Most of the theoretical contributions to issues of Studies of Medievalism dedicated to “Political Medievalism,” like the many books that have proliferated on this topic over the last ten years, have focused on medievalist tropes revived by members of the English-speaking entertainment industry or deployed by right-leaning politicians as a “conceptual weapon.” In this brief contribution to the theoretical conversation, I would like to take a step backward, to examine medievalism and politics through the lens of a time (1871) and place (France) when episodes of medieval European history were distorted and “weaponized” by factions on left, right, and center alike. By focusing on French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’s “diplomatic negotiations” (philosopher Bruno Latour’s metaphor for grappling with irreconcilable positions), I hope to encourage debate about public medievalism today.

The Imagined Middle Ages of 1871 France

In 1871, Fustel de Coulanges encouraged politicians forming a new government after the fall of the Second Empire (1851–70) to improve an inequitable justice system. He offered help in the form of a four-part essay, “The Historical Origin of Justice Systems from Antiquity to Modern Times,” which was published in La Revue des Deux Mondes. This venue – a French bi-weekly dedicated to culture, literature, economics, and politics – ensured a broad non-partisan readership.

Fustel could not have anticipated that a civil war would interrupt the publication of this essay. Only three days after the March 15 publication of his second installment (“Justice in the Feudal World”), fighting broke out in Paris between a left-leaning coalition of intellectuals and members of the working class and a recently elected (February 8) conservative government. The conflict resulted in the burning and vandalism of great swathes of Paris and in the establishment of a parallel government, named “The Commune,” which enacted a liberal agenda including expanded voting rights, the separation of Church and State, self-policing, and the abolition of child labor. The Paris Commune was short-lived, however (March 28 to May 28

Hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn (HDFN) is the immune mediated destruction of fetal and neonatal red blood cells by maternal antibody. HDFN occurs when the fetal red blood cells express a paternally inherited antigen not present on maternal red blood cells. The spectrum of illness ranges from clinically insignificant to that of a critically ill, anemic, hydropic, and jaundiced infant at risk for bilirubin-induced brain damage (kernicterus).

MEUBLE, THE FRENCH word for furniture, stems from the Latin mobilis, movability being the defining characteristic of these domestic items. Relocated from castle to castle and transferred from one family member to another after the Middle Ages, furniture took on new life after the French Revolution as former family heirlooms and ecclesiastical furnishings—many of them from the medieval period—flooded the marketplace as collectibles. In this essay, I examine examples of the preservation, recycling, and repurposing of medieval meubles within a nineteenth-century French context in order to raise broader questions about the temporal and geo-spatial valence of the “Middle Ages.” Filtered through the taxonomies of reuse proposed by archaeologist Michael Schiffer, a first section focuses on new “conservatory processes” such as the “collecting behavior” that prompted figures such as Alexandre Du Sommerard, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, and Albert Jacquemart to preserve medieval furnishings while transforming their use value through display. A second section engages with what Schiffer calls “recycling”: the “remanufacture” of medieval furniture for new purposes, a process enacted by figures including Victor Hugo, Pierre Loti, and Frédéric Spitzer. A final section considers the secondary reuses of medieval furniture as emblematic of modern attitudes to the “Middle Ages” itself.

Conservatory Processes: Sacrilege and Worship

J.-K. Huysmans’ 1884 novel À rebours contains one of the best-known and most scandalous examples of nineteenth-century creative reuse of medieval furniture: his protagonist, Des Esseintes, subverts the original function of the ecclesiastical “relics” he has salvaged from Parisian and provincial antique stores and flea markets, repurposing medieval choir stalls and a pulpit to preach sermons about style. Readers found Des Esseintes’ practices sacrilegious and slipped the book into Britain in a yellow cover. They promoted it as the “breviary of the Decadence.” As fictional as the installation may seem, Des Esseintes’ reappropriation of medieval ecclesiastical furniture derives from the real-life “cathedral corner” of Baron Robert de Montesquiou de Fezensac, composed of seventeenth and eighteenth-century pieces (Figure 6.1). The nobleman later recalled having dismantled the blasphemous ensemble, donating individual pieces to a devout female friend.

How should one account for readers’ outrage over Des Esseintes’ repurposing of medieval ecclesiastical furniture when so many other contemporaries were engaged in similar activities, from transforming choir stalls into coat racks and umbrella stands, altarpiece panels into secular wall decorations, and chasubles into ladies’ coats?

Predominantly literate societies have tended to trivialize oral storytelling, dismissing it as a genre belonging to children and the underprivileged, those without the political or intellectual means to record their narratives for posterity. Such attitudes have often resulted in the infantilization of populations that rely largely on oral traditions, despite the complexity and sophistication of their narrative structures and mnemonic systems. This was as evident in British explorers’ disdain for the orally transmitted stories of India and Africa as it was in Caribbean plantation owners’ condescension toward slaves and their ‘childish’ storytelling circles. Within France, such prejudices extended to ‘primitive’ peasants whose stories were thought to stem from an oral tradition unbroken since the Middle Ages, their voices chronicled in nineteenth-century texts such as George Sand's romans champêtres, considered the perfect material to read out loud to French children, along with works from the popular Bibliothèque bleue series which specialized in textual retellings of medieval stories.

While much scholarship has been devoted to the marginalization of nonliterate cultures during the colonial period (both inside and outside of France), less attention has been paid to the ways in which the same biases were at play in nineteenth-century characterizations of the European Middle Ages. This essay explores the double standard applied to medieval texts in the nineteenth century, just as scholars were establishing what would become the canonical works of French literature. Orally recounting the content of medieval texts in modern French was deemed enriching for children and the illiterate, yet the same stories presented textually to adults (in Old French or in modern translation) disqualified them as ‘literature’ because of the alleged stylistic deficiencies of Old and Middle French, characterized as childish bégaiements or balbutiements (stuttering or stammering).

Such bias for style over substance and for text over orality is clear in works such as Désiré Nisard's 1844 Histoire de la littérature française, or Gaston Paris and Ernest Langlois’ 1895 Chrestomathie du moyen âge, the book which first introduced secondary school children to excerpts of works from the Middle Ages (in Old French, Middle French and modern translation).

The storyteller on the cover of this book stands on the margin, both inside and outside the story. Will he momentarily step into the hall to begin his entertainment at the feast going on inside? Or will he turn his eyes our way instead and launch into the Arthurian romance that has already begun within the frame to his right? Either way, his vielle is raised to play an overture whose melodies have grown so faint that we can now only imagine them. His eyes are trained on the courtly revelry beside him, as are the eyes of the kneeling page and the bishop peering up from below. For this brief moment and forever, these figures all ignore the readers – kings and ladies, monks and nuns, historians, scholars and critics – who watch and listen for the story to begin.

Reading the words on a manuscript page like this one is like watching a performance unfold. The elegant script twines across the page, carrying voices and backstories as dramatic as the message Tristan inscribed on the hazel branch for Iseut. The page is framed by vines among whose colorful leaves animals carry out their impertinent ruses. The reader warms to the drama by the light reflected in the miniatures’ burnished gold, just as the child Marcel warmed to his mother's voice as she read bedtime stories in Proust's exploration of memories both personal and medieval. There is no denying the enchantment.

Before the Gutenberg era, storytelling met critical and dynamic social needs related to governance and war, communication and education, faith and artistic creation, as well as a thousand gradations of entertainment to elicit everything from awe to raucous laughter among people of every age and station. Many feared that storytelling had died when it entered print, but Boccaccio is proof that it thrived in the new medium. As we pass into a world beyond Gutenberg, stories are told in tweets of 140 silent characters, and they stream on the internet, traveling great distances to vast audiences of solitary individuals, their responses illuminated by smartphones and tablets. Humanistic investigation into storytelling has likewise taken a web-based turn, as manuscript libraries the world over make their holdings available in high-quality digitizations, free and open to all on the internet.