Although the French seized upon the idea of national patrimony during the July Monarchy (1830–48) and have never let go, the constructed nature of the past this engendered has not been widely studied in France. In the past twenty years, Pierre Nora’s volumes of essays on “lieux de mémoire” have spawned French editions of the writings of Prosper Mérimée and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, among others. Jean Nayrolles’ L’invention de l’art roman à l’époque moderne is a welcome in-depth study of such sources for a nascent French art historiography. It follows his earlier titles from the mid-1990s as well as other general books on the modern notion of medieval life, such as that by Christian Amalvi (Le Gout du Moyen Age,Paris: Boutique de l’Histoire, 1996). As Nayrolles writes: “Voici donc une bien curieuse discipline qui, avant d’être une histoire du goût est, qu’on le veuille ou non, une histoire de goût” [“So here is quite a curious discipline which, before being a history of taste is, like it or not, a matter of taste itself”] (7). The latter may be an oblique reference to Amalvi, but Amalvi’s chatty overview of the place of the romantic Middle Ages in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, teaching, and tourism, along with its dissemination in popular culture, is completely different from Nayrolles’ dense and exhaustive study.

Nayrolles shows that since the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars have been aware that the Middle Ages as we know it was an invention of the nineteenth century. He proposes to go back before this period and reveal the sources of such thought. He commences with a long introduction stressing, in the tradition of Jacques Le Goff and Nora, the place of art outside the traditional history of events and great men, placing it instead within the realm of memory: “C’est sans doute que l’art, plus que n’importe quelle autre activité humaine, est fondé sur la mémoire” [“There is no doubt that art, more than any other human activity, is based upon memory”] (8). He describes the factors that led to the awareness and appreciation of the Romanesque as a style separate from other medieval art by situating it within three phenomena coming out of the Enlightenment: the philosophy of aesthetic taste, the rise of natural history, and the profession of the historian.

The eighteenth-century’s growing interest in the art of the past led to the categorization of artistic styles, as well as to the recognition of the picturesque—which we know became an essential component in reclaiming the ruined and outdated products of the Middle Ages after 1830. Nayrolles contrasts eighteenth-century notions of beauty and the picturesque—situating the former in the taste for Classical clarity and the latter in Gothic confusion, or in the terms of the early English authors he quotes: “smoothness” versus “roughness.” He also underscores Winckelmann’s emphasis on the sublime, which Burke judged to be superior to beauty and whose characteristics Goethe applied to Gothic architecture, leading to the Romantic idealism that flourished in the nineteenth century. As for the other two phenomena: scientific investigation engendered archaeology while the formal discipline of history (which Nayrolles calls the study of “why” compared to the antiquarian’s “how”) established the concept of the modern as well as the distinction between its manifestations in the past and the contemporary present.

Throughout his book, Nayrolles keeps to primary sources as much as possible and establishes deep connections (and distinctions) between key authors and their philosophical colleagues who also rehabilitated the Middle Ages, such as Herder and Hegel. At the beginning of the first chapter “Le roman avant le roman,” he builds upon late twentieth-century scholars, for instance drawing from Francis Haskell on taste in art history (La norme et le caprice, Paris: Flammarion,1986; De l’art et du gout, Paris: Gallimard, 1987; L’historien et les images, Paris: Gallimard, 1996), Sylvia Lavin (Quatremère de Quincy and the invention of a modern language of architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), and especially Tina Waldeier Bizzarro (Romanesque Architectural Criticism: A Prehistory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), although he seems to split hairs with Bizzarro in his introduction: “Il ne s’agit pas à proprement parler d’une préhistoire de l’historiographie médiévale, mais plutôt de la configuration du sol sur lequel elle se produira” [“It is not, strictly speaking, so much a question of a prehistory of medieval historiography as rather the groundwork upon which [medieval historiography] will be based”] (31).

The chapters follow chronologically. Nayrolles progresses in chapter 1 from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century contempt for medieval architectural styles and the first distinction between Gothic and Romanesque, to the influence of English antiquarians upon French writers and the work of those following Dom Jean Mabillon’s model of rigorous scientific scholarship, and up through to the Revolution’s effects upon attitudes toward the past and the growing preference for Gothic, evident in Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments français. Here he makes a distinction between scientific and popular concerns for medieval art that he will maintain—for instance, in discussions of Victor Hugo. After the initial nod to English and German initiators of the taste for things medieval, Nayrolles restricts his definition of Romanesque to French writers and to monuments in the Hexagon. Because he shapes his study so resolutely, Nayrolles treats many nineteenth-century French writers little known outside of France (and perhaps even in France); in this way, his narrow vision serves us well. (The index frustratingly confirms this focus on authors—there are only personal names listed, no terms or locations. Likewise the clear preference for French sources is painfully obvious by the lack of proofreading on English citations. The latter is so bad that even French words within those citations have errors.)

Nayrolles’ long second chapter (over one hundred pages), “L’Invention de l’architecture romane” serves as the heart of his investigation into the emergence of an understanding of Romanesque as a separate style from other medieval art in France. He begins with the introduction of the English term in the correspondence of Charles-Alexis du Hérissier de Gerville and Auguste Le Prévost, and he moves through Arcisse de Caumont’s subsequent taxonomy, tracing the evolution of the style in all its forms. He then addresses the authors of the new French history after 1820 and the flowering of patrimonial concerns under François Guizot and the “institutions de mémoire” begun during Louis-Phillipe’s reign. Nayrolles carefully analyses the role of eleventh- and twelfth-century art in the histories of Guizot, Augustin Thierry, Jules Michelet, and Henri Martin, on to Ludovic Vitet, Charles Magnin, and Mérimée, and finally the scientific applications of Jules Quicherat. He also considers the broader context of their various images of the Middle Ages, which served successive political and intellectual agendas.

In the next chapter, Nayrolles turns to the figural arts, following the rise of formal analysis and iconography. He begins by asking when people stopped understanding the meaning of medieval sculptural programs and which monuments were first reconsidered by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious scholars such as Dom Bernard de Montfaucon and Mabillon. He then looks at the revisions of early nineteenth century writers, less-known names as well as Viollet-le-Duc, Mérimée, and Adolphe-Napoléon Didron. From these Nayrolles traces those scholars who sought an iconography for Romanesque art and paved the way for the rich contributions of Émile Mâle at the end of the century.

By the fourth and fifth chapters, Nayrolles is ready to apply what he has learned to its larger historical resonance. These final chapters, entitled “La diffusion d’un concept archéologique nouveau” and “Débats archéologiques et historiques sur l’art roman,” address the effects of previously discussed ideas within France. In the former, Nayrolles shows the growth of amateur archaeological societies across France and popular appreciation for Romanesque architecture, along with publications by provincial authors. He also attempts to survey the vast inventory undertaken by Guizot’s Comité historique des arts et monuments with its departmental correspondents as well as the growing attraction to the symbolism believed to be implicit to art of the Romanesque period. As thorough as Nayrolles’ text is, I would also highly recommend an author Nayrolles does not cite, Stéphane Gerson (The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Gerson covers some of the same ground and, relating the early nineteenth-century “cult of local memory” to the better-known definitions of national memory, considers the implications of Nora’s concept of “lieux de mémoire” that underlies these topics.

In the extensive final chapter on archaeological debates, Nayrolles reviews romantic myths concerning the year 1000, various arguments over when Romanesque art actually began, the stages of its stylistic development, and the problem of the transition from Romanesque to Gothic (for the latter, see also Kathleen Nolan and Susan Leibacher Ward’s review of the 2005 Louvre blockbuster show, “La France romane au temps des premiers Capétiens” in Gesta 44, no. 2: 149–153). Then there is the enormous question of regional “schools” of Romanesque, still being debated today, for which Nayrolles must return to authors who considered the various monastic empires and who looked at the origins of the Romanesque—its relationship to the art and architecture of the East, to the “barbarian” tribes” (i.e., Goths, Saxons, Lombards), or to the Romans of the “Aryan” West. These origin questions are also linked to the famous controversy over the national source for the Gothic pointed arch, which raged throughout the nineteenth century, and which extends to the larger question of whether there is a distinct French national architectural style. (One might note that two most commonly used denominations of French currency today, the 10- and 20-euro notes, show Romanesque and Gothic architecture.)

Nayrolles begins his conclusion with Henri Focillon, the art historian in whom all this came together and who during the 1930s, in Nayrolles’ opinion, finally got it right. Focillon was taught by a generation that had turned to acute observations of the monuments themselves and for whom sentiment had no place in concrete theory. Nayrolles points out that with all the discussion during the nineteenth century of a Romanesque art, there was no consideration of the Romanesque artist. It thus fell to Focillon to affirm a humanist principle of artistic exchange against the tradition of racial determinism that was being revisited under Nazi politics. Finally, Nayrolles raises the subject of post-Revolutionary destruction and restoration: the creation of a Romanesque during the nineteenth century by the architects who worked for the Monuments historique. One can criticize their work, as one can the many nineteenth-century theories covered in this book, but in the end we have much more today than those who began the quest for a Romanesque art among the ruins of the past. Nayrolles feels this is proven by the existence of the hybrid Neo-Romanesque churches built in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, such as Sacré-Coeur in Paris, which served as compromises between the opposing camps of Classical versus Gothic supporters and which spoke to a new interest in abstract forms and international totality favored by the modern.