Champollion ‘has shown me far more attention than I ever showed or could show, to any living being: he devoted seven whole hours at once to looking over with me his papers and the magnificent collection which is committed to his care … he is to let me have the use … of all his collections and his notes relating to the enchorial character that I may make what use I please of them.’ To the scientist François Arago, the friend who first introduced him to Champollion in 1822, Young wrote of Champollion’s ‘kindness and liberality’, and added: ‘I have obtained in this manner a most extensive collection of enchorial documents, many of which are accompanied by Mr Champollion’s own interpretations of particular passages, which amply demonstrate how unjustly he has been supposed to have neglected this department of the great field.’
We can only guess at Champollion’s motives: no doubt they included some new respect for Young as a foreign associate of the French Institute, but more important must have been Champollion’s pride in his invulnerable achievement and in his curatorship. In addition, it would surely be reasonable to assume some feeling of guilt at his unacknowledged debt to Young. Be that as it may, Young was careful to acknowledge Champollion’s help in generous terms when he produced his enchorial/demotic dictionary. Although the difficulties of deciphering demotic remained formidable – many manuscripts contain passages that are puzzling even today – Young could justifiably claim that ‘30 years ago, not a single article of the list [i.e. the words in the dictionary] existed even in the imagination of the wildest enthusiast: and that within these ten years, a single date only was tolerably ascertained, out of about 50 which are here interpreted, and in many instances ascertained with astronomical precision.’ The modern Egyptologist John Ray sums up: ‘Young was the first person since the end of the Roman Empire to be able to read a demotic text, and, in spite of a proportion of incorrect guesses, he surely deserves to be known as the decipherer of demotic. It is no disservice to Champollion to allow him this distinction.’
Champollion’s generosity with his time was noteworthy for another reason. On 26 April 1828, Charles X had finally given him the go-ahead for his Egypt expedition. When Young came to see him and his collection at the Louvre, in late June, Champollion was in the thick of preparing to depart for the Mediterranean coast. On 10 July, he wrote hurriedly to his old school friend Thévenet, now a shopkeeper in Grenoble, asking to meet him en route in Lyons. ‘I am leaving on a voyage that is so chancy I am thirsty to embrace those who are dear to me, and you may imagine how happy I would be to see you, before throwing myself into the midst of the tanned faces who await me on the shores of Africa.’ Less than a week later, Champollion and Cherubini would leave Paris for what Champollion anticipated would be the greatest adventure of his life.