Building and Diffusing the Image of Cultural Heritage: Pausanias in Ancient Greece and the Voyages Pittoresques et Romantiques in 19th Century France

This paper offers a comparative study of two examples of building and diffusing the image of cultural heritages: (i) that of Pausanias giving a panorama of what had been the culture of Classical Greece both for the Hellenistic elites of Eastern Mediterranean and for the Roman ones; (ii) that of Charles Nodier and baron Taylor building an image of medieval and Renaissance France for the romantic public of 19th century France. In both cases, the problem was to offer and diffuse an inventory of the past in order to anchor identities of the time. Greek identity in the case of Pausanias and French national one in the case of Charles Nodier and Baron Taylor were in a way similar, but it was interesting to show how much they differed by their political significance and by the means they relied on.