Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (17 page)

This surge of enthusiasm came from several sources. First, a panicky realisation that chunks of France were just being demolished, carted away, broken up. The principled (or vindictive) hostility of Revolutionaries to the property of Aristocracy and Church had given way to pragmatic recycling by builders who treated ancient monuments as quarries, and antiquarians who rounded up loot to sell abroad. In April 1819 the Minister of the Interior asked Prefects to report on the most important buildings in their
départements
‘in order to prevent them being dismantled and taken away by the English’. Victor Hugo declared ‘
Guerre aux démolisseurs!
’
–
War on the Vandals – and wrote in 1825: ‘There are two things about a historic building: its use and its beauty. Its use is a matter for its owner, but its beauty belongs to everybody. So an owner goes beyond his rights in knocking it down.’ This was a less politicised – though still militant – version of the Revolution’s declaration of public ownership. Hugo gave further, fictional impetus to his campaign with the novel
Notre-Dame de Paris
(1831), in which the cathedral becomes as vivid a character as Quasimodo himself.

What the thieving English wanted was Gothic, being themselves in full Revival mode. The French came later to the rediscovery of Gothic, but with a deeper national purpose. Gothic was held to be the authentic architecture of France, whereas Classicism was a foreign interpolation. Viollet-le-Duc, who began as Mérimée’s protégé, and later became the most
famous architect and restorer in nineteenth-century France, wrote that ‘Our country is closer to medieval France than to classical Rome. Our religion and our climate have remained the same. The building materials have also remained the same, and we would feel more at home in a thirteenth-century French mansion than in any palace of Lucullus.’ Gothic was patriotic; Gothic also best expressed the Catholicism which was now back in fashion.

But there was a political aspect to the new regime’s enthusiasm for ancient monuments. The July Monarchy had no real legitimacy, so it needed to confect one. In rebranding the country it therefore claimed to represent both new and old: to draw on France’s recent revolutionary heritage, but also to annex the idea of Ancient France, now being rediscovered and properly valued. Though there was a potential problem here: if you identified your new regime with a collection of collapsed and collapsing edifices, what sort of a message was that sending out? So the concept of not just protection but restoration was both vital and symbolic. The rediscovered heritage was to be presented once again as the restorer knew – or guessed, or hoped – it originally had been. In the old days, if a church had a broken twelfth-century capital, it would have been mended with one in a contemporary style – thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth century, or whatever. Now, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the notion of reimagining, and then attempting to transport, a building back to its original state was for the first time introduced on a wide scale. This was not to prove a simple matter.

Mérimée was still only thirty when appointed to succeed Vitet on 17 May 1834. He had a broad general grounding in the arts (his father was perpetual secretary at the École des Beaux-Arts, his mother an accomplished portrait painter), but was inexperienced in archaeology. Alexandre Dumas commented sardonically that Mérimée would have to begin by learning what he would then be expected to teach others. But he did
learn, and quickly. On appointment, he told his English friend Sutton Sharpe that ‘the job fits my tastes and temperament perfectly: it appeals to both my idleness and my love of travel’. But there was little idleness about the new Inspector General. Only six weeks into the job, he set off for the south of France on what was the first of a series of annual tours of inspection. Each summer for the next eighteen years, he would criss-cross the country for weeks and months, examining and reporting, chivvying and condemning. The roads were bad, the coaches uncomfortable, the inns bug-ridden, the food often inedible, the women (and Mérimée was very keen on women) often implacably virtuous, and the local experts at times dunce-like. Mérimée’s private letters are full of wry exasperation:

Mérimée certainly found some of the local antiquaries comically cocky – when in doubt, they fell back on classifying
things as ‘Phoenician’ – and some of the architects profoundly ignorant: the man at Béziers was ‘the biggest ass ever to hold a drawing-pen’, the one at Saint-Savin ‘a man quite without education and remarkably stupid’. Some of the provincial officials were obstructive, and some of the clergy proprietorial: the curé at Chauvigny, Mérimée noted with astonishment, insisted ‘that the church belonged to him’. But the Inspector General would have made little headway if he had been heavy-handed, or bossily Parisian. He was not just extraordinarily industrious, knowledgeable and incorruptible; he was also charming and persuasive. Viollet-le-Duc, who travelled with him on several of his tours, wrote: ‘Without even noticing what was happening, the person to whom he was speaking was induced to give him all the information he wanted, and confess everything to him. He would have made the most amiable examining magistrate one could imagine. At the same time, he was a good diplomat and a clever politician.’

He had to be; not least because he and his Commission had little more than moral authority. The fact of listing a monument (1,076 were put on the roll in 1840; nearly 4,000 by 1849) did not give it any legal protection. If an owner knocked a building down, or a municipality decided on a piece of street-widening to the detriment of some awkward medieval vestige, there was nothing Paris could do about it: the necessary protective laws were not finally introduced until 1887–9, nearly two decades after Mérimée’s death. So his role was part aesthetic expert, part moral presence, part patriotic cheerleader. When Guizot, the Interior Minister, described the job of Inspector General in 1830, he not only drew its terms very widely (museums, private collections and manuscripts were included as well as buildings and works of art) but announced the hortatory principle which was to infuse it. The task of an Inspector General, he wrote, was to ‘stimulate the zeal’ of local authorities, ‘so that no building of incontestable merit would be lost through either ignorance or collapse’.
This collaboration with departmental and municipal authorities was desirable for democratic reasons, and necessary for economic ones. Only one listing in three led to state funding; so the intention was also to stir local pride in the monument, and release local money.

What Mérimée discovered, as he went on his annual rounds, was that much of France’s monumental patrimony was in a state of near-collapse. The roof of Chartres Cathedral was on the point of falling in; the wall paintings at Saint-Savin – the largest array of medieval frescoes in France, and possibly Europe – had been crudely obliterated with whitewash; a few days after Mérimée had inspected the Vice-Regent’s tower, ‘one of the most ancient edifices in Avignon’, it simply fell down. Symbolic of much elsewhere was the condition of the great abbey church at Vézelay. Its left-hand tower had been pulled down by Protestants in 1569; the Revolution had hacked off offending bas-reliefs; and then, ‘as if to prove that the nineteenth century did not yield to the past in the matter of vandalism’, the Army Corps of Engineers, engaged in mapping the country, had built ‘a ridiculous octagonal observatory’ right on top of the remaining tower. Walls had fallen in, or were rotting away from damp; trees were growing out of the stonework; the vaulting could scarcely hold together any longer; and as Mérimée sat in the church sketching the grim scene, stones from the roof kept falling all around him. The town itself, with only a thousand inhabitants and no significant industry, didn’t have money enough even to stabilise the church in its current morbid condition. ‘So things get worse by the day,’ Mérimée wrote in his report to the minister. ‘If we delay our support any longer, the church will become so dangerous that we shall have to pull it down.’

Nor was it merely Time and History that were assailing the patrimony. Theft, vandalism and self-interested urban development were happening by the week. The famous Roman mausoleum outside Saint-Rémy may be eighteen metres high;
but shortly before Mérimée inspected it in October 1834, ‘an Englishman’ (if in doubt blame
les Rosbifs
) managed to scale it in the middle of the night and make off with the heads of the two draped figures from the very top. In Avignon, Corsican soldiers billeted in the Palais des Papes supplemented their pay by chipping off the medieval frescoes and selling them; while a horticultural entrepreneur had taken over the city’s famous bridge, planting almond trees and cabbages along it. In La Charité-sur-Loire, two locksmiths had built their houses against the wall of the abbey church, so that their sleeping alcoves were decorated with spectacular eleventh- and twelfth-century bas-reliefs. A month before Mérimée’s arrival, a soldier had lodged with one of the locksmiths and slept next to a sculpture of God the Father surrounded by saints and angels. He had a less than satisfactory night. In the morning he took his stick, chastised the figure of God with the words, ‘You invented bedbugs, so this one is for you,’ and knocked its head off.

There was also institutional vandalism to contend with. Historic buildings were now being used as storehouses, shops, stables and beer halls. The Palais des Papes was a barracks, Noirlac Abbey a china factory. Since the Revolution, the church of St-Étienne in Strasbourg had been used first as a music hall, later as a tobacco warehouse. Saint Savinien at Poitiers was a prison, and its choir a padded cell: the Inspector General was faced with a request to destroy the interior’s few remaining sculptures of worth, to stop the inmates treating them as climbing stones and making their escape. Mérimée’s task was rarely helped by other government bodies: he found the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs obstructive, the Ministry of Works destructive, and the Ministry of War ‘the biggest vandal in France’. Near Carnac, road builders, unwilling to make a detour of a few metres, smashed ‘the beautiful menhirs of Erdeven’ to powder. The city of Orléans pulled down its old Hôtel-Dieu. At Bourges, the richly late-Gothic Maison
de Jacques Coeur had been turned into a courtroom, a change of use which wrecked the internal layout and decoration. Mérimée judged it impossible to restore the interior to its original condition, because it would mean that ‘we would be obliged to
invent
’. He was constantly faced with such decisions, and expressed his principles in the dictum: ‘It is better to consolidate than repair, better to repair than restore, better to restore than embellish, and in no circumstances knock down.’

Yet worse than individual or institutional vandalism was something less immediately obvious, indeed paradoxical: the mutilations inflicted by wrong-headed restorers. Of all the enemies Mérimée faced, bad restoration was the one which obsessed and infuriated him most. ‘I have no hesitation in saying that neither the iconoclastic fury of Protestantism nor the stupid vandalism of the Revolution has left such deplorable marks on our monuments as the bad taste of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The barbarians at least used to leave ruins; the so-called repairers have left us only their own sorry work.’ Medieval frescoes were whitewashed out; crude new oil painting made churches look like taverns; old stone was brutally scraped away at until it matched the colour of the new stone with which it had been patched. At Bayeux they installed proud new stained glass which was nothing but ‘a gaudy and pretentious pastiche’. At Saint-Savin, one of the buildings closest to his heart, the Inspector General was moved to rage by the enthusiastic repainting and filling-in of the frescoes: ‘the most revolting sight in the world’, he called it. The colours were luridly modern; there was a grotesque portrait of God the Father ‘squinting horribly’, plus an eagle of St John the Apostle looking more ‘like a cockerel’. Within an hour Mérimée had this destructive restoration effaced.

It is amazing that, with all these enemies, he kept both his sanity and his stamina. ‘I am already at war with so many
towns’, he wrote in the 1840s, ‘that one more or less doesn’t worry me much.’ Given that the Commission had only moral and persuasive authority, there were inevitable defeats and losses – some of which occurred after a building had supposedly been saved. The state might list a church, restore it at considerable expense, and hand it back, only for the community to finish the job wreckingly. As the architectural historian Paul Léon put it in his magisterial
La Vie des monuments français
, ‘Their barbarous ignorance often succeeded in removing from the edifice its entire value as a work of art.’ When Mérimée reported on Carpentras in September 1834, he described a delightfully walled and fortified town, like a junior version of Avignon. Despite his praise, when he returned eleven years later, the town had pulled down the better, southern ramparts, and was hard at work destroying the rest. ‘You wouldn’t recognise the place,’ Mérimée wrote to Vitet. ‘It’s now the filthiest and vilest dump you could imagine.’ Avignon similarly wanted to sacrifice its ramparts to facilitate the railway line, whose course would also have chopped through the famous old bridge – a piece of vandalism that was successfully resisted.