The Monument in the Age of the Enlightenment: A Genealogy

Abstract: The relation between architecture and memory, between the built environment and its mnemonic function for people and society, attains an exemplary character in the concept of the “monument”, and, especially, in the idea of a “public” or “historical monument”. Nevertheless, as Françoise Choay has shown in her study titled “L’Allégorie du Patrimoine”, the concept of the “monument” is constantly transformed through historical time and is receptive to different interpretations by antiquaries, philosophers, historians, travellers, and architects, according to the worldview and the spirit of the age. Consequently, as the concept of the “monument” changes over time, the relation between architecture as a material structure of the past and the social function of memory is transformed as well. In other words, the “memory of the stones” as an immaterial, intangible cultural heritage and its various semiotic forms and manifestations are subject to radical metamorphoses through history. The 18th century, when the new spirit of the Enlightenment started to unfold itself, was a turning point for those transformations. The explosion of archaeology as a systematic study of ancient monuments led to emergent Neoclassicism and was intimately connected with various changes in the understanding of historical time. During the era of the Enlightenment, architecture became an allegory of time and a symbolic space of mnemonic values, norms, and epistemic ideas that could bridge the past, the present, and the future. What were the main concepts of the “monument” in the 18th century? The aim of the present paper is to investigate this question through the elaboration of a genealogy of selected transpositions of the concept of the “monument”, as these are articulated in various textual sources of the Enlightenment discourse. In that way, we hope to understand the “book of stone” through the “book of paper” (Victor Hugo’s conceptual duality from his novel “Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482”) in order to shed some light on the values attached to architecture as a mnemonic structure. The working hypothesis behind this research is John Ruskin’s intuition, expressed in the “Lamp of Memory”, from his major book The Seven Lamps of Architecture: “We may live without architecture and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her”.