| During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many prominent French intellectuals utilized the Middle Ages as a means to critique and conceptualize the identity of France as a nation and a culture. Defined as cultural medievalism, the diverse movement to appropriate the medieval legacy of Europe first appeared with the philosophes and the early Romantics. This study examines the protean discourse on the Middle Ages both outside of and within the confines of academic scholarship. Indeed, the Romantic interest in the Middle Ages greatly influenced the historical scholarship of Augustin Thierry, Francois Guizot, and Jules Michelet.;While historians produced seminal works on the Middle Ages during the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, a great range of intellectuals, from novelists to architects, produced interpretations of France's medieval heritage that corresponded to their views on the purposes and problems of society. Among others, the voices on the meaning of the medieval epoch include Voltaire, Montesquieu, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Joseph de Maistre, Germaine de Stael, Pierre Leroux, Victor Hugo, and Eugene Viollet-le-Duc. Although a few were avowed political reactionaries, most of the authors who manipulated the endlessly malleable Middle Ages were not. During the nineteenth century, an essential element of cultural life was the criticism of an urban and constantly industrializing world that eroded stability and community. Modernity's destruction of traditions and its impact on the conditions of everyday life often necessitated a complementary anti-modernism. Conservatives, socialists, and liberal nationalists have embraced aspects of cultural medievalism, as the medieval epoch has served both the expression of discontent and the quest for a French national identity. |
