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THEODORE VACQUER and the ARCHAEOLOGY of MODERNITY in HAUSSMANN’S PARIS∗ by Colin Jones

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THEODORE VACQUER and the ARCHAEOLOGY of MODERNITY in HAUSSMANN’S PARIS∗ by Colin Jones Transactions of the RHS (), pp. – C Royal Historical Society ! doi:./S Printed in the United Kingdom THEODORE VACQUER AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MODERNITY IN HAUSSMANN’S PARIS∗ By Colin Jones READ OCTOBER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE ABSTRACT.Theodore´ Vacquer (–)wasanarchaeologistwhoexcavated, directed excavations in and visited all archaeological sites in Paris between the s and his death. In the latter part of his career, he served as assistant curator at what became the Musee´ Carnavalet, specialising in the Roman and early medieval history of the city.Taking advantage of the reconstruction of the city in the nineteenth century associated with the work of Paris prefect, Baron Haussmann, he was able to locate far more of Roman Paris than had been known before. His findings remained the basis of what was known about the Roman city until a new wave of archaeological excavations after .Vacqueraimedtohighlighthisdiscoveries in a magnum opus on the history of Paris from earliest times to AD ,buthe died with virtually nothing written. His extensive archive still exists, however, and provides the substance for this essay. The essay seeks to rescue Vacquer from the relative obscurity associated with his name. In addition, by setting his life and work in the context of the Haussmannian construction of Paris as the arch-city of modernity it aims to illuminate the history of archaeology, conservation and urban identity in nineteenth-century Paris. The subject of this essay is the life and work of a Parisian nobody. It concerns in particular the eyes of that Parisian nobody: what they saw and what we can know of what they saw. The nobody in question is Theodore´ Vacquer, a man whose whole life was lived under the star of anonymity, isolation and non-achievement. He was a failed engineer and a failed architect. A highly ambitious author who wrote copiously behind closed doors, he published next to nothing. ‘Reticent to the point of secrecy’ was the judgement of one acquaintance (an admirer, moreover); he was also ‘whimsical to the point of peculiarity’. His quirkily rebarbative character was such that even his friends referred to him as ‘a wild boar’ and ‘a permanently rolled-up hedgehog’. His desperately unglamorous * I am grateful to the audience of the essay, when read at the University of Hertfordshire, for their comments. I have given versions of the essay at numerous other venues, and been rewarded by much help and many new ideas. I also wish to thank in particular Malcolm Todd, Didier Busson, Bonnie Effros and Josephine McDonagh for their help and encouragement. Cartography is by Edward Oliver. Figure Theodore´ Vacquer. From M. Vasseur-Depoux, Catalogue des manuscrits des biblioth`eques publiques de France. T. LIX. Biblioth`eque historique de la ville de Paris (Paris, ). portrait (Figure ) reveals an awkward posture, the rough, embarrassed hands of a workman rather than an intellectual and, half hidden from view by his spectacles, a veiled, oblique, reticent gaze. Vacquer seems to have slipped the attention of just about all historians of Haussmann’s Paris. I stumbled across him and his archive while writing Paris: Biography of a City (). There is a brief but well-informed account of his life by his friends F. G. de Pachtere` and C. Sellier: ‘Theodore´ Vacquer, sa vie, son oeuvre. Le fonds Vacquer alaBiblioth` eque` de la Ville de Paris’, Bulletin de la Biblioth`eque des travaux historiques, (), which is the introduction to the catalogue of his manuscripts in the Bibliotheque` Historique de la Ville Theodore´ Vacquer was a Parisian archaeologist who spent all his life in the city excavating, viewing and reflecting upon its past. And his career covered the period in which Paris was refashioned under the inspiration of Baron Haussmann, Emperor Napoleon III’s prefect of the Seine from through to .Parisrebuilt,boulevardisedand mythologised became over that period the archetypal city of modernity, visually celebrated as such in the canvasses of Impressionist and Post- Impressionist painters. Vacquer’s life also coincided, we might note, with the period in which archaeology was emerging as a professional discipline, and in which protection of heritage (patrimoine)wasbecoming the object of governmental priority. The thrust of this essay will be to argue that the life of this forgotten and neglected figure allows us – paradoxically, most often by dint of his failures rather than his successes – to explore intersections between archaeology and modernity, history and myth, past and future, record and imagination, and memory and amnesia in the history of nineteenth-century Paris, crucible of urban modernity. Ultimately – a century after his virtually unremarked death – this Parisian ‘nobody’ is a somebody whose life and writings have much to teach us. Theodore´ Vacquer was born in Paris in ,intheSorbonne neighbourhood at the heart of the present-day Fifth Arrondissement. The latter encompasses within its limits most of Roman Paris, or Lutetia, which would prove to be his lifelong obsession. He was a true titi parisien –hisfamilywascity-bred,andhewaseducatedinthecity. He failed the entrance examination for the Ecole Polytechnique up on the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve` in the late s, and thereupon de Paris [hereafter BHVP]. The epithets I have used and and the photograph are drawn from this article, which draws on oral as well as a wide range of now unfindable manuscript materials (see esp. p. ). The admirer is Seymour de Ricci, in a brief note, ‘Paris al’` epoque´ romane’, in the Revue arch´eologique (), . For the present article, I have used in particular Vacquer’s autobiographical sketches to be found in Carton of the Fonds Vacquer. The latter was re-catalogued in the sandtheclass-marksindicatedbyPachtere` and Sellier were altered. For the current organisation, see M. Vasseur-Depoux, Catalogue des manuscrits des biblioth`eques publiques de France. T. LIX. Biblioth`eque historique de la ville de Paris (Paris, ). On the Haussmannisation of Paris, the bibliography is too vast to recount in a footnote. See esp. D. Jordan, Transforming Paris. The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (); D. H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (); F.Loyer, Paris Nineteenth-Century: Architecture and Urbanism (); J. Gaillard, Paris, la ville, –: l’urbanisme parisien al’heuredeHaussmann` (Paris, ); A. Sutcliffe, The Autumn of Central Paris. The Defeat of Town Planning, – (); and N. Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, – (). See too G. Haussmann, M´emoires,ed.F.Choay(Paris,). For an overview of these inter-related issues, see F. Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument (Cambridge, ); The section on ‘Le Patrimoine’, in Les lieux de m´emoire,ed. P. N o r a ( vols., paperback re-edn, Paris, –workinthisseriesfirstappearedin), II (esp. A. Chastel, ‘La notion du patrimoine’); E. Gran-Aymerich, Naissance de l’arch´eologie moderne, – (Paris, ); A. Schnapp, La Conquˆete du pass´e. Aux origines de l’arch´eologie (Paris, ); D. Poulot, Une histoire du patrimoine en Occident, XVIIIe–XXIe si`ecle (Paris, ). renounced plans to become an engineer, so as to train as an architect. It was on a building site in that he witnessed the discovery of stone sarcophagi from the Merovingian period – a moment which he described in terms of an epiphany. ‘One day, I noticed on a building site that the earth that the workers were bringing up to the surface contained debris from the Roman period. Several days afterwards, there appeared admirable Roman substructures, whose form and state of conservation were excellent.’ But Vacquer did not stop there. He returned home and compared these findings with the record of the city’s past as it was recounted in current historical work on the early history of Paris. The most up-to-date scholarship – Dulaure’s Histoire de Paris, for example –atonce revealed itself to Vacquer as ‘both incomplete and erroneous’. Vacquer left his armchair and went out hunting for other vestiges of a misrecorded Parisian past. ‘Up to now’, he later noted, ‘the history of Paris had been written by the fireside.’ But things looked different, Vacquer was excited to learn, in the field. ‘I saw that every day and in all neighbourhoods the navvy’s spade was laying bare and destroying ancient sites.’ His vocation as an architect was abandoned. He now vowed to follow all building work as best he could, with the aim of recording findings and where possible rescuing relics. He soon discovered, moreover, that he was falling into the habit of directing his attention by preference ‘on Roman-occupied areas’, ‘often to the detriment of areas built on in the Middle Ages’. This would be, he projected, ‘his life’s work’. This was a good time to be evolving into the proto-archaeologist of Roman Paris. For at this time, thanks mainly (though not entirely) to Prefect Haussmann, more of the central parts of Paris were being dug up than had ever been dug up before. Emperor Augustus had famously re-made Rome in the image of a great empire, and Haussmann’s master, Napoleon III, charged him with the same task for his own imperial capital. It is probably true that historians have tended to follow Haussmann’s own lead and make him (with Napoleon III) almost entirely responsible for this transformation. As Nicholas Papayannis has recently pointed out, the idea of rational urban planning on which the Haussmannian project was based dated back to the Enlightenment (and in some respects even earlier). Haussmann’s predecessor as Prefect of the Seine from to , Count Rambuteau, trialled many of the processes which Haussmann was Pachtere` and Sellier, ‘Vacquer’, ;BHVP,fo.v. In the biographical account, I am drawing essentially on these sources unless otherwise stated. J. A. Dulaure, Histoire physique, civile et morale de Paris, nd edn (Paris, ). Pachtere` and Sellier, ‘Vacquer’, ff; BHVP esp.
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