The Chair of National Antiquities was created in 1905, in very special surrounding circumstances. The Universities were only interested in classical civilisations : the Middle East (Egypt and Mesopotamia), Greece and Rome. Although, since King Louis-Philippe and above all since Napoleon III, much attention had been given to the Gauls and to Gallo-Roman vestiges, the subject was not taught anywhere. And yet, the political and cultural circles were agitated by a ferment of Franco-German antagonism which the war of 1870 had exacerbated. In novels, poems, plays and operas, our ancestors the Gauls were placed at the forefront and Vercingetorix was a national hero, while the Germans glorified Arminius.Born in 1859, Camille Jullian was, at eleven years of age, a pupil in a Marseilles lycée. He heard his history teacher relate the sinister events of the eastern front, waving Caesar's De Bello Gallico at the class. The Germans were the Romans and the French were the Gauls, Julius Caesar was Bismark and Vercingetorix was Gambetta. Jullian, before all others, wanted to make room for the history of Gaul in university teaching. The Universities refused to include it in their syllabus, but the Collège de France welcomed it and appointed Jullian in preference for Durkheim, a clear
symbolic choice: the Great War wasn't far off. From 1907 to 1914, Jullian published the first four volumes of his great Histoire de la Gaule. During the war his lectures were full of the sort of patriotism which we would be tempted to call jingoistic today. He then wrote four more volumes of his Histoire. He died in 1933. With Camille Jullian, the teaching of the history of Gaul, still ignored by French universities, became extraordinarily prestigious. Albert Grenier (from 1935 to 1948) and Paul-Marie Duval (from 1964 to 1982) more or less claimed him as their model, although giving their chairs different names from his.When I was elected to the
Collège in 1984, I insisted on retaining the original name of National Antiquities chosen by Jullian. My reasons for this choice were different from his: our towns and our countryside were being transformed by vast civil engineering developments, such as the building of modern town centres, car-parks, motorways, TGV rail tracks, and many others, which were destroying our archaeological heritage. Our national antiquities were being killed off. Just as Jullian had criticised contemporary indifference to France's past, I wanted to draw attention to the destruction in progress. That was twenty years ago. Since then, the destruction has been prohibited by law,
French archaeology has greatly evolved, even if the current situation is neither ideal nor even satisfactory.
Since I have been in charge of it, the Chair of National Antiquities has had two ambitions:
1. To try and advance analysis and debate on subjects dealing with Gaul and its relationship with the present world. What does La Gaule mean ? How did Gaul come to be ? What was it ? What part did Caesar's conquest play ? How were the myths, images and heroes produced ?
2. To bring to light recent discoveries from archaeological digs, publications or exhibitions, invite the organisers of the major archaeological operations to my seminars, as well as foreign specialists of the « Celtic world ». Encounters emulate reflexion on methodology and results.
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