In Situ (Feb 2019)
Le patrimoine monumental du comté de Nice entre France et Piémont, d’une histoire nationale à l’autre 1830-1930
Abstract
France witnessed its last significant territorial acquisitions during the second half of the nineteenth century, when, in 1860, at the end of the Austro-French Piedmontese War, Napoleon III’s Empire annexed Savoy and the County of Nice. Up until that date, the heritage of these annexed provinces belonged to another nation, the Kingdom of Sardinia and its reigning dynasty, the House of Savoy. The change in sovereignty brought about what could be called a process of ‘Frenchification’ of the territory’s historic monuments. This article focuses on the built heritage of the County of Nice, describing the main features of this process, covering short-term administrative questions as well as longer-term scientific and political aspects between 1830 and 1930. At this last date, fascist-inspired irredentism began to question the idea that Nice should be considered a part of France. The establishment in Nice of an office of the French historic monuments administration was by no means the beginning of governmental policies to protect the region’s monumental heritage. As early as 1832, the Piedmontese State had created a council of antiquities and fine arts (Giunta di antichità e Belle arti) and appointed Carlo Promis as its first inspector (Ispettore dei monumenti d’antichità dei reali Stati). This was in the same year that the government of France’s July Monarchy established a historic monuments commission, together with a post of inspector. As in France, from the outset, the Piedmontese monuments administration relied considerably on the help of local scholarly societies. The first inventory of historic buildings led to an initial list of ‘classified’ monuments enjoying statutory protection, which the French administration took over after 1860. The restoration project on the Roman Tropaeum Alpium, the Trophy of the Alps at La Turbie, may be seen as characteristic of this continuity, but whereas Sardinian civil engineers had advocated a simple consolidation of the structure, Viollet-le-Duc and his followers preferred their perspective of restitution of the monument. This new concept in restoration also entailed some revisions in the interpretation of history. The historic monuments and archaeological sites in Nice prior to 1860 were all heritage recognised as such under the regime of the House of Savoy. A new dynamic began to affect historic monuments after 1848 when the House of Savoy became involved in the process of Italian unification. The question of style became a highly political issue in Northern Italy, where architects of historicist inspiration sought to forge a national architectural style suitable for the new nation. With the French annexation of the County of Nice, the heritage acquired another national history, that of France. A fragment of a monument of antiquity was symbolically given to Napoleon III for the collections of the Museum of National Antiquities at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
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