Our ancestors were not Celts: history, folklore and the Celtic past in Napoleonic France

ABSTRACT

This article offers a new interpretation of the Académie celtique. Active between 1804 and 1813, the Académie sought out megaliths and collected popular customs, songs and stories, which they understood as the vestiges of the ancient Celtic inhabitants of Gaul. The Académie has often been associated with nation-building projects, either as a manifestation of concern with the cultural diversity of the French population, or as a search for the nation’s glorious ancestors. Based on close reading of the Académie’s publications, manuscript correspondence and minute books, this article argues that the Académie was also a vehicle for the enthusiasm of its members for a vision of the Druids as Deist Philosophes, an aspect hitherto overlooked in the literature. In doing so it demonstrates the complexities of French nation-building projects, revealing both the crucial role of religion in debates over popular culture in France during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, and the contested place of the Gauls in the memory culture of the period.

KEYWORDS:

• Napoleon
• French history
• nationalism
• nineteenth century
• antiquarians
• folklore

Introduction

In the summer of 1808, a group of men gathered on the Place des Invalides in Paris. They formed two groups, separated by a carefully measured distance, and began shouting at each other. A pause, an adjustment to the distance between the groups, and the ritual began again. The author of this strange scene was Antoine Mongez, administrateur des monnaies, antiquarian and member of the Institut national. Its purpose was to test a seemingly incidental passage in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, in which the author describes how his erstwhile enemies were able to communicate news of an attack in Cenabum (now Orléans) to the territory of the Averni in the present-day Auvergne by placing a string of lookouts to pass on the news orally.¹ Mongez found Caesar must have been mistaken, for the cries of his companions became indiscernible at a distance of just 97 metres, which would have required the Gauls to station an improbably large number of men across the countryside.

Mongez’s experiment reflected a series of issues in French historical practice during the period that are the central concern of this article. Mongez’s transformation of the Place des Invalides from esplanade to historical laboratory was a response to a central difficulty in historical writing on the Gallic origins of France: how could the history of the Celtic peoples of Gaul, who had left no written records of their own, be understood without recourse to the inevitably partial works of their Greek and Roman adversaries? This was precisely the issue confronted by members of the Académie celtique, founded in 1804 just a few years before Mongez’s experiment. Like Mongez, they saw little reason to accept the observations of Greek and Roman authors at face value, and like Mongez they sought other sources of evidence to explore the mores, beliefs and practices of the Ancient Gauls. For the Académie celtique, the most important evidence was to be found in the ‘Celtic’ megaliths of the French countryside, but also the traditions, customs, beliefs and language of the population of rural France. This folk culture was conceptualized as a remnant of the Celtic past, and its collection and study could be used to write the history of Gallic France.

The principal argument presented in this article is that the collecting practices undertaken by the members of the Académie celtique, and especially their interest in folklore and popular religion, can be best understood when set alongside the manifest interest of some key members in Druidism. Classical writers, Caesar perhaps most famously, had accused the Druids of human sacrifice and described the ancient Celts as uncivilized and barbaric.² Understood as remnants of Druidism, the popular culture and religion of the French peasantry offered, for some members of the Académie at least, the chance to rehabilitate the reputations of the ancient Celts and their Druids.

This focus on the Druidic interests of the Académie, it will be argued, offers important insight into the intersecting practices of history making and antiquarian folklore collection in Napoleonic France. There is a tendency in some scholarship to instrumentalize folkloric and historical work as a tool of politics, focusing on the invention of national or regional identities or the legitimation of particular political projects.³ This is doubly the case for the politics of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, where nationalism appears such an obvious subject of analysis. Contemporary historical interest can be parsed for usefulness or otherwise in state propaganda.⁴ Eighteenth-century linguistics can be understood as a cypher for Revolutionary anxieties about political disunity.⁵ When French elites wrote about their country and co-citizens it is inevitably understood through the prism of cultural imperialism.⁶ None of this is unjustified. The period was one of fundamental discussions about the role of the state, the nature of politics and the limits of the nation. Figures like the Abbé Grégoire did call for the destruction of the local languages spoken by the majority of the French peasants, and the cultural unification of the country. Napoleonic prefects did tour their departments, writing ethnographic tableaux of the population and noting the works of improvement that were needed.⁷ Even if some historical work has emphasized the complexity of this process, highlighting local attachments and important dynamics of negotiation between regional and national spheres of action that shaped nation-building projects, it was clear that such projects influenced contemporaries in important ways.⁸

The work of the Académie is often located in precisely these modernizing narratives. Anne-Marie Thiesse has pointed to the obsession with France’s lost Celtic past as an example of the early nineteenth-century quest for national ancestors.⁹ For Mona Ozouf, the Académie’s work reflected a centralizing discourse of national regeneration that emerged from the Revolution.¹⁰ For Jean-Yves Guiomar, the Celtic interests of the Académie played a crucial role in constructing a distinctive ‘Breton’ historiography, by connecting the province to broader historical narratives.¹¹ Within the disciplinary memory of Folklore studies and ethnography the Académie has been viewed as a forerunner of modern scholarly practices.¹²

Recent scholarship has offered a more complex reading of the interplay between historical scholarship and these modernizing and nationalizing processes. In a significant recent study of French historical writing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Matthew D’Auria has argued that the period was decisive in the construction of a French national historical narrative, principally thanks to a gradual consensus that identified the Gauls as the ancestors of the French nation. For D’Auria, this process needs to be understood in relation to the intellectual, cultural and scholarly concerns, as well as the political agendas, that helped shape historical texts and their reception.¹³ In a similar vein, Ian Stewart’s recent re-appraisal of the Académie celtique has emphasized continuities with antiquarian linguistics of the eighteenth century, especially in the etymological practice of its permanent secretary, Éloi Johanneau.¹⁴

As I argue, focusing on the Druidic interests of the Académie celtique offers a fuller understanding of their contribution to the history-making practices of the Napoleonic period. The emphasis on religion, that of the Druids and of contemporary French peasants, reveals just how central this issue was to concepts of social and political order. The importance of the Catholic Church in French politics and society before the Revolution is difficult to exaggerate, and the experience of the revolutionary decade had made the religious question a cardinal issue in Napoleonic politics. In this context, the interest of the Académie celtique in the religion of the Druids made their work controversial, not least as some members constructed an image of them as enlightened and deists, while others parsed contemporary Christian culture for its pagan roots.

This Druidic interest offers insight into another frequently noted characteristic of the Académie celtique: its marginality as an intellectual endeavour. The Académie suffered from disinterest amongst the Parisian literary classes, and ultimately became something of a laughingstock before its reorganization as the Société des antiquaires, less than a decade after its opening. This marginality is itself of historical interest since it reveals the complexities of history-making during the period. On the face of it, the Académie was very much of its time, offering a national-origins myth that would go on to fill the first chapters of Ernest Lavisse’s famous history textbooks.¹⁵ The construction of the French countryside as a space of romantic exploration and encounters with the sublime, as well as the construction of popular culture and folklore as cultural heritage, both evident in the work of the Académie, reflected broader trends in European culture. While some criticism of the Académie’s work was really little more than the mockery of antiquarian discourse in general, other writers reserved their scorn more particularly for the vision of the Celts and Druids as deist philosophers who founded European civilization that was propounded by some members. This argument had religious dimensions, as the members insisted on the Druidic origins of popular religion and argued that the Catholic Church had merely ornamented Druidic traditions with saints’ lives and Christian ceremony. Far from offering a unifying lieu de mémoire for French nation-building projects, the Académie celtique reveals the contested nature of the Celtic past during the period, as well as the centrality of Catholicism in contemporary discussions of the apparent irrationality of France’s rural population.

This article will explore the complexities of these positions, in particular by examining the religious and deistic aspects of the Académie’s project and demonstrating the connections between these views and the collecting practices that they undertook. It will begin with an examination of the Antiquarian practices undertaken by members of the Académie, before focusing on the vision of the Celts expressed in the writings of members, and finally the reception that the Académie’s publications received in the Parisian press.

The Académie celtique and the production of historical knowledge

The Académie celtique was founded by a number of scholars who previously associated with La Tour d’Auvergne and the Breton circle in Paris.¹⁶ Foremost amongst these figures were Jacques Cambry, the former prefect of the Oise who was the Académie’s first president, Éloi Johanneau, the perpetual secretary, the former diplomat Michel-Ange Bernard Mangourit,and Alexandre Lenoir, the director of the Musée des monuments français. They were joined on the membership list by 86 resident members, 132 non-resident members, 31 foreign members and 67 associated correspondents. The overarching aim was the rediscovery of France’s Celtic past, which was framed as a patriotic duty. As one member claimed, ‘amongst the diverse organizations consecrated to letters and to the arts, we cannot deny that if there is one that is essentially patriotic and national, it would be the one known under the name Académie celtique’.¹⁷ This reflected a broader trend of European intellectual endeavour whereby the techniques of antiquarian study, notably textual scholarship, travel literature and the collection of popular culture, served to define and illustrate the nation by laying claim to a glorious past.¹⁸

The members of the Académie celtique, in pursuing the history of France’s Celtic past beyond classical writings, sought evidence from archaeology and from the popular culture of France’s rural population. This was collected through antiquarian journeys, whereby the intrepid scholar would launch themself into the rural wilds of provincial France in search of the vestiges of the ancient past. The published writings of the Académie contain numerous dissertations on dolmens and menhirs discovered across the French countryside during just such voyages and scrutinized for clues about the Druidic religion.

Collecting empirical observations about historical relics required a network of informants across the country. The idea of establishing a national society for the study of France’s ancient past was an example of the process of centralization reflected in the establishment of nationwide institutional structures across fields of intellectual endeavour, as described by Laurence Brockliss and embodied in the Institut national and École normale.¹⁹ The provincial network that served these experts at the centre comprised a mixture of local enthusiasts and state officials, reflecting the intertwining of administrative functions and provincial scholarly life during the period. No fewer than 11 serving prefects appeared in the Académie’s membership list. They were joined by sub-prefects, mayors, tax inspectors and judges, as well as local antiquaries, librarians and lycée teachers.

The Académie’s network underscored the important role of local officials in the production of ethnographic and antiquarian knowledge. The Académie’s questionnaire on popular customs was circulated amongst departmental prefects, in the hope that they would facilitate its distribution to local scholars.²⁰ Members of the Académie ‘on mission’ in the provinces in search of antiquities would often arm themselves with letters of introduction from the prefect, enabling them to obtain access to archives and the cooperation of local mayors and sub-prefects.²¹ Local officials, regardless of their personal interests in the subject, saw it as their patriotic duty to support antiquarian and other intellectual endeavour as part of a post-revolutionary effort to rebuild the cultural institutions of the country. It was not uncommon for prefects or their aides composing departmental statistics to include a discussion of local antiquities and monuments. Ferdinand Bodmann’s work on the Rhenish department of Mont-Tonnerre even referenced the work of the Académie’s founder, Jacques Cambry, in his description of a megalithic dolmen near Annweiler.²² Other collaborators were identified through personal networks, with family members and acquaintances commonly nominated for membership. Members of the Académie also made converts while themselves travelling in the French provinces. Johanneau spent 14 months travelling in the Loire Valley and Normandy, and whilst travelling recommended a several local antiquarians for membership in the Académie.²³

A number of motivations drove these men into the countryside on the trail of Celtic antiquity. For some the benefits were personal in nature. Officials, for example, might curry the favour of the local prefect, or demonstrate their zeal for the regeneration of the nation’s culture, while the network also offered the opportunity for the exchange of favours, which were an important lubricant of scholarly collaboration. The archaeologist Alexandre Dumège sought a recommendation from Johanneau for a friend for a judicial post in Toulouse. The individual was doubly recommendable, for his legal acumen and because he was interested ‘in the glory of the ancient Celts’, and, in return, Dumège would ‘be of use to you in these countries if the occasion ever presented itself’.²⁴ Another member claimed he was unable to meet the subscription cost for the Académie’s journal, but sent on an essay ‘in recompense’.²⁵

Local patriotism was also important for the Académie’s collaborators. It was considered natural for Johanneau, during his own antiquarian voyage, to focus his efforts on the department of the Loire-et-Cher, since he ‘owed this preference to his country of birth’.²⁶ Jean-Marie Badouin de Maisonblanche, a native of Châteaulaudren in lower Brittany, explained that his own work on Lannion was a service to his ‘adoptive pays’. His reason for undertaking the study was ‘that Armorica, my fatherland, that the Armoricans, my fellow citizens, would be better understood’.²⁷ These sentiments could shade into nostalgia. Claude Le Coz, the Breton-born bishop of Besançon, explained his enthusiasm for the history of Britany: ‘It is above all at my age that the heart carries itself towards one’s country of birth. It seems that we would wish to end only in the same place where we began.’²⁸ Similarly, Claude-François-Étienne Dupin, the Lorrainer Prefect of the Deux-Sèvres, wrote a letter on the tradition of processional Dragons in his home town of Metz in order ‘to have the chance to discuss a country which is dear to me, and to recall a few memories of my childhood’.²⁹

Such sentiments demonstrate the importance of local attachments even for state officials during the period. Yet for many antiquarians, enthusiasm and enjoyment melded with the political or patriotic dimensions of the activity. Louis-Marie Révellière-Lépeaux explained that ‘during the limited leisure that my affairs have left me, I undertook some research relative to Druidic monuments’.³⁰ Bridel, a Swiss pastor, claimed that he had ‘consecrated, up to now, the little spare time that my occupations, which are very numerous, leave me, to the study of my patrie and to researching our Swiss antiquities’.³¹ Richard of the Vosges, who would go on to publish a number of folklore collections on Lorraine, explained that he had an ‘established taste for this study, which has been for the past five years the sweetest charm of my life’.³²

Some did underscore the hardships of the antiquarian voyage. Alexandre Dumège talked of the ‘long and arduous’ journey he had taken across the Haute-Garonne in search of antiquities at the behest of the department’s prefect.³³ During his travels, Éloi Johanneau complained bitterly about the conditions he endured and the impact they had on his health, even though the Académie would be astonished with his findings. ‘My travels’, he wrote, ‘exhaust me, and I suffer more with my chest than in Paris. I have truly alarming breathing difficulties sometimes.’ Yet Johanneau was not about to let ill health or even death interfere with his discovery of France’s Celtic past:

Nothing can stop my zeal for the research of the Académie and if I die the only favour I ask is to be buried in the most beautiful and immense tombelle in all of the Sologne, that of Renaud-Tombant, situated between Cléri [Saint André] and Mézières.³⁴

The travelling antiquarian may have faced hardships, but he did not have to face them alone, and the opportunity for male sociability ranked alongside local patriotism and an enthusiasm for antiquities in contributing to the appeal of the antiquarian voyage. Thus Alexandre de Noual de la Houssaye described an excursion to the commune of Corseul, a commune in the Côtes-du-Nord about 10 km west of Dinan known for its Roman ruins, with two friends, De Noual du Plessis and Benjamin Delaunay, both regional administrators and members of the Académie celtique.³⁵ The mayor of Dreux explored the cellars of the commune’s castle with a group of friends.³⁶ Johanneau travelled to a dolmen near Tours with a young writer named Boulai, introduced to him by Louis-Marie Révellière-Lépeaux, Boulai’s godfather.³⁷ Révellière-Lépeaux himself was similarly accompanied by his two friends Pilastre and Leclerc on his visit to monuments in the Maine-et-Loire.³⁸

The members of the Académie romanticized the practice of travelling, imbuing rural France with the allure of an unknown country, where discoveries of the past were possible for the informed lover of antiquities. As Rallier wrote of his explorations in the Ile-et-Villaine, ‘forests are perhaps the first books that the connoisseur of antiquities and above all those who desire to enrich the history of the Celts with some new observations’, and most importantly, they were right on the French antiquarian’s doorstep.³⁹ The lure of such sites was clear from Noual de la Houssaye’s discussion of a megalith called the Fairy Rock in the department of the Ile-et-Villaine. This rock was ‘visited endlessly in the good season, by the inhabitants of the country and by foreigners, it excites the admiration of some, the astonishment of others’.⁴⁰ Even a humble ‘promenade’ could offer inspiration, becoming a voyage of discovery in its own right. Révellière-Lépeaux, for example, railed against the tendency of rural dwellers to dismantle ruins and use the materials for other purposes. The problem was that unlike the ‘enlightened man’, who considered them a ‘precious ornament’, the peasantry had no idea of their true value. This was because ‘on promenades and on voyages’ they could conduct the thinker ‘towards the most profound meditations, furnishing to the scholar the material for the most learned research, inspiring in fecund imaginations, the most attractive systems and the most pleasant fictions, and finally, presenting picturesque effects to the man of taste’.⁴¹ The slippage here between the ‘voyage’ and the walk or ‘promenade’ was telling, as was the appeal to the aesthetic taste of the picturesque. Antiquities could inspire flights of enlightenment and imagination in the educated man of taste on even a limited and leisurely excursion.

The thrill of discovery and the picturesque appeal of travelling was expressed by many members of the Académie. The sight of an ancient ruin or monument had the capacity to inspire a kind of historical revelry in the antiquarian traveller. Jacques-Antoine Dulaure described his own response to finding a monument in the commune of La Tombe in the department of the Seine-et-Marne, not far from Paris: ‘at the sight of this monument, my imagination transported itself to the most distant times; everything that surrounded me recounted the objects consecrated to the Druidic religion’.⁴² Éloi Johanneau expressed a similar enthusiasm on his encounter with a dolmen near Tours. In his telling, he could not stop himself from climbing on top of the monument, from examining it from every angle. In doing so, he found himself

transported in imagination to those distant times, where the majority of peoples who became in turn so famous for their civilization, had no other sanctuary than crude rocks […] I said to myself, like Jacob: it is truly the house of God and the gates of heaven.⁴³

Travelling into rural areas could be an aesthetic, even spiritual experience, but the monumental past and its setting in the French landscape was just one part of what the antiquarian traveller sought; he also went in search of the popular culture, stories and religious beliefs that were understood as vestiges of the ancient past. Collecting these traces in a systematic way was the purpose of the Académie’s celebrated questionnaire. Held up by later folklorists as a model for collecting practice, the questionnaire reflected general efforts to produce systematic ways of gathering ethnographic observations both at home and abroad. The Abbé Grégoire’s enquiry into the patois of France is probably the most famous of these forms of social survey, but not the only one. The departmental statistics of the Directory and Napoleonic periods were governed by Chaptal’s 1801 circular setting out a series of headings (topography, population, Moeurs, agriculture, industry and commerce).⁴⁴ The Société des observateurs de l’homme, later identified as in important progenitor of anthropological thought, also propounded a set of questions elaborated by the Napoleonic administrator Joseph-Marie de Gérando, in his Considerations on the Observations of Savage Peoples.

The common concern was how to make sense of the seemingly irrational. De Gérando claimed a set of questions for the systematic collection of information about non-European societies was necessary because travellers made assumptions about the significance of given cultural practices based on their own. As a result, they unjustly accused other societies of vices – of cruelty, atheism, lawlessness or libertinage – on the basis of a small number of observations that were not set within a broader understanding of the society under consideration.⁴⁵ Travellers in rural France, as much as abroad, encountered practices that in the broadest terms were understood through the paradigms of progress and backwardness. Cambry, for example, lamented the impoverished backwardness of the peasants of the Breton coast, comparing them to the ‘unfortunate inhabitants of the Tierro del Fiego’ and to the ‘Kamchadals eating rotten fish’.⁴⁶ For their part, the members of the Académie were convinced that, with the reforms of the Napoleonic state, and especially the Napoleonic code, the traditions and customs they sought would soon disappear.⁴⁷

The value of these peasant traditions lay in their status as evidence about the distant past, which in turn rested on a vision of rural culture as unchanging. In Johanneau’s words, ‘we will learn […] to consult the people, amongst whom all science is only traditional, whose expressions even are no more than consecrated formulas, since it is proven and demonstrated […] that they are the faithful depositories of ancient traditions’.⁴⁸ The fables, traditions and superstitions of the people, he argued, were disdained because the systematic logic that had underpinned Druidic teaching had been lost. In his words, ‘what we disdain today as popular stories, as coarse monuments, are the precious vestiges of the wisdom of their ancient legislators’.⁴⁹

The influence of James Macpherson and his Ossianic poetry was important here, though the idea that rural dwellers and their culture represented historical artefacts was fairly widespread during the period. The work of the Alsatian philologist Jérémie-Jacques Oberlin illustrates the point. Oberlin, a corresponding member of the Académie, published a study on the French dialect of Ban de la Roche in 1775. This work contained a transcription of several medieval manuscripts, the earliest of which was the famous Oath of Strasbourg, the first written example of the Gallo-Romance language that developed into French. Placing these texts alongside samples of the contemporary patois spoken in Ban de la Roche, Oberlin argued that the dialect was a relic of the Old French spoken in the twelfth century, preserved by farmers who lacked the time to keep up with the ‘purification’ that had produced modern-day French.⁵⁰

The members of the Académie celtique were often hostile towards popular customs and traditions, and at times needed encouragement to pursue such collecting activities. Writing to Alexandre Lenoir in 1803, a military commissar and antiquarian named Siauve discussed various legends surrounding the Merovingian necropolis at Civaux. Siauve was dismissive of the popular traditions that described the origins of these stones, describing them as absurd. The problem was that local legends were miraculous rather than historical in character. As he complained,

what to think of men who, unable to conceive how a village of one hundred hearths could have a collection of 6000 tombstones, had found nothing better than to imagine a miracle made them descend from the heavens at Clovis’ prayer.⁵¹

Lenoir urged Siauve to persist with his collection of the local traditions: ‘Good or bad, they must be collected: these same [peasant traditions] as absurd as they seem are often the best.’⁵² Siauve’s judgment neatly encapsulated the challenge of integrating popular culture into a field of discourse oriented towards the past, and he was not the only member of the Académie who was sometimes disappointed not to find what he was looking for amongst the peasants he encountered. Éloi Johanneau, for example, complained to Alexandre Lenoir that he ‘had great difficulties getting the peasants to discuss his doctrines’, even if ‘with patience and zeal I obtain nearly everything I want’. Part of the problem for Johanneau was the distrust of the locals, who took him either for a treasure hunter, tax collector or government spy: ‘When I take my notes, they imagine that I am writing a report and they plead with me not to name them!’⁵³

This reveals a relationship, between informer and collector, that often remained opaque in the writings of the Académie celtique, becoming explicit only occasionally. In an essay on the traditions and customs of his native Sologne, Thomas-Philippe Légier recounted an exchange with a peasant woman who was presumably his tenant farmer (he referred to her as ‘ma laboureuse’). Légier rebuked her for failing to inform him that another local was stealing from him, and the farmer explained that she was afraid of the culprit, who was an ‘old sorcerer’ and would have cursed her geese. In the end Légier had caught the culprit himself, but ‘the geese were no less dead as a result of the lack of care of my farmer who, to excuse herself, told me while crying, “[the sorcerer] thought it was us who told you about his theft, and to avenge himself he threw a curse on my geese”’. Légier dismissed this as simple superstition; ‘unable to convince these imbeciles’, he exclaimed, ‘one must stay quiet’.⁵⁴ The exchange demonstrates the ambivalence of the antiquarian collector’s relationship to the culture he was studying: it was at once irrational and a vestige of the past.

The anonymity of these informants was a product of how popular culture was understood: as a remnant or ruin of the past rather than part of a living culture. It was the historical character of the customs observed by contemporary rural dwellers that warranted their collection. The Baron de Caila, a Bordelais antiquarian, described his experience of participating in the story telling of a traditional soirée in romanticized terms that resembled Johanneau’s enthusiasm for megaliths:

I discovered amongst these little people, a custom practiced by the Celts, according to Strabon. The oldest recounted that which he learnt from his fathers, all the fables that ignorance and simplicity make credible. I participated in one of these soirées which recalled the first age of the world; I joined these good folk, so that nothing would escape my observations.⁵⁵

This is why the tellers of the stories and singers of songs in the Mémoires published by the Académie were largely invisible. They had no real part in the production of such cultural artefacts: they simply gave expression to the remnants of ancestral beliefs and tales, inherited from the Celts.

Druids, popular religion and the Celtic past

Given that the members of the Académie celtique collected popular culture for its value as a vestige of the culture of the Gauls and their Druids, their beliefs about the Druids merit some attention. Anyone seeking to reconstruct the role of the Druids in ancient Celtic society faces the considerable difficulty of a lack of evidence. As Ronald Hutton has observed, what little first-hand testimony exists was written by Greek or Roman authors with limited knowledge of Druidic practices, good reasons for exaggerating their barbarism, or both.⁵⁶ The one first-hand account that remains is that of Caesar. Most of the Druids’ cardinal traits are established in book 6 of The Gallic Wars; the practice of human sacrifice, their role administering both religious and legal rites, the belief in the immortality of souls, and the practice of eschewing written records in favour of memorizing their teachings in verse.⁵⁷ Yet Caesar had every reason to embellish the excesses of his defeated adversaries in order to justify his ‘civilizing mission’ in Gaul, and may have super-imposed elements drawn from Roman society in order to make Druidic practices comprehensible. Following Hutton’s survey, subsequent authors added to the Druidic mix; for example, the Bards, who spread Druidic teachings in song (Strabo), and the association with oak and mistletoe (Pliny).⁵⁸ However, neither these classical accounts, nor the available archaeological evidence, seem able to offer definitive answers to even basic questions about Druidic beliefs and practices, such as whether they engaged in human sacrifice.⁵⁹

Ancient Gaul and its Druids, therefore, would seem to offer an adaptable material for the construction of national historical narratives, though they enjoyed a somewhat mixed fortune during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. Having overturned a political regime that could make significant claims on dynastic and historical precedent, the Revolutionaries generally reached for classical, and especially Roman, histories in their political rhetoric and symbolism. The use of the Roman Fasces was widespread on government prints and seals, as was the Phrygian cap. The Abbé Sieyès, it is true, did play upon Boulainvilliers’ notion of the French as descendants as two warring nations, the Franks and the Gauls. For Boulainvilliers, hereditary privilege was justified as the rights of conquest, while for Sieyès the destruction of such privilege was an act of liberation.⁶⁰ Yet ancient Gaul, and especially the Druids, were often invoked in a negative fashion during the Revolution, conditioned no doubt by stories of human sacrifice found in classical writing.⁶¹ The judges of the Ancien régime imposing spectacular corporal punishment, counter-revolutionary priests fermenting dissent: all were described as ‘Druids’.⁶²

Under Napoleon, the romanticized martial glory of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry was appealing, as evidenced by Girodet’s Apotheosis of the French Heroes who died for their Fatherland during the Wars of Liberation. Commissioned by Napoleon for the palace at Malmaison, the painting showed Ossian welcoming fallen French military figures of the Revolutionary wars into paradise. Yet Rome remained a more significant source of historical symbolism for the regime, for example in the form of triumphal arches. Moreover, as the regime became a dynastic empire, other forms of symbolism were sought. Napoleon’s coronation was an act of historical bricolage, combining elements of Merovingian and Carolingian ritual with new innovations, and as the influence of the Napoleonic state extended eastwards the empires of the Frankish kings made a more obvious historical touchstone than the Gauls.⁶³

The focus on the Celtic past put the Académie somewhat out of step with the regime’s own historical sensibility, though the focus on Celtic, rather than Gallic, history nonetheless marked an effort to fit the historical narrative to the political moment. After all, Gaul, situated mainly on the territory of the modern French nation-state, has at most other times offered up more obvious material for building a common national past than the much wider Celtic world. In the eighteenth century, when the Comte de Caylus included megaliths in his antiquarian studies he referred to them as ‘Gallic’, not ‘Celtic’, and in 1828, when Amédée Theirry set out to write about the ancestors of ‘nineteen twentieths of us’, he employed the term Gaul, not Celt.⁶⁴ This doubtless reflected an interest in Celtic revivalism sparked by Macpherson’s Ossian, though as it manifested itself in the writings of the Académie it meant placing the Gauls at the head of vast Celtic empire.⁶⁵ This view was articulated by Joseph Lavallée, when he suggested that Gaul was the ‘mother country’ of the Celts, who established colonies across the ancient world, spreading their language and culture. The Frankish invasion accordingly was little more than the homecoming of one of these Celtic colonies, and the shared Celtic heritage might form a useful historical precedent for the current French Empire.⁶⁶ These Napoleonic parallels were clearly drawn by Éloi Johanneau at the Académie’s first session. In his speech, Johanneau criticized the obsession with Greek and Roman civilization, arguing that it was ‘finally time to consider the language and the antiquities of the no less famous peoples from whom we descend, of the happy land and of the vast empire that we inhabit’.⁶⁷ As he argued, ‘almost all the peoples of Europe are the descendants of the Celts […] reunited once more, they almost all form, again today, a single and great family under the same Federal government’.⁶⁸

For some members at least, the driving force of this interest in the Celtic past went beyond a simple quest for glorious national ancestors. It rested on the belief that the Druids had created a uniquely enlightened religion as the basis of Celtic society, and that the vestiges of this religion could still be uncovered in popular beliefs and oral traditions. This programme was set out in the work of the founding president of the Académie, Jacques Cambry. According to Cambry, the Druids were the classical world’s first philosophes, employing religious teachings to promote a rational social order based on universal principles in the same way as the legislators of the Revolutionary period might have used the law.⁶⁹ As he wrote in his 1805 work on Celtic monuments, ‘all the precepts of the Druids were based on utility, on the happiness of men’.⁷⁰ In this telling, the Druids were natural scientists and philosophers, spreading themselves out across Gaul to pursue their studies. They believed in a single supreme deity and the immortality of the soul, though far from practising the kind of Patriarchal Christianity that William Stukeley insisted upon, Cambry’s druids were Deists.⁷¹ Their religious and moral teachings were derived from their assiduous study of nature, and then recorded in verse and disseminated to the people by the Bards.⁷²

This explained Cambry’s interest in peasant ‘superstitions’, as he called them. They contained vestiges of the teachings of the Bards and studying them could permit the reconstruction of the Druidic religion. These beliefs were, however, corrupted, not least by the Catholic Church. Perhaps unsurprisingly from an author who construed the Druids as a college of Deist philosophes, a strand of anticlericalism can be detected in Cambry’s arguments. He was certainly hostile to the kind of baroque piety that he felt had characterized Catholic practice in Brittany before the Revolution. As he claimed of the religion of the Breton people:

The theocratic government of the Druids was replaced by the government of Catholic priests, and the growth of their absurdities could not take place with greater success than amongst these unfortunate people [… .] The voice of philosophy has never penetrated these countries, and the pardons and missions extinguish all but the smallest glint of enlightenment and of good sense.⁷³

The ideas of the Druids remained buried beneath Catholic practice, in the guise of saints and their miracles which were remnants of Bardic verses intended originally as moral teachings.⁷⁴ What resulted was a system without logic, replete with the ‘absurdities’ Cambry decried.

Perhaps the most significant manifestation of this Druidic interest in the work of the Académie celtique emerged from the interpretation of the folklore that they collected. The logic of this collecting activity rested on the assumption that popular stories, songs, customs, traditions and beliefs were very often vestiges of Druidic or Bardic teachings. As the prospectus, almost certainly penned by Johanneau, suggested, the central aim of the Académie was to ‘untangle Druidism from Christianity and find the origins of religious beliefs, fables and popular usages’.⁷⁵ Popular culture, therefore, found its origins in Druidism, and popular superstition arose because the allegories and symbolism of the different myths and practices had become obscured over time.

Many members of the Académie asserted that the basis of popular beliefs were druidic allegories drawn from nature, and especially from astronomical observation, with Christian teachings and beliefs calqued upon them. Claude-Xavier Girault argued that the Christian festive calendar was appropriated from the Celtic calendar, which was derived from astronomical movements.⁷⁶ Alexandre Lenoir similarly argued in his article on Graoully, the processional Dragon of Metz that made an appearance on Rogation Day parades, that legendary dragons, such as the Graoully slain by Saint Clément, but also those slain by Saint George and Saint Michel, were derived from Druidic solar allegories. According to Lenoir, ‘these figures, what they are, and whatever names they carry, represent the figurative victory of light over darkness’.⁷⁷ As Lenoir explained, such religious myths ‘are quite simply, if we separate them from their allegorical envelopes, the triumph of virtue over vice. It is recognized […] that this was the manner in which the ancients indoctrinated the people in morality.’⁷⁸ It was for the members of the Académie to separate the corrupted superstitions from the moral code of Druidism that underlay it.

The extent to which the other members of the Académie shared Cambry’s interest in the Druids, and ideas about them, can be judged from the Académie’s published work and minute book. The prospectus that accompanied the Académie’s published Mémoires promised readers that the articles contained within would seek to ‘collect the code of laws of the Celts and the Druids, […] their religion and their mythology’.⁷⁹ The Académie’s minute book also shows the topic was raised with some frequency by the central members of the Académie. Cambry delivered a dissertation on the Druids and the Bards in March 1805, ‘roundly applauded’ by the membership according to the minutes.⁸⁰ Joseph Lavallée elevated them to the status of ‘founders of morality, and in consequence the creators of social order’, claiming that their religion formed the basis of ‘the edifice of social virtues, bravery, and attachment to the fatherland’.⁸¹ Perhaps most significantly in terms of the lasting influence of Cambry on the work of the Académie, Éloi Johanneau presented a dissertation in May 1806 defending the Druids from accusations of human sacrifice, claiming this was a calumny invented by the Romans and perpetuated by Christians as part of their persecution of the Druidic religion.⁸²

Other members of the Académie certainly did not subscribe to every part of the schema propounded by figures such as Cambry, Johanneau and Lavallée. Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, for example, argued that Druidic religion and laws had survived the Romans and the Frankish invasions, but drawing heavily on Caesar held that the Romans had ended the practice of human sacrifice.⁸³ Another member, a doctor from Blois, described a series of dolmen as ‘Druidic altars’, which seemed to confirm that the Druids had practised sacrifices in the area.⁸⁴ The prominent scholar and Deist, the comte de Volney, observed at one meeting that the reality of human sacrifice under the Druids should not be denied since, he claimed, this was a widespread practice in the ancient world.⁸⁵ Yet the interest in Druidism more generally was palpable. The Académie received and discussed letters and essays on ‘Druidic’ temples, altars and festivals from many different correspondents.⁸⁶ Its publications include frequent discussions of the Druids and their religion. Louis-Marie Révellière-Lépeaux wrote on a stone axe and other ‘Druidic’ monuments.⁸⁷ Legonidec described the temple at Lanleff, a Romanesque ruin from the middle ages, as a site dedicated formerly to sun worship.⁸⁸ The senator Denis Lanjuinais speculated upon the ancient role of female Druids amongst the Gauls.⁸⁹ These examples could be multiplied, but serve to illustrate the point: Druidism was a significant area of interest for the members of the Académie celtique. This was certainly true for important members, like Cambry the first president, Éloi Johanneau, the perpetual secretary, and Alexandre Lenoir, another president who hosted the Académie at his Musée des monuments français.

This returns us to Cambry’s interpretation of the Druids as Deistic philosophers. For some members of the Académie, reflecting on the religion of Ancient Gaul led them to expressions of a more or less explicit anti-clericalism. Louis-Marie de la Révellière-Lépeaux suggested in his work on the Vendée that the priesthood were keen to embellish superstition, and convince their gullible parishioners that only their benedictions guaranteed safety from werewolves, vampires and other spectres of fertile imaginations.⁹⁰ This was perhaps unsurprising in the case of Révellière-Lépeaux, who was the director of the deistic Theophilanthropic church during the 1790s. Yet the work of the Académie also came at a time of great uncertainty over Napoleon’s post-revolutionary religious settlement with the Church. Several years of tension culminated, in 1809, with the formal annexation of Rome, the excommunication of Napoleon and his administrators, and the arrest and imprisonment of the Pope himself.⁹¹ It may well be that an interest in, or admiration for, the Celts and their Druids reflected a genuine hope for a more radical religious settlement. For their conservative critics, it certainly marked them as unorthodox and dangerous.

The reception and significance of the Académie celtique

The Académie celtique was a short-lived project. It collapsed in 1813 and was reformed as the Société des antiquaries de France. The change in name marked a change in the intellectual project. As explained in the first edition of their journal, ‘the leading members [of the Académie celtique] conceived a system on the Celts more seductive than solid.’⁹² To judge by the Académie’s reception in the press, the emphasis on writing the history of the Celts and Druids was central to how its work was understood.

One of the Académie’s most acerbic critics was Conrad Malte-Brun, the geographer and linguist who coined the term Indo-Germanic in 1810. In a series of articles in the Journal de l’Empire, Malte-Brun claimed the Académie failed to proceed in a scientific manner, and ignored the findings of scholars from other nations:

If occasionally they deign to cast an eye on the research of antiquarians from the rest of learned Europe, it was to teach these scholars that all they had believed to be Greek, Roman, Pelasgic, Gothic, Slavic etc., were Celtic.⁹³

Worse than this, the Académie risked turning the public against historical studies in general. Malte-Brun decried them as ‘Celtomaniacs’ and ‘Druidomaniacs’, lamenting how the ordinary reader would take from these debates only the conclusion that antiquarian study was little more than a ‘vain game of imagination’.⁹⁴

Others drew the same conclusion and the Académie became something of a laughingstock in the Parisian press. In one satirical piece which saw antiquarians deep in debate over Dick Whittington’s cat there appeared an sardonic aside to the reader, insisting that ‘one must refrain from thinking that the editor, in collecting this fragment, would have intended to allude to the respectable Académie celtique which occupies itself, as we know, only with useful research’.⁹⁵ Another claimed after a discussion of the patois spoken by Limousin and Auvergnat builders in Paris, that the Académie celtique whose ‘profound research has taught us many more or less useless things’ was currently working on a grammar and dictionary ‘with the aid of which it will prove by A + B x C, that the jargon of the Limousin and Auvergants takes its origin from Bas-Breton, which was the language that Adam and Eve spoke in the garden of Eden’.⁹⁶ The Gazette de France sarcastically reported that le Maout’s gastronomic and medicinal product, le moutarde celtique, ‘had already surpassed in renown the Académie of the same name’.⁹⁷

This is not to say that the Académie had no defenders in Parisian literary circles. The supportive René Tourlet at the Moniteur universel published extracts and accounts of the Académie’s work throughout the period, commenting on its ‘remarkable interest and importance’.⁹⁸ Some reviewers of Cambry’s 1805 book on Celtic monuments also clearly shared his enthusiasm. One wrote approvingly that the ‘greatest riches of the ancient world belonged exclusively to our land’, and that the Druids, these ‘philosopher-magistrates’ had too long been calumniated by foreigners and ‘fanatic historians’. As he exhorted his readers, ‘we will revive the name and the glory of our ancient forebears.’⁹⁹ Another reviewer of the same work exclaimed, ‘how much the glory due to our ancestors and buried by the veil of time redounds on us!’ The trope of patriotic rural exploration was also evident, as the author expressed his hope that Cambry’s book would ‘inspire [Frenchmen] to travel and to admire their country’.¹⁰⁰

Despite these more positive readings, even the Académie’s supporters admitted its poor reputation.¹⁰¹ Yet the Académie’s more substantive critics, rather than the witticisms of the Parisian press, tell us most about the position of its work in relation to contemporary intellectual and cultural trends, and here some common patterns emerge. The criticisms levelled by the pro-royalist Étienne Jondot echoed those of Malte-Brun. In one typical review published in the Gazette de France in 1810, Jondot singled out Éloi Johanneau’s etymological work as particularly implausible, as well as the implicit regionalist sympathies of Breton language enthusiasts who, he suggested, would be better served perfecting their knowledge of the national tongue.¹⁰² Jondot’s opposition to the Académie also had a clear religious dimension, and again like Malte-Brun, he criticized the Académie for its treatment of Druidism and its relationship to Christianity. Discussing the antiquities surrounding Autun, Jondot identified a supposed Druidic temple where human victims were burnt. According to Jondot, ‘only the Académie celtique would dare exalt the purported science’ of these ‘atrocious priests’, while it was ‘Christianity, which put a stop to their abominable sacrifices, [and] which overturned their sacrilegious altars’.¹⁰³

Other writers struck a similar tone. J.B.B. Roquefort, another Royalist who was elected a member of the Académie in 1809, was clearly alienated from the project by 1813, when he reviewed a work by another member, describing the author as ‘one of the small number of reputable scholars affiliated with the famous Académie celtique, which took the Druids and their august ceremonies under its immediate protection’.¹⁰⁴ In a similar manner, George Bernard Depping, writing in the Annales des Voyages, identified the Académie’s treatment of religious history as a grave error. He criticized the work of members such as Alexandre Lenoir for claiming that Christian religious ceremonies were adapted from those of the Druids. As Depping wrote, ‘it would be very unfortunate if the work of the Académie celtique ended only in placing our religion below those of the barbarian peoples of Antiquity, and in viewing the heads of the church as imitators of idolatry’.¹⁰⁵ The Vicar-General of the diocese of Quimper felt similarly. He expressed his outrage that his name appeared on the academy’s membership list despite having sent back their diplôme. ‘I am not one of you’, he railed, ‘I am a Catholic priest, and I will die a Catholic priest. I detest your principles.’¹⁰⁶ This was a concern expressed by some members of the Académie themselves, and a number even objected to the reading of articles considered ‘contrary to the Catholic faith’, with the Académie insisting upon its commitment to freedom of expression of religious beliefs in response.¹⁰⁷ Others suggested dropping celtique from group’s title entirely in favour of what they hoped would be the more acceptable ‘antiquités françaises’.¹⁰⁸

How should we interpret the work of the Académie celtique? In many ways it reflected broader narratives of nation-building, revealing a moment in which the rural peripheries became a fertile site for the national historical imaginaries of French elites, and it was surely no coincidence that the dynamic between urban and rural France was such a crucial political and social factor during the period. The revolutionaries had exalted images of the peasantry as a symbol of the third estate and by extension the French nation in 1789. Yet as the work of figures like the Abbé Grégoire shows, rural peripheries could also be viewed as spaces from which threatening cultural difference and political disunity could flow. The Napoleonic departmental statistics similarly constructed a vision of rural areas and their populations as objects to be described and administered. For antiquarians, rural areas were imaginative spaces, where one could meditate on the fragments and ruins of past national glories, but they were also spaces of backwardness, of irrational superstitions and hidebound tradition. That the members of the Académie looked back to the religion of the Druids to explain the popular religious beliefs and folklore they collected says much about how they viewed rural dwellers, and the relationship between rural society and religion. The former, it seemed, were static, unchanging repositories of culture, while the latter was devised by educated elites who used it to govern. In this respect, they perhaps reflected Napoleon’s own understanding of religion and society.

Yet if antiquarian and folklore collecting was part of a process of nationalization, whereby the exploration of the nation’s internal peripheries served to construct national identities, then the work of the Académie celtique demonstrates that such activities were often complex and contested. For many members of the Académie it was about enthusiasm of various shades- for a pastime, for the exploration of local sites, and for at least some, a seductive and sometimes religiously subversive version of the Celts and their Druids. The Académie cannot be understood just as an effort to find a usable Celtic past for the Napoleonic regime or part of the process of creating a Gallic national origins myth. Perhaps above all, as their critics in the Parisian press make clear, the Académie’s historical and folkloric scholarship was entwined with the religious disputes that had wracked France during the Revolution, and which continued to weigh heavily under Napoleon.

Acknowledgements

Versions of this paper were presented at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of French History and at the BEROSE seminar at the CNRS in Paris. I would like to thank the audiences at these events, Prof. David Hopkin at the University of Oxford, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stewart McCain

Stewart McCain is Senior Lecturer and Programme Director in History at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. He is particularly interested in questions related to cultural diversity, national identity and the state in French and European History of the nineteenth century. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. David Hopkin and Prof. Mike Broers, and taught at the University of Winchester and Aston University before joining St Mary’s in 2016. His 2018 monograph, The Language Question under Napoleon, explores how Napoleonic institutions negotiated linguistic diversity, and he has also published work in French History and History Today.

Notes

1. De Barral, “Lettre,” 225. For the passage in question see book 7, chapter 3 of the Gallic Wars; Caesar, Hammond (trans) and Hirtius, The Gallic Wars, 143.

2. For a comprehensive discussion of the textual and archaeological evidence concerning the Druids see Hutton, Blood, 1–48.

3. Hopkin, “Folklore”; Gildea, The Past; Nora, “Memory.”

4. Jourdan, “Napoleon and History.”

5. Rosenfeld, Revolution in Language.

6. Broers, Napoleonic Empire.

7. Bourguet, Déchiffrer; McCain, Language, 27–64.

8. Bell, “Nation-Building”; McCain, “Speaking”; Deseure, “Faces.”

9. Thiesse, Création, 50–9.

10. Ozouf, L’école de la France: Essais sur la Révolution, l’utopie et l’enseignement.

11. Guiomar, Bretonisme, 28.

12. Belmont, “l’Académie”; Senn, “Folklore.”

13. D’Auria, Shaping, 23–4.

14. Stewart, “Language.” Johanneau sought novel etymologies by mining the extant Celtic languages, especially Breton, for the roots of contemporary words. This practice, like that of earlier antiquarians, drew on superficial similarities between individual words, combined with sometimes tenuous rationalizations from metaphor or loose connections in meaning, and also tended to proceed from the assumption that the true root of a word was usually Celtic. As such, it lacked the rigour of the more systematic historical linguistics that was emerging around this time in the work of Jones, Schlegel, Bopp, Rask and Grimm. At times, Johanneau would refer to this as the ‘science’ of etymology, and yet, curiously, also presented it in the manner of a learned diversion. See Johanneau, “Questions.”

15. Bourdon, Forge gauloise.

16. Guiomar, “La Révolution”; de la Tour d'Auvergne, Origines.

17. De Breuvery, “Recherches,” 334.

18. Leersen, National Thought.

19. Brockliss, Calvet’s Web, 368.

20. Mangourit, “Série de questions,” 72.

21. Pardessus, “Notice,” 380–1.

22. Bodmann, Annuaire, 118.

23. Procès-verbaux des séances de l’académie celtique, 36AS/3, September 19, 1806, Société des Antiquaires fonds, Archives nationales, Paris.

24. Correspondence from Dumège to Johanneau, July 28, 1812, 36AS/66, Société des Antiquaires fonds, Archives nationales, Paris.

25. Correspondence from Decampe to Johanneau, August 2, 1810, 36AS/65, Société des Antiquaires fonds, Archives nationales, Paris.

26. Pardessus, “Notice,” 318.

27. Baudouin de Maisonblanche, “Recherches,” 201.

28. Le Coz, “Lettre,” 469.

29. Dupin, “Lettre,” 481.

30. Révllière-Lépaux, “Notice,” 169.

31. Bridel, “Lettre,” 286.

32. Richard, “Lettre,” 177.

33. Dumège, “Notice,” 386.

34. Correspondance of Éloi Johannaeu to Alexandre Lenoir, September 4, 1806, Papers of Alexandre Lenoir, Additional Manuscripts 19,564, British Library, London.

35. de Noual de la Houssaye “Dissertation,” 247.

36. Conchin, “Notice.”

37. Johanneau, “Notice,” 397.

38. Révellière-Lépeaux, “Notice,” 169.

39. Rallier, “Mémoire,” 64.

40. Noual de la Houssaye, “Mémoires,” 371.

41. Révellière-Lépeaux, “Extrait,” 460.

42. Dulaure, “Archéographie,” 454.

43. Johanneau, “Notice,” 397–8.

44. Bourguet, Déchiffrer, 67–70.

45. de Gérando, Considérations, 9.

46. Cambry, Voyage, 158.

47. Mangourit, “Série des questions,” 74.

48. Johanneau, “Discours,” 57–8.

49. Johanneau, “Discours,” 62–3.

50. Oberlin, Essai, 2.

51. Correspondence of Siauve to Alexandre Lenoir, 14 Vendémiaire an XII (7 October 1803), Papers of Alexandre Lenoir, Additional Manuscripts 19,564, British Library, London.

52. Correspondence of Alexandre Lenoir to Siauve, 22 Brumaire year XII (14 November 1803), Papers of Alexandre Lenoir, Additional Manuscripts 19,564, British Library, London.

53. Correspondence of Éloi Johanneau to Alexandre Lenoir, 4 September 1806, Papers of Alexandre Lenoir, Additional Manuscripts 19,564, British Library, London.

54. Légier, “Traditions,” 208–9.

55. De Caila, “Recherches,” 75.

56. Hutton, Blood, 1–48.

57. Caesar, Gallic, 126–7.

58. Hutton, Blood, 6–7.

59. Ibid., 23–8.

60. Pomian, “Franks,” 51–3.

61. Jordan, “Image,” 190.

62. Assemblée nationale, December 11, 1791, Archives Parlementaires, 36 https://sul-philologic.stanford.edu/philologic/archparl/navigate/36/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/22/; Assemblée nationale, May 30, 1791 Archives Parlementaires tome XXVI https://sul-philologic.stanford.edu/philologic/archparl/navigate/26/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/597/?byte=5577354

63. Dwyer, “Citizen.”

64. Thierry, Histoire, ii.

65. On Cambry’s interest in Ossian see Constantine, “Ossian,” 84.

66. Lavallée, “Discours,” 3.

67. Johanneau, “Discours,” 37–8.

68. Ibid., 42.

69. Cambry, Monumens, 150.

70. Ibid., 61.

71. Stukeley, Stonehenge, 2.

72. Cambry, Monumens, 50–1.

73. Ibid., 79.

74. Cambry, Voyage, 41.

75. Johanneau, “Prosectus,” 3.

76. Girault, “Étymologie,” 87.

77. Lenoir, “Mythologie,” 19.

78. Ibid., 19.

79. Johanneau, “Prosectus,” 4.

80. Procès-verbaux des séances de l’académie celtique, 36AS/3, 9 germinal an 13, Société des Antiquaires fonds, Archives nationales, Paris.

81. Lavallée, “Discours,” 13–19.

82. Procès-verbaux des séances de l’académie celtique, 36AS/3, May 19, 1806, Société des Antiquaires fonds, Archives nationales, Paris.

83. Dulaure, “Sénats,” 331.

84. Despranches, “Lettre,” 492.

85. Procès-verbaux des séances de l’académie celtique, 36AS/3, 19 prairial an 13.

86. Procès-verbaux des séances de l’académie celtique, 36AS/3, 30 floréal an 13, 9 prairial an 13, 19 prairial an 13, Société des Antiquaires fonds, Archives nationales, Paris.

87. Révellière-Lépeaux, “Extrait.”

88. Legonidec, “Notice,” 40.

89. Lanjuinais, “Langues,” 328.

90. Revelliere-Lepeaux, “Notice,” 177.

91. Caiani, Kidnap, 132–61

92. Société royale des antiquaires de France, “Préface,” iii.

93. Malte-Brun, “Variétés,” Journal de l’Empire, June 17, 1807. 3–4.

94. Malte-Brun, “Variétés,” Journal de l’Empire, April 20, 1806.

95. Lemazurier, La récolte, 412.

96. Guichard, Parisiana, 87–8.

97. Gazette de France, May 17, 1812.

98. Tourlet, “Sciences,” Gazette nationale, ou le moniteur universel, October 10, 1805.

99. “Archéologie,” Journal des arts, de littérature et de commerce, June 24, 1805, 346.

100. Journal Typographique et bibliographique, August 13, 1805.

101. Journal central des académies et sociétés savantes, January 1810, 29.

102. Jondot, “Histoire et antiquités,” Gazette de France, November 3, 1810, 215–16.

103. Malte-Brun, “Varitétés,” Journal de l’empire, February 6, 1807.

104. Mercure de France, July 17, 1813, 125.

105. Annales des voyages, de la géographie et de l’histoire 10 (1810): 121–2.

106. Journal des arts, des sciences et de la littérature, December 5, 1810.

107. Procès-verbaux des séances de l’académie celtique, 36AS/3, April 29, 1807, Société des Antiquaires fonds, Archives nationales, Paris.

108. Procès-verbaux des séances de l’académie celtique, 36AS/3, December 29, 1806, Société des Antiquaires fonds, Archives nationales, Paris.