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Budapest 2005.
National museums and nationalism
In 2003 I gave a paper in Budapest on certain expressions of
nationalism in northern Europe in the nineteenth century, on the day on
which Hungary collaborated with fireworks its decision to join the
European Union. I am still trying to work out the symbolism of this
coincidence. It is a platitude to say that the world has grown smaller
through ease of travel; but, as we all grow conscious of the community of
Europe, nationalism has not disappeared from the agenda. In fact, national
identity today is being emphasised even more vociferously – and in some
cases in a worrying manner. It is proper that we examine the roots of our
nationality, indeed it is an imperative of self understanding. That it has
and had political overtones is undoubted, and it is against some of these
overtones that the history and development of national museums must be
seen.
In this paper I wish to examine the various reasons for the
foundation of national museums in northern Europe; that is in Britain
Scandinavia, France and Germany. These are complicated and different.
Museums were founded for a number of reasons: to lend respectability to
a nation’s past, to stress nationality itself in a divided society, to stress
nationality after victory in war, as a postscript to revolution, or out of a
sense of national grandeur. I will stress the importance of Denmark in this
process because of the development of the study of prehistory in that
country and its influence on all other European countries.
Even that most universal museum, a foundation permeated with
the ideas of the European Enlightenment, the British Museum, expresses
in its title a nationalistic idea. The adjective ‘British’ emerged from
nowhere in the few short months after the death of Sir Hans Sloane in
1753, as Parliament formalised the new museum’s foundation under this
seemingly odd name. But the term ‘British’ was at that period an
important one politically, for it grew out of the need for a clearly-defined,
acceptable national identity after the Scottish-based rebellion of 1745
(less than eight years before the death of Sloane), in which the House of
Stuart, in the person of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, challenged the
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House of Hanover for the last time. The nation building of a country
which became known as Great Britain, following the defeat of this
rebellion, was founded on some pretty draconian and nasty acts in
Scotland, but it also included a tacit attempt to re-emphasise the identity
of the people (and particularly the English and the Scots) ruled by the
crown after the Act of Union of 1707. The term ‘British’ was not, then,
given to the new institution in terms of a museum of national antiquities,
but probably rather as an expression of some sort of new national identity,
or even national pride. Indeed, the British content of the British Museum
was minimal, save in relation to printed books and manuscripts – and, to a
certain extent, natural history.
The British Museum need not concern us in this context, save only
in the sense in which I mentioned it to some of you the other day – as a
model for secular, non-royal, public museums. Such a museum was the
National Museum of Hungary; founded in 1802, one of the earliest to be
erected after the foundation of the British Museum – and one which was
to some extent modelled on the British Museum. But it is not my job to
look at Hungary’s great national museum, rather I am tasked to turn to
northern Europe to examine nationalism in relation to museums there.
The French were the first to erect some sort of national museum –
although it was a rather short-lived experiment and its collections were of
a very limited nature. One of the great institutions to emerge from the
Revolution was the Musées Nationaux de France, founded in 1791, of
which the most important constituent was the Musée de la République,
soon to be renamed as the Louvre, which was constructed in 1793 out of
the old royal collections and a number of the great aristocratic collections.
This need not concern us here, but the short-lived Musée des Monuments
Nationaux does. It was founded in the abbey of the Petits-Augustins in
1795 with sculptures and treasures taken from the secularised and
dissolved ecclesiastical establishments of the whole of France, but
particularly from the Île de France, initially as a result of the abolition of
Christianity in October 1793 and the revolutionary vandalism on a grand
scale which followed. It was accidentally formed, originally in 1791 as a
depot for confiscated items intended for sale, then as a depot for the
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stonework and other material of no commercial value, particularly from
the vandalised tombs of the French royal dynasty from St Denis. It was in
some ways a museum of national antiquities with a very nationalistic tone
in a country which was only just coming to terms with its nationhood after
the Revolution. The curator, Alexandre Lenoir, trod a very difficult and
even dangerous path. He had to convince the Committee of Public
Instruction that he was not glorifying the memory of the dynasty. Writing
to them in an attempt to save the monument of François I, he said, ‘I
forget his morals along with his ashes. I am concerned only with the
progress of art and education’.
In his initial approach he used the authority of Wincklemann to
emphasise the need of demonstrating through such monuments the
primitive and the decadent art produced as a result of the fall of the
Roman Empire. As the worst period of the Revolution subsided, he more
openly followed Montfaucon, whose great book, Les monumens de la
Monarchie française, had been so influential over some 75 years, and
used the excuse that he wished the monuments in the new museum to
preserve some idea of the dress and accoutrements of the past. The
Museum was a very fragile institution and it did not survive,
henceforward the few attempts to save the material culture of the country
were confined to the Cabinet des Medailles of the Bibliothèque Nationale
(the old Royal Library), which to this day retains such important
archaeological material as the finds from the grave of the Frankish king
Childeric, found at Tounai. But, because of the very concentration of so
much material from the medieval period, the Musée des Monuments
Nationaux gradually became an element in establishing the national
identity of France with a history and a culture of its own. With the uneasy
reconciliation of Church and State under Napoleon, and ultimately with
the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, the monuments were returned to
the church and their pre-revolutionary owners, and the museum was
summarily closed in 1816.
It was not, however, until 1863 (rather late in the day) that
Napoleon III founded the very different Musée des Antiquités Nationales
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in the semi-derelict chateau at Saint Germain-en-Laye, to which I shall
return.
When it comes to understanding of the growth in the formation of
national museums, in the sense that they reflect and systemize the
prehistory and history of a country, the importance of Scandinavia is preeminent. In both Sweden and Denmark (and consequently, of course,
Norway) the crown had retained the ancient rights of ownership of
unclaimed treasure of precious metal found in the ground, save that in
Denmark objects of base metal could also be claimed. This functioned
rather more rigorously in Denmark than it did in Sweden. Such objects
were added to the royal Kunstkammer,. The Danish Kunstkammer, which
was founded in 1650 by Frederik III, while somewhat later in foundation
than those in Vienna, Prague, Kassel and Dresden, it was large and
extremely well curated, and in 1665 had incorporated the famous
collection of the polymathic physician Ole Worm. By the end of the
seventeenth century there were among its very diverse collections,
seventy-five prehistoric objects found in Danish soil.
The middle years of the eighteenth century were a low period in
the history of Danish culture. German scholars and authors, as well as
politicians and courtiers, influenced many of the Danish upper and middle
classes to turn towards German culture, so much so that in 1772
Struensee, the German chief minister under Christian VII, even suggested
the abolition of the Danish language. He had, however, underestimated
the growing groundswell of nationalism and, after his expulsion and
execution in the political shake-up of the 1770s, there was a revival in
Danish arts and language. By the end of the eighteenth century interest in
Danish antiquity grew greatly among landowners and intellectuals,
including painters who were producing works of art depicting ancient
monuments. In 1792 Frederik Münter, a professor of Theology and
Bishop of Sjælland, who was also a distinguished numismatist, pressed
for a:
collection of all the Nordic monuments and prehistoric objects
which are either extant or on which there exist accurate and reliable
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reports - a task whose urgency is enhanced by the destruction
overtaking these monuments at the hands of peasants, and through
public works as well; since many ancient burial-mounds, assembly
places, and sacrificial sites have been destroyed by road
construction in Sjælland, and that even those examples renowned
in tradition should not have been spared is universally acknowledged and deplored.
This was a period of wealth in Denmark, when grand projects of
classically-inspired landscaping of indigenous monuments were but one
element which helped to express the power and influence of the country
and its interest in its monuments and its past. Importantly, in 1806,
Rasmus Nyerup, in his historical-statistical survey of Denmark and
Norway in ancient and modern times, wrote a fourth volume, entitled (in
translation), ‘A survey of ancient monuments of the fatherland which
might be displayed in a future national museum’. Denmark was deeply
involved with France, politically, militarily and culturally. Nyerup was
much influenced by the French Musée des Monuments Nationaux
founded as the result of the revolution, and pleaded for a similar museum
in Denmark. The continuing influence of Bishop Münter, combined with
the unsatisfactory quality of the curation of the royal collections revealed
by the robbery and melting down of two major national treasures – two
fifth-century golden horns from Gallehus in southern Jutland, and the
general disregard by farmers of antiquities found in the Danish soil,
brought matters to a head.
In 1807 a royal decree established a commission for ancient
monuments, with Nyerup as secretary. This body was ordered to decide
which ancient field monuments should be preserved, to preserve
important features of medieval churches, to inform the peasants of the
value of antiquities found on their land, and to establish a ‘public
museum, which, at a minimum of expense to the state, could house all the
archaeological objects to be found in His Majesty’s domains’, both within
and outside the royal collections. To curate the collections a young man,
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, a rich man who needed no salary, was
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appointed in 1816 and started work in the roof-space of Holy Trinity
Church in Copenhagen which now housed the collections.
Denmark, at this time was in a dreadful economic and
international position.. Copenhagen had been attacked by the British fleet
in 1801, and in 1807 the British again bombarded the town; the Danish
merchant fleet, on which much of the country’s wealth depended, was
decimated under constant attack, and a series of unfortunate alliances with
France and Russia, combined with invasions and military defeats, led to a
gradual drift into state bankruptcy in 1813 and the loss of Norway to
Sweden at the Peace of Kiel in 1814. In such low periods countries tend to
turn in on themselves and consider their identity. To a certain extent the
Danes were, as I have said, already well on the way towards an upsurge in
nationalism, which now became an element in their own salvation. It is
significant that Nyerup in 1806 used the term ‘Fædrelandet’ (Fatherland)
in his plea for a museum of antiquities. This term had echoes of a 1745
concept launched by a group of young middle class Danes – against the
political wind of the time – of a ‘Danish Society for the improvement of
the history and language of the fatherland’, but was well in keeping with
the romanticism of the time, when the deeds of the gods and heroes of the
pagan past were being translated into modern Danish, and celebrated in
poetry, on the stage and in the fine arts by a new breed of educated and
highly articulate Danes. It was expressed most forcibly in the writings of
Grundtvig and Oehlenschläger, who in the romantic nationalist fervour of
the time, were fascinated by the stories of the Norse gods and heroes. It
was a nationalism which was to grow in strength in the SchleswigHolstein wars of 1848-50 and 1864, in which museum politics was also to
play a part.
But back to the Commission and the work of Thomsen. The new
curator had no experience of the job and, faced with an inchoate group of
500 objects, had to sort and display them. He did this from first principles,
dividing them up by the material from which they had been made on a
purely empirical basis, but, in effect, developing what has been termed the
Three-Age system – the development of the present terminology for
prehistory – the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. He also realized the
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importance of recording archaeological finds in context and to keep
groups of objects together. This latter he carried into practice by
excavations using the results of excavations, including those of Bishop
Münter and the Crown Prince (later Frederik VII), carried out on sites
throughout the country. He carried his ideas into Sweden, through his
close contacts with antiquarians there, of whom the most important was
Bror Emil Hildebrand (who was virtually his student), and into the rest of
Scandinavia. The Museum, which opened in a limited fashion to the
public in 1819, led a peripatetic life in the first half of the century, moving
into the Royal Palace in 1832. It was after its arrangement in these new
rooms that Thomsen, together with N.M.Petersen, archivist and
philologist, published in 1836 what is perhaps the most important book in
the history of prehistoric archaeology – his Ledetraad til Nordisk
Oldkyndighed [Guide to Scandinavian antiquities], in which he postulated
his Three-Age theory for the first time in print. The three periods were
distinguished by the materials of their chief tools, but he had, through his
observation of excavation material, also associated with each of them
monument types, pottery types and burial customs. He also made a first
foray into the theory of typology, particularly in his study of the
development of bracteates, first published in 1855. His strength lay, as
one scholar has put it (OKJ,57), ‘precisely in his ability to point out
characteristic features, and compare these features with others, so
combining them in a classificatory and chronological system’.
But it may be thought that I am wandering from my subject in this
detailed account of the erection of the prehistoric periods. It cannot,
however, be too forcibly emphasized that the new understanding of
prehistory was important in nationalist terms, for it helped to give a
respectable, understandable and longer past to a country which was to all
intents and purposes illiterate until the coming of Christianity in the tenth
century. It added respectability by providing a past which produced
monuments and artifacts which, while not so sophisticated as those of the
Greek, Roman and Assyrian past, sometimes surpassed them in technical
achievement. It struck a chord in other countries, both inside and outside
the limits of the Roman Empire. Thomsen’s guide gained a wider public
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audience through translation, first into German, in 1837, and then into
English, in 1848.
Thomsen’s influence, both practically and academically, was of
the greatest importance in encouraging the revitalization of the old
Swedish collections. But the story of the National Museums in Sweden is
very different from that of its southern neighbour, and has deeper roots.
Sweden in the early nineteenth century, although the home of a strong
nationalist movement which found its expression in poetry and the applied
arts, was already very aware of its past. This was based on its
commanding position in the North in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries based on the military achievements of Gustavus
Adolphus, which had led to a consciousness of its heritage and the need to
have a respectable past. This was expressed in the foundation in 1662 at
Uppsala of a chair in Antiquities with an Antikvitetscollegium (College of
Antiquities) based in the university, in which was the energetic and
influential figure of Olof Rudbeck. The head of the College was Johan
Hardorph, who under the patronage of the Chancellor of the University,
Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, appointed a series of assistants to record in
the words of the foundation document:
The heroic achievements of the kings of Sweden and Gotland,
their subjects, and other great men – the imposing castles,
fortresses, dolmens, the stones bearing runic inscriptions, the
tombs and ancestral mounds.
Field monuments were to be protected and recorded by the parish priests
and their assistants, who were to send drawings of them to the king. The
college had a museum which acquired antiquities from throughout
Sweden and Finland. After the death of Hardorph in 1693, the influence
of the College was at an end and it was transferred as an archive to
Stockholm, where it survives institutionally to this day as the State
Historical Museum and the state antiquities service.
In seeking the roots of its greatness, the Swedish king did not rely
completely on the College, he expressed it also in the 1661 royal initiation
of Erik Dahlberg’s great work, Svecia Antiqva et hodierna, which dealt
with the architectural manifestations of Sweden’s contemporary
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greatness, alongside illustrations – real and imaginary – of its heroic past,
and even a number of ancient monuments. It was eventually published,
after Dahlberg’s death, in 1715. The search for Swedish respectability in
the past is also seen in the brilliant, monstrously nationalistic, wrongheaded and influential Atlantica of Olaf Rudbeck, published in 1696,
which put the Goths (the perceived ancestors of the Swedes) at the centre
of man’s origins in Europe. With the foundation of the Swedish Academy
of Letters, History and Antiquities by Queen Lovisa Ulrika in 1753, the
study of Sweden’s past was set on a rather lazy and inward-looking course
that was much less seriously involved in the early nineteenth-century
nationalism of Denmark and Norway.
Meanwhile the Swedish royal collections of art were receiving
attention with the opening to the public in 1794 of the Royal Museum in
Stockholm. This was based on the collection of Gustav III and his mother,
Lovisa Ulrike, the latter a private collection and the former largely state
funded. In 1792, after the death of Gustav III, it was taken over by the sate
and remained in the royal palace, basically as a royal collection of art. In
a late expression of a spirit of nationalism it moved, renamed as the
National Museum, into a newly-built building (designed by Stüler, the
architect of the Neues Museum in Berlin) in 1866. In the National
Museum were incorporated the Royal Armoury, which was moved to a
separate building in 1885, and the collections of national antiquities.
The National Museum in Stockholm was dominated by pictures,
while the care of the antiquities was basically in the hands of the state
antiquary, who was responsible to the Academy of Letters, History and
Antiquities. At this period it happened to be a most powerful figure, Bror
Emil Hildebrand, whom we have already met in Thomsen’s company in
Denmark and who was appointed Royal Antiquary in 1837. His influence
was crucial and, much influenced from Denmark. He had organised the
old collections on the basis of the Three-Age system in a new Museum of
Antiquities. This, which also included the massive royal coin collection,
had been opened to the public in 1845 in rather cramped quarters. It was
moved to the basement of the National Museum in 1865, given the title of
State Historical Museum, and finally moved to its present site in 1939.
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The Swedish National Museum, by origin, was then basically a royal art
collection which, in bourgeois hands, accidentally accreted other
collections, including national antiquities, with little rigorous academic
thought. The pictures, however, always dominated the public spaces.
The situation in Norway was different, although here again
Thomsen was greatly influential. In 1810 (while Norway was still
attached to Denmark) a commission similar to that established in
Denmark was appointed. Its small archaeological collection passed into
the hands of the University and was arranged by its first curator, R.
Keyser, on the basis of Thomsen’s three-age system as the University
museum. There was, however, already a museum in Trondheim, which
belonged to the Royal Society of Science, and this continued to collect
archaeological material from the region, as it does today. Bergen, the
prosperous port on Norway’s west coast, as always went its own way. In
1825 the Bishop of Bergen, Jacob Neumann (an active antiquary), and the
gifted statesman and local governor, W.F.K.Christie, established the
Bergen Museum. Christie had been the Norwegian representative at the
peace talks in London in 1814, where he had been so impressed by the
British Museum, that he modelled the newly-founded institution on the
British Museum’s multi-disciplinary structure; combining it particularly
with a strong natural history and ethnological collection. Local patriotism
hindered the proper establishment of a national museum.
This was a period of strong nationalist feeling in all three
Scandinavian countries, who for various reasons did not particularly like
each other, and were often actively resentful of each other (after all they
had been fighting on different sides for many centuries). This was a
period of passionate nationalism expressed through national societies,
poetry and a return to the heroic period of the pagan past with its distinct
pantheon of gods. The museums in the three countries were expressions of
each individual nation’s nationalism, the search for respectable roots, but
were at the same time became a means of reaching towards a wider
Scandinavian vision, also rooted in the heroic past.
Stark nationalism was a feature of the more conservative members
of the Liberal party and of the agricultural community. The Danish flag,
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for example, became obtrusive as a national symbol. Throughout the first
half of the nineteenth century there was, however, a growing panScandinavian movement which came into its own among the intellectuals.
First, the poets and artists, then the academics. Natural scientists, for
example, at a meeting in Gothenburg in 1839, pledged themselves to work
towards a Scandinavian union. Among other academics was the
archaeologist who was to be Thomsen’s successor, J.J.A. Worsaae, and
who was to confirm through excavation the detail of the Three-Age
system. In 1845, as a youngish man of strong nationalist political
inclination, he was one of the speakers at an inter-Nordic student meeting
in Copenhagen, where the hall was decorated with pictures of the gods of
the North, framed in motifs drawn from monuments and objects of the
early Middle Ages, to emphasise the common heritage of Scandinavia.
Pan-Scandinavianism was seeking respectability in museum terms.
The pan-Scandinavian ethnographic museum, Nordiska Museet in
Stockholm, founded in 1873, was one expression of this; its founder,
Artur Hazelius, having been interested in the Scandinavian movement as
an undergraduate at Uppsala. Pan-Scandinavianism became particularly
important to the Danes during the Schleswig-Holstein wars, when
Worsaae was an active pamphleteer, sometimes stretching the evidence,
and discoursing in chauvinistic fashion on the common heritage of the
three Scandinavian countries, on the basis of the archaeological and
historical material. But there were many, particularly in Norway, who
were unconvinced. But this, while it goes beyond my brief, leads on to my
next point and my next examples.
Everybody here will recognise that nationhood is an artificial
construct. As Hungarians or British, we can see this as clearly as anyone
(although for you the language is a greater binding element than is mine).
Nationhood is also a temporary construct and one that cannot be
recognised as a single platonic idea. The nation – nationality – is to be set
against foreigners, what modern historians call the Other. It can be, indeed
most often is, an artificial construction in times of danger. The English
became ‘the British’ after the Act of Union, but the construct became
important partly in relation to the French, their natural enemy. Linda
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Colley has put it rather well in relation to eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century Britain:
I am aware that in referring to Great Britain as a nation, I may
bewilder, and even offend those who are accustomed to thinking of
nations only as historic phenomena characterised by cultural and
ethnic homogeneity. My reply would be that, if we confine our use
of the term 'nation' to such pure, organic growths, we shall find
precious few of them available in the world either to study or to live
in. By contrast, if we accept Benedict Anderson's admittedly
loose, but for that reason invaluable definition of a nation as ‘an
imagined political community’, and if we accept also that,
historically speaking, most nations have always been culturally
and ethnically diverse, problematic, protean and artificial
constructs that may take shape very quickly and come apart just as
fast, then we can plausibly regard Great Britain as an invented
nation superimposed, if only for a while, onto much older
alignments and loyalties.
One of the elements making up the invented nation of Britain was
Scotland, which in its cities and old universities was seriously cultured
and especially open to modern ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century. Edinburgh was the proud centre of what is now known as the
Scottish enlightenment. In the first half of the nineteenth century, to some
extent, under the influence of the romantic nationalism of Ossian and,
more particularly, of the novelist Sir Walter Scott, the Scots became more
nationally conscious and self-assertive. Scott himself built up a collection
of Scottish antiquities at his grand newly-built house of Abbotsford and
was a member of, and much influenced by, the newly-established Society
of Antiquaries of Scotland (founded in 1780), which from its own
headquarters and museum worked towards an acceptance of national –
that is Scottish – antiquity.
The Society’s progress was slow and faltering. There was a sort of
museum from the beginning; but it was initially little more than a
curiosity cabinet. It soon dropped its residual natural-history collections,
passing them in a mutual exchange to the Royal Society of Edinburgh,
with whom for some time it shared a building. In 1824 a new building
was purchased and the Society’s collections were assembled in elegant
rooms which were freely open to the public by means of a ticket signed
by a Fellow of the Society.
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The time was right. Scottish national identity had received an
enormous romantic boost by the visit to Scotland in 1822 of George IV,
the first king to visit Scotland since 1630. The visit was a theatrical show
on a grand scale and was orchestrated by Sir Walter Scott. In the words of
his latest biographer:
Scott's strategy was to drown out critics by a deafening
barrage of pomp and reach over the heads of the Whig
middle classes to the populace. He embarked on what
Lockhart calls ‘an orgy of Celtification’; a shameless
parade of kilts, bagpipes, sporrans, claymores, and the
panoply of Old Gael, all of dubious accuracy but
picturesque enough to establish the image of Scotland in
the non-Scottish mind for all time. He invented ‘traditions’
as freely as anything in the plots of his novels. Underlying
everything Scott invented for the occasion was the grand
fiction that the Scots are a nation of Highlanders.
The visit was an enormous success; the Scots, a receptive
audience, in practical terms re-invented themselves – history, kilts
and all.
It was in this atmosphere that the newly-invigorated
Antiquaries museum (later to be renamed the National Museum of
Antiquities of Scotland) was inaugurated and the first attempts to
achieve public funding were made (an aim not achieved until 1851).
The Museum made ripples beyond Scotland. In 1828, James
Markland, the Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London,
wrote an open letter which drew attention to the newly-opened
museum in Edinburgh, and this was shortly followed up by Edward
Hawkins, the newly appointed Keeper of Antiquities in the British
Museum, who drew the attention of his Trustees:
to the Propriety of appropriating a portion of the new building to
the reception of National Antiquities; a letter lately addressed to
the Earl of Aberdeen by Mr Markland, the Director of the Soc. of
Antiquaries is evidence for the general desire for the formation of
such a collection, and the interest excited by the commencement
of one at Edinburgh by the Soc. of Antiq. of Scotland, and by the
extensive museum of such objects established at Copenhagen
under the auspices of the Danish Government prove that similar
establishment here would be duly valued. Mr Markland proposes
that it should be attached to the Soc. of Antiq. but even if the
objection of their present want of accommodation were removed,
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their pecuniary means would be scarcely adequate to its collection,
preservation and proper exhibition. The National Museum seems
to be the proper receptacle of National antiquities … It is desirable
also that the objects in question should be under the same auspices
and the same Roof with the unrivalled collections of MSS and
Coins illustrative of our early History which are already deposited
in the Brit.Mus.
This was the official first step in the long haul towards the formal
recognition of a separate section of the British Museum devoted to
national antiquities, which was not finally achieved until 1852, about
which I spoke to some of you the other day.
But let us return to Scotland. Edinburgh had long had an
intellectual connection with Scandinavia, and this extended to its museum
collections. The new Copenhagen museum was described in a lecture to
the society in 1828. But the presence of the Vikings in Scotland was a
particular archaeological problem as they had been for many years
classified as ‘Danes’. The first person to tackle the problems of
terminology in Scotland was a most influential scholar – Daniel Wilson,
in 1851 still Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries and in charge of its
museum until his departure for Canada in 1853 – and the man who
introduced the word ‘prehistoric’ into the English language. In a seminal
book, The archaeology and prehistoric annals of Scotland, published in
1851, he attempted to give some sense of order to the terminology used by
Scottish Antiquaries. Influenced by one of Worsaae’s critics, he deleted
the term ‘Danish’ as a descriptor of what we now call ‘Viking’, and
generally substituted the word ‘Northmen’, pleading that the word ‘Dane’
was an English concept and used for a very wide range of material found
in Scottish soil. He also dropped the word ‘Celtic’, previously used to
describe all prehistoric material. He never, however, attempted to display
the museums in terms of the Three-Age system. What is interesting in the
context of this lecture are his comments on the value of the Museum in
national terms. Wilson saw both his book and his work as influential in
creating patriotic feeling, writing in the first volume of the Society’s new
Journal, ‘In Dublin…as in Copenhagen, a keen spirit of nationality and
patriotic sentiment has been enlisted in the cause of Archaeological
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science [but in Scotland] … we mourn the decay of our old generous
spirit of nationality’. Elsewhere, in 1852, he writes:
… I grieve to say it, our Scottish nationality, which was once so
fervid and healthful an element of action, has degenerated into a
species of empty vanity and conceit … I have tried to enlist it on
behalf of an object I had much at heart, the establishing of a
Museum of National Antiquities here [in Edinburgh]. In
Copenhagen a genuine nationality has been awakened on this; and
it is wonderful what has been effected in Dublin. But Scotsmen
seem to me beginning to be ashamed of Scotland – surely a woeful
symptom.
Wilson was, we can now see with the benefit of hindsight (there is
nothing more nationalistic than a Scotsman), exaggerating, but the burden
of his song was to be carried through in many statements concerning
national antiquities over the years. Clearly, however, Wilson specifically
saw the Museum as a support and a symbol of nationalism.
After all this it is interesting to note that the British Museum,
sticking to its brief as an universal museum, rarely had a specific gallery,
dedicated to national antiquities, except for a few years after 1851 when
the Trustees of the Museum finally agreed to appoint somebody to curate
them, British antiquities were always displayed alongside comparative
material from the Continent. It is, however, interesting to note that the
British Museum was the first museum outside Denmark to show national
antiquities in terms of the Three-Age system.
If we now turn to Germany, it is clear that the story is rather
different from that of the other European countries, only partly because of
its fragmented political base and the evolving federal nature of the
country. The country had a multitude of Museums – mostly in Berlin,
where they had become shrines of culture. The German intellectuals, by
and large, exhibited an elitist, hierarchical attitude towards museums and
their collections. Schinkel, for example, the architect, used the term
Heiligtum of his Altes Museum in Berlin, the temple-like appearance of
which proclaimed it a secular shrine. In the words of one historian: ‘Often
enough, the object of worship became not artistic beauty, but the expertise
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of and social power of art’s new political and academic guardians’.
German archaeology and German medieval culture made little impact in
this atmosphere.
But the strong strain of German nationalism was beginning to
break through. The romantics had a commitment to the study of history,
of philology and of law. This was formalised in ground-breaking
university courses in the first quarter of the nineteenth century which
encouraged the study of ancient Germany. A shining army of scholars –
of whom the leaders were Eichorn, Savigny, the Grimms and von Ranke –
investigated in critical, almost painful, detail the history of the Germanspeaking peoples.
The revolutionary year, 1848, with its deep intellectual base,
encouraged the examination of nationalism. One outcome was the
Museum erected at Nürnberg. Known as the Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, it may be seen as a symbol of the failed aspirations of
the Frankfurt parliament out of which it had grown. It was founded - in
public at least - at a well-prepared meeting of academics in 1852 at
Dresden as, ‘a well-ordered compendium of all available source material
for German history, literature and art… to spread the knowledge of
national prehistory by publishing the foremost source treasures and
educating handbooks’. Its real inspiration, Freiherr von und zu Aufsess,
conceived it as an omnium gatherum for documenting the fundamental
unity of the German-speaking world. With the foundation of the German
Empire in 1871 it became the official national museum of German art and
culture – of everything from the Palaeolithic to the present day. The
museums of Berlin, strongly supported by the Emperor, became the
symbol of Germany’s international power and culture.
It was presumably no coincidence that the Wittlesbachs set up
their own national museum in Munich only three years later. Maximillan
II accepted plans put forward by the state archivist, Karl Maria Freiherr
von Artein, to set up the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum for ‘die
interessanten und vaterländischen Denkmäler und sonstigen Uberreste
verganger Zeiten der Vergessenheit zu entreissen’. Following the taste of
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the period the museum was at first chiefly concentrated on the medieval
period.
National museums did not, however, spring up all over Germany,
but an interesting side-line to the use of museums in stressing nationality
is provided by the fate of the Museum in Flensburg after the SchleswigHolstein war of 1864. The Kongelige Samling for Nordiske Oldsager
(literally the Royal Collection for Nordic Antiquities) was moved to Kiel
in 1873 and became the core of a new museum called Museum für
Vaterländische Alterthümer (incidentally with the first female curator –
later director – of a museum recorded in Europe, Johanna Metsdorf). The
story of the setting up of this museum is a fascinating story including a
great deal of Danish obfuscation and a long-drawn-out piece of police
detective work on the part of the Germans; interference by Bismarck; not
to mention arguments about the national identity of antiquities, and hard
feelings all round. The story has recently been well told by Stine Wiell.
The main bone of contention comprised the finds, including the famous
Roman Iron Age boat from Nydam excavated by the Danes just before the
outbreak of the war, which were evacuated and hidden by the curator of
the Flensburg Museum, H.C. Engelhardt, before he fled to Denmark. In
justice it must be said that he published the finds in Danish and English
within two years. The titles of the two museums – ‘Nordic’ in the case of
the Flensburg, and ‘Fatherland’ in the later Kiel museum – tell the whole
story of bitter nationalism. The museum is now in Schleswig and is called
the Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesmuseum.
My last example comes from France. I have earlier talked of the
failure of the short-lived Musée des Monuments Nationaux, which was
erected as a result of the Revolution. It was not until 1867 that France
began to take its national antiquities seriously. In that year, a section of
the Exposition Universelle, overseen by leading French archaeologist,
Gabriel de Mortillet, with an international committee which included
Franks from the British Museum, arranged a display of material drawn
from the whole of European prehistory. A description of the section,
Promenades préhistoriques à l’Exposition Universelle, written by de
Mortillet, was deeply influential. De Mortillet, aware of its importance,
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wrote that it was, ‘la première fois que les temps préhistoriques se
manifestent d’une manière solonelle et générale. Eh bien, cette première
manifestation a été pour eux un triomphe complet.’
In many respects it was here that prehistoric archaeology achieved
respectability. The French, however, backed away from the universality
expressed in the 1867 exhibition. French scholars, although well in the
forefront of the study of prehistory, were stultified by a conservative,
imperial tradition which is well exemplified by the Musée des Antiquités
Nationales at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, founded by Napoleon III in 1862
and opened in 1867. Legend has it that the museum was founded because
of a famous state visit to France by the impressionable Queen Victoria,
who had a romantic attachment to the Stuart dynasty, the last king of
which, James II, was buried in Saint Germain, and whose court had
occupied the chateau there. As she wished to see the last royal centre of
the Stuart dynasty, it was quickly converted at the Emperor’s orders from
a barracks and military prison into a museum and a preserved ancient
monument. Unfortunately this story is untrue – the visit took place more
than ten years before the foundation of the museum – although the
château was undoubtedly tidied up for Victoria’s visit and was clearly
looking for an occupant when the idea of the museum was adumbrated.
The Exposition obviously stimulated the foundation of the museum and
was perhaps partly encouraged in its foundation by the gift of a collection
of national antiquities from the Emperor and from Boucher de Perthes, the
founder of French Palaeolithic studies, not to mention a large collection of
Danish prehistoric antiquities given by Frederik VII. Despite this latter
gift its collections became almost completely national in character. In
1868 de Mortillet, having played a leading role in its foundation, became
its assistant director. This is quite surprising in that in his earlier days he
had trumpeted the internationality of the archaeological discipline,
particularly during his exile after 1848 in Switzerland. De Mortillet,
however, was a highly politicised animal. He had gone into exile in 1849,
having been sentenced to two years imprisonment for an attack on the
Jesuits, and, despite his previous internationality (as displayed, for
example, by is involvement in the foundation of the international
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Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology), his own
interests – both political and archaeological – became highly nationalistic.
Towards the end of his long life, he published, in 1897, La formation de
la nation française, which, with its political undertones, seems almost to
ignore any comparative study.
From what has been said, it is quite clear that nationalism and
politics entered very much into the foundation and development of
national museums. This is clearly the case in relation to the middle of the
nineteenth century to Denmark, in Worsaae’s period as director of what
became the National Museum; equally it is true of the foundation of such
Museums as those at Kiel, Nuremburg, Munich and St Germain-en-Laye.
At the same time it is also clear that internationalism permeated the
thoughts of many of the prehistoric archaeologist who met almost
annually at the Congress of Anthropology and prehistoric Archaeology.
The type of nationalism involved in the foundation of these
museums varies greatly. In Denmark the museum was founded in the
spirit of a national romanticism, growing out of the rather bruised country
that had emerged after the Napoleonic wars. Reflecting the artistic
achievement of the period – this was the so-called Golden Age of Danish
painting – it impacted enormously on the consciousness of the middle
classes, especially in the towns, as evidenced by the popular books
published, and the popular learned societies, founded in this period. In the
period between 1848 and 1864, the period of the Schleswig-Holstein
wars, and the ten years which followed the peace, the National Museum
was used by Worsaae and others as a tool in the pan-Scandinavian
movement as it sought the solidarity of its neighbours in the face of the
German threat. It is, for example, interesting that the Museum in
Flensburg was founded in this period (actually in 1852) as a (Danish)
national museum for the region and 1858 became a department of the
Museum in Copenhagen – a rather aggressive move in view of the
established right of Kiel University to archaeological material found in the
duchy of Schleswig-Holstein. At the same time it got its new name, The
Royal Collection of Antiquities in Flensburg.
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Just as aggressive – if not more so – was the German treatment of
the Flensburg Museum after their victory in the 1864 war. The use of the
word ‘Vaterland’ in its title was not particularly happy. The Flensburg
collections became a symbolic element in a battle of identity, between
‘Danes’ and ‘Germans’, much complicated by the world-famous find of
the Nydam boat. Both after the First and the Second World War, the
Danes attempted to claim the Flensburg collections, but failed on both
good and rather specious grounds. The battle is now over and there is
cooperation as never before between the archaeologists of Denmark and
Schleswig-Holstein, and last year the Nydam boat was actually moved,
for temporary exhibition, to Copenhagen.
The Germanisches Nationalmuseum was not founded in the same
aggressive spirit as that associated with Kiel Museum. Rather, it sprang
from the failed expression of a united Germany represented by the
Frankfurt parliament, an expression which had foundered on the
implacable determination of Frederick William IV to ignore the proposals
of that democratically-elected body. The museum must be seen as part of
the obsession of German intellectuals with national identity in the middle
years of the nineteenth century. Both this museum, and more particularly
the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich, also emphasised Germany’s
medieval roots – a heavy, rather humourless taste, which was castigated in
anti-romantic strain, in a different context, by the poet Heine from his
exile in Paris – as a mood which could be ‘brought to life by an evil spirit,
which walks about in broad daylight and sucks the red blood from our
breasts’. Both museums are remarkable institutions, but few would deny
the underlying romantic longing of both.
In effect, the development of the museum in Edinburgh tells a
different story; a collection, rooted in the ideas of the European
enlightenment, was turned under a false romanticism for the medieval into
a rather strident expression of national identity – Wilson’s ‘species of
empty vanity and conceit’.
The first half of the nineteenth century was an enormously
important period in the development of museums – both local and
national – throughout Europe. The internationalism of the eighteenth
21
century enlightenment is chiefly expressed in the ideas which lay behind
the foundation of the first public universal museum – the British Museum.
It was an idea which was built upon in the Victorian era. When, for
example, the British Museum started to collect British prehistoric and
medieval artefacts, they were not placed in a separate gallery, but were
shown alongside contemporary and comparative material from Europe
and elsewhere. Universalism was an idea which also inspired the
development of the classical and ethnographical departments of the
Danish National Museum in the mid-nineteenth century and also of the
National Museum in Budapest, although neither of these institutions
developed the comparative archaeological collections seen in London. It
would be a truism to say that the national museum (as a concept) was, at
its best, the product of liberal nationalism, the product possibly of a
struggle to achieve a national identity. Would it be too much to say that
the universal museum was a product of a more sophisticated nationalism,
which saw the home country in a wider – even a uniting – context? This is
one of the problems which must be clearly addressed in the ‘Multiple
antiquities – Multiple Modernities’ project of the Collegium Budapest.