The modern Invention of - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

The modern Invention of
Barbarians: Ethnicity and the
Transmission of Form*

ERIC mICHAUD

The writing of history has always been one of the major tools of power. Él
shares with art not only the capacity to depict something that never existed but
also the capacity to bring about the new simply by describing it. Just as there was
no London smog before Turner painted it, the “barbarian invasions” only began to
take up a significant place in the European imaginary after the eighteenth cen-
tury, when a few historians decided to use the idea to political effect in order to
influence the course of history.1 As Hannah Arendt has noted, “The deliberate
denial of factual truth—the ability to lie—and the capacity to change facts—the
ability to act—are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source:
imagination.”2 Thus the myth of the barbarian invasions, based as it was on the
hypothesis of “alternative facts” situated in a distant past, became a political con-
struct powerful enough to change the history of Europe. Al mismo tiempo, fue
the instrument that made possible the entire rewriting of the history of European
cultura, a culture from which, up to that point, the barbarians had, by definition,
been excluded.

For this reason, we can say that the history of art began with the barbarian
invasions. This is not to imply, por supuesto, that the history of art has actually been
written down in an unbroken line since those barbarian or Germanic-led invasions
of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, and still less
does it mean that art had no history before these “great” invasions. It means,
bastante, that a true history of art only became possible after that moment, at the
end of the nineteenth century, when the barbarian invasions came to be seen as
the decisive event allowing the West to enter into modernity, es decir., into the con-
sciousness of its own historicity. The barbarian invasions, from this point on, eran

*
l’histoire de l’art, París, Gallimard, 2015.

This essay is a modified version of the introduction to Les invasions barbares. Une généalogie de

1.
“There may have been fogs for centuries in London. . . . But no one saw them, and so we do
not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.” Oscar Wilde, "El
Decay of Lying” (1889), in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann
(chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pag. 312.

2.
República (Nueva York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1972), pag. 5.

Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in Crises of the

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OCTUBRE

no longer thought of as the major catastrophe that had plunged Europe into the
obscurity of the middle Ages. On the contrary, they were seen as a salutary release
from a long period of stagnation that could only have ended in decay. Up until
the middle of the eighteenth century or thereabouts, it had been accepted that
the irruption of the barbarians into the empire had precipitated the latter’s deca-
dence and fall. Después 1800, sin embargo, the new blood of the northern races came to
mean the renewal, the physiological, political, and cultural rejuvenation, of the
peoples of the empire: “By opening up springs from beneath, and pouring floods
of barbarians over the dry and withered surface, the stagnant life was refreshed by
the new blood which was infused into it; and the dry and faded was again clothed
with a new verdure.”3

Semejante, entonces, was the picture of the barbarian invasions that became estab-
liado, for a long time, in people’s minds. It was a picture that carried with it the
idea of vigorous peoples overflowing with a creative instinct that was sadly lacking
in the decadent Romans and their subject peoples. As it flowed throughout the
empire, entonces, this new blood of the barbarians had destroyed nothing; rather it
had preserved the ancient art, just as it produced a new art that was necessarily
anti-Roman and anti-classical. The heritage of this art was still there to be seen in
Europe fifteen centuries later. Quite suddenly, with this fantastic narrative, artistic
styles became entirely dependent upon race and blood.

A good number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians were happy
to depict the barbarians as peoples who were as strong physically as they were
racially or ethnically homogeneous. The ethnography of antiquity, En realidad, pro-
vided them with models for this, models based on the double postulate of the
homogeneity and the continuity of the “foreign” peoples. Had not Tacitus himself,
from the end of the first century CE, described the multitude of peoples that he
named Germanic as a single population, without mixture, and of pure race? Su
physical traits, he affirmed, are “everywhere the same” (Germania, IV). Diversity
and complexity at home contrasted thus with uniformity and simplicity elsewhere.
A contributor to Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie wrote that men resembled
each other far more among wild peoples than among the civilized.4 Added to this,
as we see in Pliny, is the principle of the continuity of peoples through time. Ellos
are understood to never disappear and to always keep the same physical and moral
traits.5 The history of art was built upon such anthropological paradigms. In task-
ing itself with describing the objects produced by peoples assumed to be
homogeneous, enduring from century to century and always unchanging, él
sought to make of these objects the irrefutable evidence of that identity and
homogeneity. It was to this end that the history of art fashioned its own concepts,

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Joseph von Goerres, Germany and the Revolution, trans. John Black (Londres: Longman, Hurst,

3.
rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820), pag. 199.
4.
Darkstée and merkus, 1767), volumen. 1, páginas. 375–76.
5.
Prensa universitaria, 2002), pag. 49.

Pierre Jacques Changeux, Traité des extrêmes ou éléments de la science de la réalité (Ámsterdam:

Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton

The Modern Invention of Barbarians

its tools of interpretation, and these tools have survived the collapse of their very
own presuppositions.

The barbarian invasions were thus in large part a Romantic invention, insep-
arable from the formation of the nation-states and the rise of nationalism in
Europa, and they have since continued to be a controversial and sensitive subject
among historians. Was the decay of the empire inevitable, or was it caused by the
arrival of the Germanic peoples? Did the latter suddenly coalesce and invade in
compact masses, or was their entry into the empire a long and drawn-out process?
Did the Romans themselves ask for it? Were the Germanic peoples peaceful or
warlike? Were they peasants? “Roman civilization did not die its own quiet death.
It was murdered.”6 These famous words, written under the Nazi occupation by a
French historian, were published in 1947 shortly after a war with a perceived
hereditary enemy. They tell much about the extent to which the position of the
observer, in space and time, is always a determining factor in the writing of history.
The idea generally accepted up until the time of the Second World War—
that the empire had collapsed through its own internal decay—has never
completely disappeared, even though it has become difficult today to speak of a
Roman “decadence.” In addition, the picture of cruel and destructive barbarian
hordes (a picture that appeared destined to belong forever to the European imagi-
nary) was nonetheless strikingly transformed around the turn of the twenty-first
siglo, rejoining, como resultado, the views of Fustel de Coulanges at the end of the
siglo XIX. Was it really possible to speak of “Germanic invasions” when
these barbarians, who were not even nomads,7 had been deliberately called or
attracted to Rome, and when, furthermore, “none of them were Germans”?8
Hoy, most historians agree on two points: It is no longer possible to consider the
groups entering into the territory of the empire as homogeneous peoples, y
those peoples, who had always been called Germanic, included very few
“Germans.” It was Tacitus’s Germania, rediscovered in the fifteenth century,
Jordanes’s History of the Goths, and Paul Diacre’s History of the Lombards that allowed
a few humanists in the sixteenth century to imagine that the numerous barbarian
peoples living beyond the Rhine and the Danube—Burgundians, Saxons,
Alamanni, Goths, Vandals, Franks, Herules, Visigoths, Alans, etc.—were all
“Germanic” tribes (Stämme) and that they were accordingly the most authentic
ancestors of modern Germans.9 This notion of an absolute continuity between the

André Piganiol, L’empire chrétien (325–395) (París: P.U.F., 1947), pag. 422.

Lawrence Nees, "Introducción,” Speculum 72, norte. 4 (Octubre 1997), pag. 960.

8.
Walter Goffart, “None of Them Were Germans: Northern Barbarians in Late Antiquity,"
Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (Filadelfia: University of Philadelphia
Prensa, 2006), páginas. 187–229.

9.
Tacitus, Germania, ca. 98; Jordanes, Getica, 551; Paul Diacre (Paul the Deacon), Historia
Langobardorum, ca. 788; Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547), Rerum Germanicarum libri tres, Bâle, 1531. Ver
further Goffart, Barbarian Tides; Klaus von See, “Der Germane als Barbar,” and “Vom ‘Elden Wilden’
zum ‘Volk der Dichter und Denker’: Die Anfänge der Germanen-Ideologie,” in Barbar, Germane, Arier:
Die Suche nach der Identität der Deutschen (Heidelberg: 1994), páginas. 31–82.

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OCTUBRE

“Germanic” and the modern Germans has persisted, and still today, some histori-
ans claim to be writing “a synthesis of the German past from the arrival of the
Germanic peoples in the Western world up to the Reunification of 1990,” as if it
were possible to write a two-thousand-year history of a single and unchanging
“German people.”10

Yet as soon as one accepted, along with Tacitus, the fiction of a Germanness
common to these heterogeneous populations, it was very easy to make the
“Germanic peoples” the source of modern Europe. German patriotism in the eigh-
teenth century, thoroughly anti-French in its outlook, did not deny it. For Herder,
it was at the point when the Roman Empire appeared exhausted, agitated, and dis-
located that “in the north a new human being was born. . . . Goths, Vandals,
Burgundians, Angles, Huns, Heruli, Franks and Bulgarians, Slavs and Lombards
came—settled, and the whole modern world from the mediterranean to the Black
Sea, from the Atlantic to the North Sea, is their work, their race, their constitu-
ción!”11 A few years after this, a minister of Frederick II, who was, like Herder,
opposed to the “Romanist” views of the sovereign, wrote: “The Franks,
Burgundians, Anglo-Saxons, Lombards, Vandals, Goths, Rugiens, and the Heruli,
the major peoples who destroyed the Roman Empire, and who founded the pre-
sent monarchies of Europe, were all of Germanic origin.”12 It was fictions of
“racial” unity such as these that allowed the barbarian invasions to be made, dur-
ing the next two centuries, into a decisive episode in the eternal war waged by the
“Germanic races” against what were soon to be called the “Latin races.”13

Late antiquity, sin embargo, did not speak of the “migration of peoples” (nor of
Völkerwanderung or migratio gentium), and the barbarians who infiltrated the empire
were quite unaware that they belonged to the “Germanic” peoples.14 Rather, el
distinction between a populus romanus, possessing a history and a constitution, y
the more or less wild gentes, living beyond the Rhine and the Danube, was a
Roman political construction that was to persist well after the fourth and fifth cen-
turies, while the differences between Romans and barbarians were to become
increasingly uncertain. al mismo tiempo, sin embargo, this persistent opposition
between an “us” and a “them” survived equally well, but in reverse, in a certain

10.

Henry Bogdan, Histoire de l’Allemagne de la Germanie à nos jours (París: Perrin, 2003).

11.
(Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 2002) páginas. 300–01.

Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings (1774), ed. and trans. michael N. Forster

Comte de Hertzberg, “Dissertation aiming to explain the causes and the superiority of the
12.
Germans over the Romans & to prove that the North of Germania or Teutonia between the Rhine &
the Vistula, & principally the present Prussian monarchy, is the original land of these heroic nations,
who in the celebrated migration of peoples destroyed the Roman Empire, & who founded & peopled
the principal monarchies of Europe,” Huit dissertations… (Berlina: Decker and Fils, 1787), páginas. 28–29.

Thus the historian Gervinus saw in the Reformation “the renewal of the opposition of the
13.
Latin and Germanic races,” still visible in the division between a “Germanic” North America and a
“Latin” South America. Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Introduction à l’histoire du XIXe siècle, trans. François
van meenen (Bruxelles: Flatau, 1858), pag. 39.

14.

Goffart, Barbarian Tides, pag. 13.

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The Modern Invention of Barbarians

Germanic and Germanist tradition. It did so by way of other oppositions: Kultur
against Zivilisation, por supuesto, but also “civilisations sympathiques” against “civilisa-
tions politiques,”15 and, more generally, through the contrast between populations
judged to be racially homogeneous and those that seemed to be made up only of a
simple, political conglomerate, and that were lacking an “organic” foundation. En
drawing up these rudimentary taxonomies, the modern thinkers deliberately
ignored all those individuals who were simultaneously Roman and barbarian, justo
como, more broadly, they ignored the extreme fluidity of social, political, and “eth-
nic” identities that blurred the frontiers more than could any incursions by armed
bands. As for these latter, Fustel de Coulanges was already arguing that “many of
these Visigoths, Burgundians, and Vandals, that we read about in history, eran
Italians, Galos, Spaniards, Africans. They intermixed with the Germanic peoples,
and merged with them. They made the invaded populations believe that the
invaders were very numerous; and they have made posterity believe it as well.”16

To compound the confusion, the names that the Romans gave to often hete-
roclite populations covered groups whose members could change considerably
con el tiempo. The continuity of the name thus created the false and misleading idea
of a great “ethnic,” i.e., biological, continuity. Estos, entonces, were not the names of
“nations.” They were rather “claims for unity under leaders who hoped to monop-
olize and to embody the traditions associated with these names. Al mismo tiempo,
these leaders were appropriating disparate traditions and inventing new ones.”17
Ethnic homogeneity and continuity were therefore essentially romantic and singu-
larly reductive descriptors. Europe was projecting its national and racial aims onto
its past. As Fustel de Coulanges was to say, with his usual gift for understatement,
“The modern spirit is everywhere taken with ethnographic theories, and it brings
this prejudice to the study of history.”18

Ahora, it was through the adoption of these two fundamental theses of
ethnic/racial homogeneity and continuity that the history of art was to come to be
an integral part of the great narrative of the war between the races. This narrative,
through the history of art, was to take on a new cultural and political significance
once the art object was called upon to speak to the identity no longer of its individ-
ual creator but also to that of the ethnic group—“people” or “race”—that was
understood to have produced it. In seeking to cast a historical light upon their
objects, the two great tutelary figures of the discipline of the history of art, Giorgio
Vasari and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, had both, with two centuries between
a ellos, conceived the development of art according to the template of life. Para

15.

16.
552.

17.

18.

Viollet-le-Duc in 1863.

Fustel de Coulanges, L’invasion germanique et la fin de l’empire (1891; París: Hachette, 1904), pag.

Geary, The Myth of Nations, pag. 155–56.

Coulanges, L’invasion germanique, pag. XII.

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OCTUBRE

Vasari, the history of the fine arts had been interrupted by the arrival of the barbar-
ians, and it began again only with the medici. For Winckelmann, the history of great
art had been definitively curtailed by the barbarian invasions. Vasari sought to estab-
lish biographies of artists, thus creating vague local genealogies—what were later to
be called “schools.” His famous Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and
Architects (1550 y 1568), a monumental work dedicated to the glory of Florence
and the grand duke of Tuscany, was assuredly based upon a biological conception of
arte. Respectivamente, just as an artist’s style developed and reached maturity in a way that
was analogous to his or her own life, the development of the arts in general went
through all of the stages leading from childhood to old age and decrepitude. De este modo
the decline of art in the Roman Empire appeared to Vasari at times to be as
inevitable as the decline in the life of a human being, while at other times he hinted
that the causes of this decline were to be found not in the empire itself but rather in
Christian iconoclasm and in the depredations of the barbarians, who did away with
the most notable classical models. Two centuries later, Winckelmann’s History of
Ancient Art, a work that culminated in the analysis of that art’s “downfall” and
“death,” inaugurated a new biological conception of style. What was for Vasari some-
thing essentially individual here becomes collective. According to Winckelmann,
each of the peoples of antiquity had developed a particular style that was born, lived,
and died with them. Y todavía, all the while claiming that the life of a style was to be
thoroughly identified with the life of its people, Winckelmann nonetheless extolled,
in an utterly contradictory fashion, the atemporality of classical art—a norm set up
against the art of his time, which he saw as decadent.

It was to fight against the atemporality of classicism, to fight against his
norm proclaimed as eternal, that scholars and artists began to praise precisely
those sorts of forms that the norm had up until then rejected or simply ignored.
The history of art was thus born under the sign of anti-classicism and with the
conscious invocation of the barbarians and their arts. Local and historical particu-
larities were brandished therefore as weapons in an arsenal aimed at classicism’s
purported universalism. If it so happened that the first objects chosen to this end
were the bizarre forms and outlandish proportions of the “Gothic taste,” then this
was because, in many European countries, the Gothic style was soon to be seen as
a style that was everywhere “national,” providing clear evidence of the inextrica-
ble link between its natural inspiration and its barbarian origins. As soon as they
were compared with the columns and capitals that shouted out their “Greco-
Roman” ancestry, the skyward-thrusting cathedrals, shooting up like so many
trees rooted in the national soil, their decorative features echoing the native vege-
tation, bore witness to another lineage. Thus it was that this Gothic style, cual
Vasari once called, lamenting its ugliness, “Tudesque,” was to become, desde el
end of the eighteenth century, an object of national pride first in Great Britain19

19.

michel Baridon, A. oh. Lovejoy, Le gothique des lumières (París: monfort, 1993).

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The Modern Invention of Barbarians

and then in France and Germany,20 these three countries being foremost in pro-
claiming ever more loudly their heritage and descent from barbarian forebears.
modern racial theory was therefore to put itself forward as the theory of the racial
determination of cultural forms: The new blood brought in by the Germanic
invasions had not only caused the end of classical antiquity, it had also created
the new Christian art and thus the opposition, destined to last for centuries,
between the “Genius of the North” and “Latinity.”21 The influx of new blood had
shifted the entire history of the West from an ancient, pagan, and mediterranean
culture to the thoroughly modern and profoundly Christian culture of the North.
Hegel’s thought was certainly marked by this new mapping of history. Sin,
sin embargo, giving in to the racialism of many of his contemporaries, Hegel laid out,
in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the exceptional fate of the “Germanic
peoples.” For Hegel, it was the Germanic peoples who had brought Christianity,
and so the Germanic world spirit was to be totally identified with the Christian
spirit of the modern world. It had begun with the appearance of the Germanic
nations in the Roman Empire and was pursuing its course “until our time.” In the
Lectures on Aesthetics that Hegel gave in Berlin in the 1820s, what he called
“romantic” art was not the same as the Romanticism of the first years of the nine-
teenth century. Hegel’s “romantic” art followed directly upon the classical art of
pagan antiquity; it began with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, merging
entirely with Christian art.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of voices had
been claiming that the decisive moment in the history of Europe was not to be
written based solely upon Roman sources, but from the point of view of the
“Germanic peoples.” As there were no actual barbarian texts, it was the study of
“barbarian antiquities,” they argued,22 that would shed new light on a Roman his-
tory that had been up to then “written by Romans with the aim of self-promotion,
and by Greeks whose aim was flattery.”23 Only in this way would it be possible to
get away from the exclusive admiration and the sterile and deleterious imitation of
the Romans. Esencialmente, at issue was understanding oneself as part of another
genealogy, and it was a case of finally making one’s cultural heritage coincide with
the biological one. En 1805, as Napoleon’s troops occupied the Rhineland, él
seemed obvious to Goethe that, after so many centuries, no one could expect the
Germans to show any admiration, or to go in for any imitation, of the Greek and

20.
cathedral of Strasbourg against the “good taste” of the Italians and the French.

See for example “German Architecture,” the famous text that Goethe wrote in 1772 sobre el

21.
See the letters of Henri Focillon, Gilbert murray, Josef Strzygowski, and Rabindranath
Tagore in the Institut international de coopération intellectuelle, Correspondance 4: Civilisations:
Orient—Occident, Génie du Nord—Latinité (París: Société des nations, 1935).

22.
Leibniz had, de 1691, called upon his compatriots to explore the soil “in order to re-estab-
lish the ancient history of Germania” (Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past, trans. Ian Kinnes and
Gillian Varndell, [Nueva York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996], pag. 206).

23.
páginas. vi–xv.

Comte du Buat-Nançay, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Europe (París: Desaint, 1772), volumen. 1,

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OCTUBRE

Roman “divine models.” Thus he claimed: “We Northerners cannot be exclusively
referred to their example. We have other ancestors to be proud of and many other models
to bear in mind.”24

In the rest of Europe, por supuesto, claims of barbarian descent were different.
The myth of the Frankish origin of the French nobility, introduced by
Boulainvilliers, offered a clear case of social and political domination by one
“race” over another: a Frankish, es decir., Germanic, aristocracy wielded power over a
Gallo-Roman third estate. montesquieu’s words here are well known: “Our ances-
tores, los alemanes . . ."; “. . . those ancestors who conquered the Roman empire.”25
Phrases such as these were not at all unusual in Europe. After the successive
incoming waves of Sueves, Vandals, and Alans, Spain was invaded by the Visigoths,
whose kingdom, it is true, did not survive the arrival and conquest of the moors in
711. The Visigoths, sin embargo, did bequeath to Spain its “gothic myth,” the mark of
which is still there in the language: In its entry for godo, the Diccionario de la Real
Academia Española gives “hacerse de los godos” (to boast of one’s nobility) and “ser
godo” (to be of ancient nobility).26 In England or in Scotland, there were many
who claimed descent from the Angles, Saxons, Goths, and above all the
Normans—so many peoples reputed to be “Germanic” and whose successive con-
quests clearly attested to their superiority over the indigenous “Celts.” It is only the
Langobards or Lombards in the north of Italy, the last barbarians to enter the
empire, OMS (at least until the Lega Nord27) seem to have inspired no pretensions
to titles of nobility or superiority.28

Yet the nature of the interest taken in the barbarians did begin to change
over the course of the nineteenth century. The historians had so swelled their
numbers that the barbarians appeared less a conquering elite than a huge mass of
gente, migrating from the vague immensity of a borderless Scythia and coming to

24.
j. W.. Goethe, quoted by Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton, 1953), páginas. 330–31. “ . . . Aber uns
Nordländer kann man auf jene muster nicht ausschließlich hinweisen: wir haben uns anderer Voreltern zu
rühmen und haben manch anderes Vorbild im Auge.” From “Geschmack,” remarks following Goethe’s transla-
tion of Rameaus Neffe, in Goethe’s Werke, volumen. 36 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1830), pag. 170. my emphasis.

25.
2001), volumen. 1, libro 6, ch. 18, pag. 108; libro 10, ch. 3, pag. 157.

montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (1748), trans. Thomas Nugent (1752) (Kitchener: Batoche,

26.
En línea: http://www.rae.es/diccionario-de-la-lengua-espanola/la-23a- edicion-2014. See the
classic work by Léon Poliakov on which I am drawing here: The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and
Nationalist Ideas in Europe (Nueva York: Libros Básicos, 1974).

27.
1991.

Lega Nord, or Northern League, is an Italian right-wing regionalist party that was formed in

28.
This did not prevent a great number of Germans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
from deducing, to the contrary, from all of these barbarian migrations the “Germanic” character of the
art and culture of Europe as a whole, including Italy.

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The Modern Invention of Barbarians

impregnate the native populations of Western Europe. The idea of such a migra-
tion was certainly not new. Leibniz, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, seeking
an explanation for the numerous “common roots” of certain European languages,
was already postulating that “this fact comes from the common origin of all these
people descended from the Scythians, OMS, having come from the Black Sea,
passed the Danube and the Vistula, and of whom one part may have gone into
Greece, the other have filled Germany and the Gauls; a consequence of the
hypothesis which makes the Europeans come from Asia.”29

Recalling, no doubt, Jordanes, who saw Scandinavia as the “manufacturer of
peoples,” the Romantics were to add to this long migration route the vast detour
of the migrants by way of the north. The same delusion of lineage that had so
moved Goethe was now to feed, through a new orientalism, the anti-classicism of
Pierre Leroux:

Nosotros, men of the North, who had left our native forests, and who had
left in that place, along with the bones of our forefathers, the poetry
of our forefathers, who had forgotten our songs of Ossian and our old
epics, created out of traditions themselves borrowed from the Orient,
but transformed by our ancestors, in the long pilgrimage that took
them from the plateaus of Asia to the ice floes of the North, and to
disperse them, like a fertile seed, across Germany, Inglaterra, España
and France—we had forgotten all of that, we had abandoned our her-
itage, repudiated the inheritance that nature gave to us, and we had
come, so to speak, like little children who do not yet know how to
utter words, to make ourselves the inheritors and disciples of the
Greeks and Romans.30

After the 1840s, when the works of Sir Walter Scott had already taken the
continent by storm, excavations carried out almost simultaneously in most of the
European countries showed, from Spain to Hungary, a growing interest in the
tombs of the Germanic tribes that had supposedly invaded those countries. En
Francia, despite the Académie celtique, founded in 1804 with the purpose of
unearthing the monuments of Gallic antiquity to stand against the all-powerful
Greco-Roman model,31 the history of art, unlike those of archaeology and anthro-
pology, only very briefly sought to give support to the historians’ and politicians’
Gallic myth.32 This is because the France of the Restoration, as Renan was to write,

29.
Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. A. GRAMO. Langley (chicago: Open Court,
1916), pag. 297. On the history of the myth of the Indo-Europeans, see the recent work by Jean-Paul
Demoule, Mais où sont passés les Indo-Européens? Le mythe d’origine de l’Occident (París: Seuil, 2014).

30.
(1832), páginas. 69–82 (here p. 75).

Pierre Leroux, “De l’influence philosophique des études orientales,” Revue Encyclopédique

31.

Aux sources de l’ethnologie française: L’académie celtique, ed. Nicole Belmont (París: CTHS, 1995).

32.
There are two notable exceptions: Louis Courajod, a Germanophile, defended, at the end of
the nineteenth century, the idea of a close barbarian kinship between the Celts and the Germans;
Henri Focillon, a Germanophobe, sought for “the genius of the race” in Les pierres de France (1919),

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OCTUBRE

was marvelously well prepared to receive from Germany “an infusion of new
spirit,” and “the Gallic race,” he claimed, was in need of being periodically
“impregnated by the Germanic race.”33 France, por lo tanto, like Germany,
Suiza, Bélgica, e inglaterra, had taken to digging in the earth in search of
objects that were expected to be capable of recounting, over against the narrative
of classicism, the great “barbarian,” i.e., essentially Germanic, epic.

“All of the centuries, all of the peoples, are thus hidden in the earth. The Gaul
lies down alongside the Roman, and the Roman sleeps beside the Barbarian. Estos
hombres, it is only necessary to make them speak and to understand their answers; but for
this we must not confuse their languages. We must know how to discern the tones,
the nuances, the colors, the physiognomies of each people and of each civilization.”34
But neither the bones nor the other objects exhumed from the necropolises ever
gave a single, univocal answer. So much so that the “Frankish question,” in Belgium at
the end of the nineteenth century, caused violent arguments between Walloon and
Flemish archeologists, profoundly shaken in the sense of their own identity. Were the
Walloons really Gallo-Romans, and were the Flemish really Franks? Could archeolo-
gists conclude, from the fact that dead warriors were dressed as Franks, that they were
Franks? The answer was no, because the Gallo-Romans of the merovingian period
used to dress in Frankish style when they were in relations with those who wielded
fuerza, es decir., the Franks. Gallo-Romans were members of the same armies as Frankish
warriors, and so they bore the same arms and had access to the same military dignities
as the Franks; they became, ellos mismos, cuenta, dukes, etc.35

Archeology and the history of art thus set themselves the same task: a
determine the correct “ethnic” lineage for their objects, whether those objects
were works of art or mortal remains. As a purely descriptive science of observa-
ción, the history of art also assigned its objects to racial groups based upon a few
visible signs. Sometimes it was their “tactile” or “optical” qualities that gave them
away as “Latin” or “Germanic” (Alois Riegl), and sometimes it was the predomi-
nance of linear elements that betrayed a Latin or Southern origin, while the
“pictorial” clearly indicated a Germanic or Northern provenance (Enrique
Wölfflin). As for the museums, they tried, from the first years of the nineteenth
siglo, to group fine-art items according to geographical origin and to the
“ethnic” lineage of their creators. Sin embargo, in the same way that a tomb contain-

from the “Celtic landscapes” to the railroad stations of Paris, and often signed his letters: “The old
Celt.” See “Lettres de Henri Focillon à Georges Opresco,” ed. Radu Ionesco, Revue roumaine d’histoire de
l’art (Bucarest) 29 (1992).

33.

Ernest Renan, Essais de morale et de critique (París: metro. Lévy Frères, 1861), pag. 59.

34.
et des cimetières francs, explorés en Normandie (París: Derache, 1855), pag. 4.

Abbé (Jean Benoît Désiré) Cochet, La Normandie souterraine, ou notices sur des cimetières romains

35.
Victor Tahon, Compte-rendu des travaux du congrès de Charleroi, Société paléontologique et
archéologique de Charleroi (Bruselas: Deprez, 1889), páginas. 85–87 and 120–25. See Hubert Fehr,
Germanen und Barbaren im Merowingerreich (Berlina: Gruyter, 2010), pag. 243, who associates this passage
with an identical remark of Fustel in La monarchie franque, 1888, pag. 296: “The rule that scholars have
established for distinguishing between the races in the grave is highly arbitrary.”

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The Modern Invention of Barbarians

ing Frankish arms might very well be holding Gallo-Roman bones, the rooms
that museums assigned to the artists of the “Schools of the North” could show
works that were perfectly “linear.” These taxonomies presupposed that a collec-
tive “manner” or a “style” could not be acquired or bartered, that it was not
socially transmitted but innate. It would be a vain task to try to prove that the his-
tory of art was—or still is—a racist discipline. It was neither more nor less racist
than the other social sciences, and all of them were oriented by racial thinking
to classify and create hierarchies of people according to certain somatic and psy-
chological traits. Still, it remains important to understand the nature of the links
it forged between people and their works of art, because those links are not yet
broken. We give them a semblance of reality each and every time that we look at
these objects and search for a sign of their “ethnic,” i.e., colectivo, origen. Esto es
because the opinion that remains the most commonplace concerning art is that
it embodies, better than anything else, the genius of a people.

The history of art was first formed on the model of the life sciences. Él
claimed to name, describe, and classify its objects as living beings, assimilating
artistic creation to a natural process and seeking to understand its development.
In looking at works of art as plants, animals, or human beings, and in organizing
them according to various grids of similarities and differences, the history of art
believed it could bring to light consistencies and continuities, establish genealo-
gies of forms, construct “stylistic families,” and reveal ties of kinship. One of the
great constructs of nineteenth-century thought was the idea that “physiological
heredity assures us psychological heredity.” Thus, for Hippolyte Taine, an individ-
ual inherited not just certain traits from his or her mother or father but a whole
“storehouse” containing all of his or her ancestors “going back to infinity.” The
consequences of this, Taine added, were considerable, and they allowed one to
examine human history through the perspective of the longue durée, as one now
knew that “the persistence of inherited aptitudes and tendencies” was to play a
preponderant part. Thus he could say: “The tenacity of the hereditary and trans-
mitted characteristic explains the obstacles facing a given civilization, religión, o
group of mental and moral customs, that seeks to graft itself upon a wild or differ-
ent stock.” 36 This explained why styles were only transmissible through
reproduction within the same “stock.” It also explained the principle of the imper-
meability of cultures to one another, a principle that had already been clearly
articulated by Herder. Además, as the nineteenth century was to add, if each
culture was the emanation of a race, then clashes between cultures were necessar-
ily clashes between races. 37 Certainly, the concept of race was no more
semantically fixed then than it has been at any other point in history, incluido

36.
essais de critique et d’histoire (París: Hachette, 1923), páginas. 185–93 (here pp. 188–89).

Hippolyte Taine, “Études de psychologie, volumen. 1: Th. Ribot, l’Hérédité” (1873), in Derniers

37.
Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David maisel (New Haven: Yale
Prensa universitaria, 2006). See also interviews with Nicolas Weill in Histoire et lumières: Changer le monde par
la raison (París: Albin michel, 2014).

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OCTUBRE

today.38 But it has always been used to include and to exclude, and to maintain
this impermeability. It caused maurice Barrès, Por ejemplo, to declare that he
could not understand Greek statues, buildings, and landscapes: “I would have to
have the blood of the Hellenes. The blood of the valleys of the Rhine does not
allow me to participate in the deep life of the works that surround me. . . . Alas, él
is all too clear! We are of two races.”39

The discourse of blood, as today the discourse of the gene, is grounded in a
fundamental invisibility. Whether applied to human beings or to art objects, estos
discourses always connect the visible differences between bodies with natural
causes that remain hidden, and those causes are understood to ensure unfailingly
the transmission of differences. In this way, these discourses maintain not only that
culture is in nature but also that it proceeds from nature.40 They strive, por lo tanto, a
construct a more or less stable world in which the arts forever resemble their
respective peoples—and vice versa.

—Translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle

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38.
1997), http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf.

See the published transcript for Stuart Hall’s video Race, the Floating Signifier (dir. Sut Jhally,

39.

40.

maurice Barrès, Le voyage de Sparte (París: Plon, 1906), pag. 49.

Stuart Hall, Carrera, the Floating Signifier.
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