Publish at October 28 2019 Updated November 28 2024
... at the other end of the planet as a multitude of micro upheavals that become butterfly effects for others in the present, but also from yesterday's history that will modify tomorrow's history?
This postulate implies that all of us, at our own level, are leaving a mark on the world. With the problem of climate change, we realize that communities have a responsibility for their ecological footprints. In the same way, we are measuring the effect of politicians' actions on our world:
"Every politician wants to leave their mark on the history of their term in office, and when they're in charge of public management, it can become chaotic, even absurd. You have to distinguish yourself from your predecessor or the previous government, and when the latter has been very good, there aren't many alternatives left to differentiate yourself.
Often in a hurry, sometimes in the illogicality of professional or natural progression. Changes are often brutal, and in the end, do users really benefit from them? Especially when the aim is to erase the traces of the predecessor".
Source : Are public services still public? - By Virginie Guignard Legros
October 2019 - https://cursus.edu/13262/les-services-publics-sont-ils-encore-publics
Does leaving your mark always mean erasing other marks? What are the choices? What's at stake?
"Archaeology is concerned not with the past, but with the material remains of the past. It works not just on monuments or works of art, but above all on "things", the debris of what we produce, consume or transform.
As such, archaeology studies what materially remains of the past in the present. Rather than history, taken in its traditional sense - reconstituting the past as it originally was - archaeology is more concerned with memory: not exactly the memory of men, but more precisely the inheritance of forms transmitted by things, which constitute the memory of places and objects".
Source: Ce qui reste, ce qui s'inscrit. Traces, vestiges, imprints - by Laurent Olivier - 2014
https://journals.openedition.org/socio-anthropologie/2315
Archaeology is above all a comprehensible formalization of the transmission of the past through memory. On the one hand, there's the object, on the other, its semantics and, ultimately, the work it does in human memory. The definition of archaeology undoubtedly merits revision, with the object becoming dematerialized with new technologies, but for a clear understanding of the subject, let's stay with the material object. Let's take the example of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's renovations of historic monuments in the 19th century.
...born in Paris on January 27, 1814 and died in Lausanne on September 17 , 1879, was one of the most famous French architects of the 19th century, known to the general public for his restorations of medieval buildings, religious edifices and castles.
A movement to restore France's medieval heritage began in the 1830s, driven in particular by Prosper Mérimée, who became Inspector General of Historic Monuments and asked Viollet-le-Duc to undertake restorations. Viollet-le-Duc restored numerous buildings, including Mont Saint-Michel, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, the city of Carcassonne and Château de Pierrefonds".
Sources: wikipedia - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Viollet-le-Duc
If we're talking about traces, the effect on our historical heritage, Viollet-le-Duc is the man who, by safeguarding major historical monuments in Europe throughout his career, had the greatest effect on the forms they transmit to us today. He was confronted with primordial and major choices that have shaped our vision of the Middle Ages today.
"Nowhere are the architectural contradictions of the 19th century clearer than in the work of the era's greatest theorist, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879).
We all know how Viollet-le-Duc, in parallel with his work as an architect (church of Saint-Denis-de-l'Estrée, Saint-Denis, 1860-1867) and his restoration projects, which often verged on the pastiche (château de Pierrefonds, 1863-1870), nonetheless ensured the rescue of many buildings threatened with ruin, pursued a process of reflection that was to find expression in the ten volumes of the Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française (1854-1868) and the two volumes of the Entretiens sur l'architecture (1863-1872), the latter condensing the teaching that Viollet-le-Duc would have given at the École des beaux-arts, had he not been expelled by a cabal led by Ingres.
Superficially considered, from the point of view of "taste", these works belong to the international Gothic Revival. But in the context of a teaching system that sought to preserve an academic order that was all surface, the "reasoned" analysis of Gothic monuments was, in Viollet-le-Duc's mind, to pave the way for a new kind of architecture, based on a knowledge of principles and constructive reality, and a resolutely modern style, a style that was not merely a matter of fashion or appearance, but which presented itself - in the words of the Dictionary - as "the manifestation of an ideal established on a principle".
No doubt it's not easy to reduce the aesthetics of the Dictionary and the Entretiens to a simple formula. But whether Viollet-le-Duc intended to emphasize the functional links between the different parts of architecture, or to proclaim the necessity of matching forms to their constructive function and the edifice to its material and spiritual destination, he will have focused most of his analyses on the synchronic relationships between the elements; and if the [...]"
Source : https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/historicisme-art/4-viollet-le-duc-l-histoire-et-la-fonction/
The restoration of major historic monuments such as the one in Carcassonne is an interesting example. The aesthetics of these restorations correspond to a given era, the 19th century, and whatever the good faith that Viollet-le-Duc put into them, he was influenced by his time, as were all archaeologists of different eras.
What do form and function mean? This formulation, for example, corresponds fairly well to the European state of mind at the end of the 15th century, as opposed to that of the 14th century. In the 14th century, everything was luxuriant: clothes and shoes could be composed of multiple materials and colors superimposed on each other. In the 15th century, the mood of the time was one of simplicity: one piece of clothing, one color and one material. Dresses, cloaks and hats were intended to be useful rather than decorative.
Some would call this austerity, others functionalism. When Viollet-le-Duc restored old Carcassonne, he did so in a state of mind close to the 15th century, which was undoubtedly close to the 19th century in which he lived. The result is a town where you can see the superimpositions of Roman and medieval stone and brickwork. Whereas he could have opted for a colorful, painted rendering with a plethora of 14th-century frescoes. But that wouldn't have suited the spirit of the times or Violet-le-Duc himself. He restored buildings from different eras, according to his era and his choices, which are also part of the history of an era. How can we be right with the times?
Look at this city, for example: it's Paris in the 2010s. But it's not at all what it should be; it's not at all what was announced when we imagined "Paris in the Year 2000". We hadn't foreseen that the 19th century would continue to fill the 21st century, along with everything else: the 18th and 17th centuries, not to mention the Middle Ages, Antiquity and even Prehistory. You can't see them all, but they're there. They work in the present.
The place where the past is found is none other than the present, because the matter of the present is made up of the accumulation of past durations: I mean all the durations of the past that continue to exist, now, since the origins. At this very moment, not far from here, black flint flakes are emerging from the soil of a cultivated field, flakes that were cut perhaps 500,000 years ago. At this very moment, the grey waters of the Seine are rolling over swords thrown into the river in the Bronze Age, three thousand years ago. All this is happening at this very moment, as you read this text: the past is what continues to exist".
CF: What remains, what is inscribed. Traces, vestiges, imprints
In the end, it's all about survival. Moreover, what is no longer there, no longer exists, or even never existed, since we no longer have any traces of it:
"In the world of historical archaeology, certain highly specialized re-enactment groups have decided to base their work solely on proven sources. So they only wear historical costumes reconstituted on the basis of what they find in historical sources. Imagine that the ladies in this case don't wear underwear. This is purely historical from the point of view of the state of research, but not from the point of view of women's everyday lives.
Imagine a woman working in the fields who, for the rest of her life, has only one item of clothing, which she adapts to her anatomy by adding or removing pieces from her dress as she becomes pregnant, for example. Her garment is therefore precious to her.
Yet, according to historical sources, she can't guarantee her personal hygiene. If this were the reality at the time, her dress would have to be replaced frequently, and therefore could not be worn for the 20 to 30 years of this peasant's adult life. In fact, it's impossible. Roman women had underwear, Renaissance women had underwear, but medieval women didn't?"
Source : The DNA of information reconstruction or the black holes of historical semantic space - By Virginie Guignard Legros - June 20, 2017
https://cursus.edu/11377/ladn-de-la-reconstitution-de-linformation-ou-les-trous-noirs-de-lespace-semantique-historique
Archaeology is a history of traces. Without traces, there is no archaeology. Which is not to say that certain parts of the past didn't exist. They're simply forgotten, for a while or forever. The past is that which is remembered by memory or by the object, or even by Proust's madeleine, which becomes the key to a door leading to a vanished universe.
To leave one's mark, several criteria come into play, including the correspondence between the era in which the study or observation takes place and the subject observed. There have to be common points of understanding. If there aren't, then the archaeologist is wide open to interpretation. If what we're studying doesn't correspond to anything we know, then we're going to fill in the gaps in the story according to our own system of understanding, from which we'll make choices.
Resituating an "original" aspect that often never existed, or accepting the successive states of a monument: such has been the dilemma facing heritage restorers since the time of Viollet-le-Duc.
From the time of his death, and even more so from the end of the century onwards, his restorations were deemed excessive, sometimes even disproportionate, and gave rise to much controversy: many critics criticized him for the cumbersome nature of his interventions, and his refusal to take into account architectural evolution over time in the name of stylistic unity.
For his detractors, the ancient monument should be treated as a living being, as the Romantics advocated, and the stratification of different periods respected. It was such considerations that prompted the Monuments Historiques to undertake the "de-restoration" of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse from 1979 onwards, with the aim of restoring the basilica to its original state before the additions made by Viollet-le-Duc.
However, these controversies cannot mask the immense influence of this architect. His great theories on architectural structure and restoration, conceived as a reading of the edifice, were revived in the wake of the First World War, during which a large number of monuments were almost entirely destroyed".
Source: VIOLLET-LE-DUC AND MONUMENTAL RESTORATION - by Charlotte DENOËL - 2008
https://www.histoire-image.org/fr/etudes/viollet-duc-restauration-monumentale
It's complicated to be fair and not be influenced by one's era or personality, by one's affinities. It's complicated to cross the threshold of historical immortality through one's work. It's a work on history in a specific historical period, which may or may not be part of an uncertain future. The chance factor is immense in this process.
Let's be happy that we still have these vestiges. The material studied is alive. Swords rust and dissolve, the marble veneers of the pyramids are mere figments of our imagination. Have these same pyramids been taken over by other civilizations for other uses? What is the true history of cathedrals? Celtic sites chosen for their energetic qualities? The churches that were planted to make them disappear, the cathedrals that followed? The archaeologist who is asked which period to choose for restoring a building? Is he wrong? Is he right? In Switzerland, architects are expected to build the modern out of the old. Elsewhere, it may be the dominant history of the neighborhood...
There are no fakes, there is no truth. Just people who have left their mark on history.
Image source: Pixabay Hans
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