Material for History: Construction of the Gallic Past from Material and Immaterial Monuments in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century

Projektbearbeiterin: Dr. Lisa Regazzoni

What access did early modern historians have to the pre-Roman, autochthonous past, which had left almost no literary testimony in its wake? What "new" evidence did they elevate to the status of historical source to supplement or replace the written and in what way did they subsequently alter the practice and understanding of historiography? What narratives and genesis imaginaries did they produce?
The aim of the research project is to rethink from a new perspective the epistemology of the field of knowledge that deals with the “Gallic past” in French discourse during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Rather than addressing the historical narratives surrounding the Gallic past, access to the research area is sought by means of the singular historical evidence that underpinned and verified insights into this past: the monument. This evidence witnessed impressive semantic enhancement in the course of the eighteenth century and became a polysemic epistemological object, one that promised to be something fundamental: a truly authentic and original witness of the past.
In accordance with the selected approach, the project concentrates on monuments seen at that time as Gallic and on the methods – descriptive, comparative and hermeneutic – that made them talk. The spectrum includes archaeological remains, the Breton language, dialects or idiomatic expressions, and also customs, traditions and costumes. These could not, however, be “discovered” and collected in the urban space, but rather existed in places whose cultural development was postulated to be slowest and their inhabitants to have the strongest attachment to old traditions. This shift in geographical perspective allows for the “provincializing” of Paris and the discovery of the role of provincial erudition in the production of the Gallic past and of empirical fieldwork as a new historical practice.