C. Constans, Ph. Lamarque: Les salles des Croisades du château de Versailles ( J. S. C. Riley-Smith)

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Francia-Recensio 2008/4 Mittelalter – Moyen Âge (500–1500)

Claire Constans, Philippe Lamarque, Les Salles des croisades – Château de Versailles, Doussard (éditions du Gui) 2002, 499 S., ISBN 2-95177417-1-5, EUR 245,00.

rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par

Jonathan Riley-Smith, Cambridge

The survival of crusade ideas into the nineteenth century is beginning to be taken seriously. Until recently it would have been impossible to find a reputable historian who would have dared to propose that the crusades outlived the biting assault made on them in the eighteenth century by the heroes of the Enlightenment. The furthest anyone was prepared to go was to suggest that the last vestiges were extinguished by Napoleon when he seized the Knights Hospitallers’ order-state of Malta in 1798. Everyone agreed that the movement’s demise was underlined by the grisly spectacle of Cardinal Ruffo’s undisciplined »Christian Army of the Holy Faith« rampaging through southern Italy in 1799, committing atrocities in support of the exiled Bourbon king of Naples. But some us are now being led to question whether crusading was moribund even as late as 1890, although it is not yet clear whether we are confronted by a few last death-spasms or by the exploitation of attractive but anachronistic ideas and images by Imperialism, which was seizing on them as a package to serve the ends of empire.

It is now certain that there was at least one authentic crusading enterprise in the nineteenth century, Cardinal Lavigerie’s »Institut religieux et militaire des frères armés du Sahara«, a military order which may have lasted for only two years before it was closed down in 1892, but attracted significant support and established two communities of professed brothers in North Africa. There were also a number of para-crusading projects, of which the most interesting was the attempt by the French knights of Malta in the 1820s to recruit English Protestant money and officers to fight the Turks, and much pseudo-crusading language, associated particularly with the French expeditions in North Africa and Lebanon, the Spanish conquest of Morocco and, less directly, with the expansion and government of the British empire. Para-crusading had within it some elements drawn from the old movement, although chosen selectively and distorted. Pseudo-crusading had no correspondence to the old reality, but borrowed its rhetoric and imagery to describe ventures that had nothing at all to do with it, particularly Imperialist ones.

France was at the centre of this movement. It was fuelled by a passionate romanticism, partly generated by Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and by the huge success of Joseph-François Michaud’s »Histoire des croisades«, which portrayed crusading as a formative influence on the development of Europe and the rise to predominance of France. One of the most striking expressions of this renewed attachment to the history of the crusades was the transformation of the château of Versailles, which King Louis Philippe planned to become a museum dedicated to the glories of France and where originally one and then several salles des croisades were embellished with many paintings, for which the leading artists of the time were commissioned. The most famous is Eugène Delacroix, the original of whose »Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople on the Fourth Crusade« now hangs in the Louvre. The programme of decoration followed the course of events as told in Michaud’s »Histoire« and, for the centuries after 1291, in René-Aubert de Vertôt’s »Histoire des chevaliers hospitaliers de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem«, which ensured that the history of the Knights of Malta (as the Knights Hospitaller of St John were now known) was very well represented. The rooms also displayed the coats-of-arms of families whose ancestors had been crusaders. There was fierce competition among French nobles to be included and for years after the rooms had opened in 1843 they continued to bombard the crown with demands for inclusion, producing in support of their case documents, many of them forged, attesting to crusading ancestry.

The salles des croisades constitute much more than a topic in nineteenth-century art history, important as that is. They are revealing evidence for the continuing attraction of the crusade ideal and for the new field of history which is only just beginning to be opened up and has wider implications, because of the way memorialization of the crusades became associated with Imperialism. It is worth remembering, in this respect, that the château of Versailles also contained paintings glorifying the conquest of Algeria, which was already being bathed in pseudo-crusading rhetoric.

In this book the salles have been given the treatment worthy of them. It opens with a brilliant essay by Jean Richard, the doyen of crusade studies, on past depictions of crusading, the immediate intellectual background to the planning of the rooms and the historical influences on the execution of the program. Claire Constans describes each painting and provides a full account of the scheme of decoration, which expanded over time and covered much more than the pictures themselves. Thérèse Burollet draws attention to parallels elsewhere in Europe. Philippe Lamarque describes in detail the coats of arms and reveals the story of their inclusion. The scholarship is exemplary throughout and the writing is clear and informative. The paintings and arms are comprehensively illustrated. I cannot praise the volume highly enough. It is only a pity that it is in a limited edition, because it deserves a wide diffusion.