Eveline G. Bouwers

Pantheon: The History of a Concept on the Move

With his lamentation on man’s inability to appreciate the talents of friends, Petrarch placed himself in a long line of thinkers admitting to the biased nature of fame. Contrary to the ancients, who had abundantly feted the heroes of their own glorious age, medieval Christianity had made the here-and-now secondary to Creation and Apocalypse.2 The anticipation of a Day of Judgement made the glorification of contemporary heroes, the Christian warrior-king excepted, suspect. During the Renaissance, the humanist focus on progress invited a new orientation towards time that aimed at bridging past, present, and future. This narrative necessarily made contemporaries sceptical about today’s impact on and relevance for tomorrow. This explains Petrarch’s admonition to Tommaso that, should he desire fame, he had better die first. In the following pages, I will return to Petrarch’s role in recuperating the ancient trope of the exempla virtutis and integrating it into modern European culture. More generally, I will discuss the genealogy of the concept of pantheon and the impact of the eighteenth century on the emergence of public pantheons in Revolutionary Europe.

The Eclipse of Exemplarity: The Imperial Pantheon in Paris

The impressions that traveller Franz Grillparzer entrusted to his diary reflected a frequently voiced disappointment of contemporaries when visiting the Pantheon in Paris. Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s Neoclassical design for the former church of Sainte-Genevieve inspired general admiration yet the Pantheon failed to live up to its fame as the repository of France’s great men. Much of its glory had been lost by the political infighting of the revolutionary days. The first inclusion, that of Mirabeau in April 1791, had also been the first exclusion; when the staunchly republican Jean-Paul Marat was pantheonised in 1794, the Convention unceremoniously transferred Mirabeau’s remains to an anonymous grave on one of Paris’ overcrowded cemeteries before admitting the ‘new God’ Marat.2 He was in turn depantheonised after the radicalism of the sans-culottes had ended. One tourist later compared the behaviour of French political elites to that of ‘Jupiter, who, according to his pleasure, chases away and receives gods on the Olympus’.3

‘National Education’ in a Royal Pantheon in Regensburg

The impressions of Chancellor Metternich upon first seeing the future Walhalla pantheon combined two emotions that appeared in nearly every account by nineteenth-century visitors. On the one hand, spectators were overwhelmed by the building’s Neoclassical aesthetics, its size, and Arcadian location. William Turner dedicated a painting to it while author Karl Gutzkow poetically described how, standing on the Brauberg, he breathed ‘gasps from the ether empire’.2 But the Walhalla also evoked emotions of a very different kind, notably in relation to contemporary political culture and the selection of exemplary men. For Metternich, again, the construction of a pantheon in the secluded village of Donaustauf was ‘madness’; Heinrich Heine disparagingly described the Walhalla as ‘a sanctuary of marble skulls’.3 No public pantheon in Revolutionary Europe evoked so many contrary emotions and had such an uneven reception as the Walhalla of Ludwig I of Bavaria. And yet the idea for a pantheon to exemplary Germans, a monument that combined Hirschfeld’s plea for a German Westminster-Abtey with thecommemoration of the Wars of Liberation (1813–4), was received with general enthusiasm.4

Conclusions: Public Pantheons: A European History?

The foundation stone of the Walhalla had not even been laid when Bavaria’s crown prince already realised that any selection of exemplary men, including his own, was contentious. Ludwig’s admittance to the particularistic nature of his pantheon was perhaps unique in Revolutionary Europe. Nonetheless, I have tried to show that every commissioner built his allegedly national pantheon on partisan interpretations of a selectively retrieved past. By adding an ‘intercultural dimension’ to conceptual history, namely, a reflection on how the concept pantheon travelled through Europe and was adapted to different political cultures, I have attempted to demonstrate how elites reacted in largely similar ways to the unravelling of their power following the socio-political and cultural upheaval of the period roughly spanning the French Revolution and the liberal revolutions.2 Confronted with a progressively emancipated public sphere and massive warfare between (infant) nation-states, pantheon commissioners appropriated the fabric of the nation to legitimate and reinforce hegemonic claims.

Competition in the Parliamentary Pantheon in London

Thackeray described the London social world of the Napoleonic years, a world unknown to him, with astonishment. While hundred thousands of soldiers fought on the European front, the protagonists of Vanity Fair were concerned with material interests and social advancement. That Thackeray chose to describe a memorial as ‘elaborate’, rather than either moving or beautiful, and inform his readers that St Paul’s Cathedral housed ‘hundreds’ of jingoistic allegories shows how monument- making had become a social practice in early nineteenth-century Britain. With a monument for the same cathedral in which the House of Commons commemorated military and naval heroes, families sought to integrate relatives into the government’s ‘projection of “Britishness”’.2

A Papal Pantheon? Canova’s ‘Illustrious Italians’ in Rome

For a twenty-first-century tourist visiting Rome, the Pantheon shows few similarities to Stendhal’s description of a temple filled with the ‘busts of great artists’. Although the tomb of Raphael still attracts hordes of tourists, few other artists are presently commemorated in this well-known building associated with the cult of genius. In lieu of a quiet residence in the Pantheon, the busts and herms were in 1820 (sic!) transferred to the Capitoline Museums.2 Few contemporaries paid attention to this transfer. Gaetano Moroni, an eccentric autodidact who started off as a barber at a Roman convent before becoming the private secretary of his erstwhile client Pope Gregory XVI, was one of the few to record that ‘marble busts of the principal artists were added to the small oval niches’ in the Pantheon before these were transferred to the Protomoteca Capitolina*.3 What both Stendhal and Moroni neglectedto mention is that rather than ‘great artists’, it was illustrious Italians whose busts and herms were then removed. For a devoted member of the carbonari (‘charcoal-burners’), a network of secret societies that fostered early nineteenth-century Italian nationalism, Stendhal’s notes reveal surprisingly little about the patriotic overtones of the series. Nor does he, or even Moroni, refer to the historical context that had prompted the construction of the pantheon.

From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology

dans l’Union européenne le temps démontrera si oui ou non les réformes vont se développer. Un autre problème est abordé par Didier Maus, la problématique de la constitution pour l’Europe. Dans le but d’unir les pays membres pour avancer et assurer la paix, l’adoption d’une constitution européenne reposant sur l’ensemble des valeurs communes et des droits fondamentaux des citoyens devient indispensable. Afin d’élaborer une telle constitution, il faut tenir compte, selon Maus de trois réalités. Premièrement, l’élargissement de l’Union européenne de quinze à vingt-cinq membres doit être pris en compte. Il est évident qu’on ne peut plus gouverner l’Europe à vingt-cinq comme on l’était habitué à quinze. Deuxièmement, il faut créer un équilibre institutionnel en modifiant les procédures législatives, exécutives et judiciaires et en libérant ces dernières d’une certaine lourdeur. Troisièmement, il est nécessaire de faire un pas vers l’intégration des politiques au sein de la communauté. Un marché unique avec un cadre social et fiscal européen en sera une première mesure. Les problématiques exposées dans le livre, et qui tournent toutes autour des deux termes « Gouvernance et identités » en Europe, sont non seulement multiples et diverses, mais sont aussi loin d’être closes. Le recueil, sous la direction de Robert Frank et Rosalind Greenstein, expose d’un côté différents points de vue sur une même thématique et, de l’autre, le livre offre la possibilité d’approcher des ressources diverses. Toutefois, le livre exige un nombre de connaissances préliminaires et n’est donc pas à conseiller comme ouvrage de première information sur la thématique. Un grand nombre de liens entre les divers articles pourrait échapper au lecteur.