The title of this far-reaching book suggests a simple journey through time and place. Given the impressive number of sites, authors, and disciplines it engages, however, the reader should envisage a comfortable vehicle and a good deal of time to take everything in, because, more than telling the story of French fascination with the lost world of Pompeii, From Paris to Pompeii explores how archaeology functioned as a metaphor that inspired Romantic cultural productions stretching from literature to art to history. The reader-cum-armchair archaeologist encounters a sprawling complex as rich as the famous buried city itself. While Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet receive the most attention in the book’s seven chapters, Göran Blix also analyzes numerous other French authors: Balzac, Gautier, Thierry, Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Flaubert, Alfred de Musset, Cuvier, Taine, Renan, Nerval, Verne, Dumas, and Proust (and this is just a partial list). Moreover, English, German, and Italian authors also figure prominently, making Blix’s book much more than a study of purely French Romanticism. Disciplines as diverse as poetry and literature, history and geology, biology and philology are all shown to have borrowed heavily from archaeological metaphors, and Blix’s intellectual frame ranges from Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes, from Carlo Ginzburg to Georg Lukács, from Georges Didi-Huberman to Michel de Certeau, and more.

I begin with this enumeration to sketch the intellectual scope of Blix’s book as well as suggest that its actual subject is hard to encapsulate in a few words. Indeed, readers looking for a history of archaeology in the nineteenth century should look elsewhere, as should those looking for detailed accounts of the actual archaeological site of Pompeii. As Blix writes in the introduction, his book is not "about the rise of archaeology . . . but about its broader mythical impact” (4). Thus the ancient site of Pompeii serves him as a repeating melody, a common but far from unique point of reference from which to cull evidence of a much broader archaeological gaze. Pompeii features as a figure that inspires a more diffuse range of approaches to not just the archaeological past but also the present and the future. Within that large compass, Blix concentrates on the myths and methods that determined the cultural practices of French Romanticism.

In order to track the cultural impact of archaeology, Blix begins in chapter 1 by defining a version of “Neoclassical Pompeii” to which he can then contrast Romantic attitudes about the site and the excavation of the past more generally. Inasmuch as these stylistic terms have been called into question by art historians, his lack of definition here seems problematic to me. Winckelmann, for example, appears as emblematic of an overtly aestheticized, “neoclassical” approach (12–14), whereas he appeared as a “Romantic hero” in Suzanne L. Marchand’s Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, xx), a pertinent work incidentally not part of Blix’s bibliography. The phenomena both authors discuss are diffuse, subtle, and complicated, and therefore fit uncomfortably within the limited frame of such contested and oversimplifying stylistic and period terms. Blix’s main argument in this chapter is that a “major transformation . . . completely redefined and reconfigured the archaeological object” and the means of apprehending it, which itself shifted from “a purely aesthetic gaze to a historicizing gaze” (9). Excavated fragments, rather than serving as art objects with aesthetic value, become historical clues that provide concrete evidence about the past. To follow this transformation, he analyzes definitions of the word “archaeology” from 1794, 1828, and 1847, showing how the discipline slowly broke from art history and came to study monuments for their “historic value as milestones in the growth of a national identity” and as “witnesses of the past” (23).

Chapter 2 tracks a parallel transformation from the much-belittled figure of the antiquarian to the more fully Romantic concept of the archaeologist. Blix rehearses Enlightenment and early nineteenth-century critiques of the antiquarian as myopically focused on arcane details, neglecting to live in the present as he attends to the miscellany of the past, and divorced from both the philosophical sweep of Enlightenment history and the aesthetic vision of the first generation of art critics. The inklings of a heroicized, modern archaeologist first appear, according to Blix, in Walter Scott’s 1816 novel The Antiquary, but can also be found in works by Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, and Dumas. The imperialist context gave the modern archaeologist political clout and legitimized the perception of him as a rugged field worker, courting danger in high-risk zones and breaking new scientific ground, an “early prototype of Indiana Jones” (39).

By far the most important shift, however, takes place in the way that Romantics perceived the past, and Blix’s long third chapter explores the transformation of what he calls the “archaeological gaze” itself. Rather than looking for and at material objects, the Romantic archaeologist sought civilization itself. Each artifact was just one more clue in the excavation of something ultimately intangible. Blix demonstrates how different levels of focus, from ancient texts to disparate artifacts to more-or-less intact cities such as Pompeii, inspired “resurrections” of either an entire civilization or a long-vanished people. This quasi-mystic power infuses all of Romantic history, not just archaeology, during the first half of the nineteenth century; and therefore it is Michelet, not himself a field archaeologist, who dominates this chapter.

Blix’s fourth chapter, “The Specular Past,” analyzes the visual metaphors that reoccur in much Romantic literature and history. Visions, paintings, mirages, panoramas, dioramas, and magic mirrors are just so many forms of a deep visual rhetoric or “optical mediation” of the past, marshaled to both “favor the reader’s illusion of being contemporary with events” and to “buttress the implicit philosophical desire to affirm the continued existence of the past” (89). Archaeology plays the smallest role in this chapter, which deals with immaterial, often ghost-like representations rather than artifacts or objects, and it is perhaps the slippage between the two ontological levels that troubles me the most in an otherwise excellent and often eloquent analysis. Indeed, if the anxiety of survival motivates most of the phenomena Blix studies, the actual survival of actual objects from the past in all their physicality anchors the hope for survival in concrete matter, not just dream-like or spectral imagos. Blix also argues that Romantic historicism tends to privilege the visual over the verbal for the way images seemingly fix lost worlds as always, eternally present whereas words “are in a sense always the plaintive echos of absent things” (105). The art historian in me, however, wants to argue that pictures are also plaintive echos, as suggested by the long history of legendary tropes that begins with the Corinthian maid who first drew her lover’s profile to mediate his impending departure. Images may hold out the promise of presence, but whether or not that presence is actually assured or falls short of the hoped-for guarantee deserves greater attention than it is given here.

The fifth chapter analyzes three techniques used to transform the past into a metaphorical and resurrected body: divination and intuition, the reassembly of fragments, and the ultimate incarnation of the past as a more-or-less intact, suffering body. This chapter resonates with one of Blix’s central theses, namely that in the secular nineteenth century anxieties about survival after death were only partly soothed by the new metaphors of resurrection promised by writers and historians. The Biblical “lost worlds” that were emerging thanks to archaeological efforts, including Petra and Nineveh, put pressure on Biblical timelines that fueled both secularism and anxieties of memory and survival in a vastly enlarged timescape. Chapter 6 continues to develop the study of Romantic reconstructions of these lost worlds, including not just Pompeii but also Troy, and even Atlantis. Reconstructions were central to Romantic metaphors of the panorama and the ruin. Blix sees behind them period dreams of a “total archive” that would allow complete reconstruction to triumph over the entropic erosion enacted by time. A key idea emerging in this chapter is the extent to which this drive for or belief in the total record is fueled by a preservationist anxiety about the contemporary world and what it will leave behind for future generations. The book closes with three examinations of how archaeology found pragmatic applications in the social, political, and aesthetic realms of nineteenth-century French culture, and ends with a frustratingly brief reading of Proust’s post-World War I book Le temps retrouvé in order to suggest that the promises of archaeology were no longer enough to generate a myth of rejuvenation.

Although works of art tend to be used (sparingly) as straightforward illustrations without any real visual analysis, three passages deserve special attention from the art historian’s standpoint. The first is a discussion of the role of the museum and contexts of display in the nineteenth century (62–71); the second is the entire fourth chapter on the visual metaphors used by Romantic historians and poets (discussed above); and the third is a section on the Neo-Grec movement and the use of Pompeian motifs in a politico-aesthetic strategy of regeneration under the Second Empire (204–216). Blix’s analysis of the museum as a site of display first questions to what extent it decontextualized artifacts by removing them from their traditional settings. He then rightly complicates such a reductionist reading, saying that Romantic museum displays “also saw much more than beauty in the work . . . embod[ying] memory, testimony, documentary value, age value, political prestige, and cultural identity” (67). His discussion of the Neo-Grecs—many of whom travelled to Pompeii—ignores Romantic efforts to revise or expand Academic attitudes toward the past (a major oversight), and it also ties the archaeological accuracy of the paintings too neatly to imperial politics. Seventy years earlier, Jacques-Louis David’s “archaeological” accuracy allowed his paintings to be read simultaneously from different political perspectives. That a parallel multivalency seems utterly impossible with Chassériau’s, Boulanger’s, or Gérôme’s Neo-Grec works suggests that the link between accuracy and politics is more complex than Blix’s reading allows.

Blix’s primary objects of study, however, are the archaeological tropes of French Romanticism, not the individual works of art that might carry them. Inasmuch as it sees archaeology behind nearly every aspect of French Romantic culture, the book perhaps overstates its claim. But in making his case for the archaeological imaginary, Blix analyzes an impressive array of examples from a wide range of discourses, seeing in them underlying desires and fantasies that fueled archaeology as a science and allowed it to deeply permeate the Romantic mentality. His own prose, rich and filled with metaphors, makes the book a model of literary accomplishment, mirroring in this the hybrid qualities of the period it studies. He seems to have taken to heart a feature of Romantic history writing, which in his words, “reunited erudition and belles lettres . . . mutually enriching the imagination and the archive” (118). Blix’s interesting book does both for modern readers.