(University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Now largely forgotten except among some archaeologists, “l’Affaire Glozel” made headlines all over France, across Europe, and even in North America in the late 1920s. It began with the accidental discovery of ancient fragments by a farmer, Claude Fradin, and his grandson Émile, who were ploughing their land in Glozel, a hamlet in the commune of Ferrières-sur-Sichon, at the southern edge of the Allier department, in 1924. After visits from teachers and members of the local learned society, the family rented the site to an amateur archaeologist named Antoine Morlet, a doctor from Vichy, the nearest town of any size, who conducted excavations, and in late 1925 began publishing the results. The finds, including inscribed stones and figured vases, aroused enormous interest and stirred up a controversy that roiled French prehistory, because they challenged then-prevailing theories about the beginnings of writing and of prehistoric art. Among those excited by the discoveries was Salomon Reinach, an academician and director of the Musée d’archéologie nationale in Saint-Germain-en-Laye; he became the most prominent defender of Glozel.
Drawings of engraved tablets, by Salomon Reinach.
In the fall of 1927 René Dussaud published a pamphlet charging that the inscribed and figured objects at Glozel were forgeries. Dussaud, then in his late fifties, was a busy man: curator of ancient Near Eastern art at the Louvre and a professor at the École du Louvre, a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the central clearinghouse for archaeology in France, and editor of the leading journal in his field, Syria. It was far from the first such attack but was considered decisive because of the author’s expertise in early alphabetic script. Shortly thereafter Morlet and the family agreed to the visit of an inspection commission of archaeologists from across Europe, which issued a report casting doubt on the authenticity of the objects discovered. The affair then entered a judicial phase, with a police search of the Fradin residence early in 1928, followed by several trials – of Émile Fradin for fraud, of which he was acquitted, and eventually of Dussaud for libel, of which he was found guilty but condemned to only a symbolic penalty. Morlet ended the excavations in 1936 without having convinced his professional colleagues of the site’s authenticity.
Dussaud was a serious scholar with an expansive administrative role; his interest to the point of obsession in the media coverage of the Glozel controversy exemplifies the perpetual tension in archaeology between its scientific aspirations and its simultaneous need for and suspicion of media attention. In October 1927 he took out a subscription to the Argus de la Presse, a commercial clipping service.1 Like many clients of the Argus he was using it to keep track of his own achievements, and timed his subscription to coincide with the publication his long essay in pamphlet form concerning the excavations at Glozel. But the scope of the selection went well beyond his own publication to include any article with the keyword “Glozel.” Within three weeks Dussaud had received 728 clippings.2 By the time he let his subscription lapse, at the end of February 1928, the pile of clippings numbered nearly 1500 individual items, from newspapers all over France, Europe, and the French empire, in nine languages besides French.
The Glozel affair opens a window into a crucial time in the history of archaeology, what William Stiebing has cast as a transition from the field’s heroic age, characterized by entrepreneurial, swashbuckling amateurs searching for treasure with minimal regard for legality or preservation, to the era of its modern professionalization, with archaeologists working under government or university auspices to increase the sum of knowledge about societies past.3 Through that window we can glimpse a whole set of wider dynamics. Discussions of Glozel also entertained, implicitly but also often explicitly, questions about the nature of scientific learning, the course of civilization – whether it moved from east to west or vice versa – and popular understandings of both. Glozel offered archaeologists an opportunity to make a case for the scientificity of their work, and to debate their methods on a very public stage. Nearly a century later, it raises questions of striking resonance to both scholarly and wider conversations today. Over the last fifteen years, stimulating work led by Nathan Schlanger and others has explored archaeological archives as, in his phrase, “the tangible memory . . . of the discipline,” their contents long considered either too trivial to warrant consideration or “too important . . . to be scrutinized by unsupervised practitioners or allowed into the public domain.”4 The constitution of archaeological archives, a process unusually evident in the Glozel case, says much about the frontiers and horizons of the field at any given moment, about what it seeks to know and the worlds it seeks to reconstruct.
A handwritten note on the external folder containing the fairly thin file on the Glozel affair in the Archives Nationales de France contains, on separate lines, this bureaucratic phrase: “M. de Bar/Glozel/dossier à classer/garder que les coupures.” De Bar was the head of the Higher Education Bureau at the Ministry of Education, in charge of the government’s support for research programs; the note instructed him, or more likely a subordinate, to file away the report, indicating that the affair no longer required the attention of the state. Although it is undated, this notation probably was made after the ministry’s Commission on Prehistoric Monuments decided not to list [“classer”] Glozel in January 1928.5 At this point the State officially had no further interest in Glozel, a private excavation taking place on private land; as one official had noted a few months earlier, “appartient-il à l’administration de rechercher et de proclamer dans une question scientifique, une vérité officielle? Je ne le pense pas...”6 The departmental archives of the Allier in Moulins similarly contain only a slim official dossier on Glozel. But what about that notation: “keep only the clippings”? Why clippings? Why only clippings?7.
Not simply a form of information storage, clipping also can be regarded as a type of collecting, one that seeks to preserve something of the materiality and the randomness of the past – the randomness that, as Benedict Anderson has observed, results from the very layout of newspaper pages. Yet as a form of collecting clipping also attempts to impose some rudimentary order upon this randomness. As a process, clipping inverts archaeology – taking a whole and turning it into fragments – but it does so in the service of a fundamentally archaeological epistemology, one that posits a missing whole from the sum of its available parts.8 Among the clippers, only Dussaud’s motives can be identified with any clarity: his letter to Jullian suggests that he was tracking the public response to Glozel as an ongoing battle between two sides, and he expressed satisfaction when the tide seemed to be turning in the anti-Glozelians’ favor. But surely, the sheer bulk of the assemblages, as well as their retention for decades in cupboards and attics, constituted at least one motive in itself, recording the importance, the weight of the affair as it unspooled, justifying or excusing the clipper’s compulsion as a small part of a national obsession. Here, the masses of paper seem to tell us, is what it was like to live through Glozel, to try to keep up with it, to master its surprising twists and turns while also keeping up with the general news. More simply, here – somewhere, buried in these piles (I won’t push the analogy too far) – is the truth; good luck finding it.
Beyond this, Glozel casts light on the intersection of mass media and public understandings of science and history, in ways that have striking resonance for our own time.
Blame the Media
Journalists and archaeologists could agree on one thing in 1927: scientific controversy sold newspapers, but media coverage did science – specifically the scientific pretensions of prehistory – no favors. In a long overview of the controversy, a reporter for L’Avenir ran through the views of various scholars (another prominent academician, Camille Jullian, took an unusual intermediate position, believing that some but not all of the discoveries were authentic but from the Gallo-Roman rather than the neolithic period). Then, under the rubric “Polémiques,” the reporter clearly assigned responsibility: “La presse s’en mêla, elle accueillit les déclarations – parfois acerbes – des uns et des autres, prenant parti pour ou contre. Bref, l’affaire tournait au scandale...”9 L’abbé Henri Breuil, the eminent prehistorian, grew so disgusted with the media coverage that he refused to comment. But this refusal, as multiple newspapers recorded, did not quite amount to silence: a story in Le Quotidien cited Breuil’s statement to another daily that criticized journalists’ role in turning the affair into a “polémique grossière.”10 Some accounts conveyed a certain cynicism about the coverage, one story in Paris-Soir commenting that Glozel was fast becoming a fait divers, calculated to sell newspapers.11
Certainly archaeologists at the time had a tendency to blame the media for enflaming the controversy. Wrote one of Dussaud’s correspondents, “Je crois que ces événements mystificateurs sont une loi de la nature et que c’est aussi un des effets de cette surabondance de journaux illustrés, de brochures bon marché qui fait germer les préhistoriens et les archéologues. Afin d’exciter les primaires sur les silex, les fibules et les [illisible], on fait éclore les imitateurs. Quoi de plus amusant que de mystifier les bourgeois ?”12 More directly, André Vayson de Pradenne charged in the journal of the Société préhistorique française that the affair was entirely the product of one widely read literary journal, the Mercure de France, and its regular chronicler of prehistory, Arnold van Gennep, who gave Morlet as much space as he wanted to write up his finds.13 Most of the criticism of the press thus tended to come from the anti-Glozelian side. In a letter to Le Temps, for example, Henri Bégouën, a prehistorian at the University of Toulouse and prominent anti-Glozelian, complained that the “nuée de reporters” at Glozel had prevented the commission from working in “le calme et le recueillement désirables”. Reinach replied that on the contrary, the presence of journalists had been indispensable: “Des yeux en surnombre, quand il s’agit de constater des faits, ne sont jamais inutiles.”14
Bégouën did not in fact disagree about the value of press coverage of archaeological finds. In a lengthy letter to the editor of the Mercure de France in July 1927, responding to accusations against him leveled by Morlet, Bégouën stressed the importance of openness in, and wide publicity for, archaeological excavations, advocating for a public conference at Glozel where archaeologists could gather to examine the site and their finds.15 Bégouën cited numerous examples of archaeologists encouraging open debate, recalling that fifteen years before, the prehistorian Denis Peyrony halted a potentially important dig until he could assemble ten of his colleagues to excavate with him and share their views. “L’autorité scientifique de Peyrony ne fut pas diminuée par ce contrôle, bien au contraire.”16 Bégouën also made a vigorous case for prompt and thorough press coverage of archaeology. Indeed, he declared, in some circumstances coverage in the mainstream press could substitute for scholarly publication.17
Archaeologists only rarely acknowledged another use they made of the media, to an extent that sometimes blurred the distinction between scholarly exchange and journalism: as a relay, indeed a megaphone, for their quarrels. Newspapers were happy to remind them. Le Temps – along with Le Figaro and the Journal des Débats one of the establishment newspapers of record, their influence far exceeding their circulation – received so many communications from figures on both sides of the controversy that, while publishing them serially under the heading “Autour d’un controverse scientifique,” it felt the need to recall certain limits. Writing that it would publish only “opinions objectives” that avoided personal attacks, the paper added, “il faut bien aussi que nos correspondants tiennent compte de l’impossibilité pour tout journal de donner une étendue illimitée aux diverses rubriques, et cela peut nous obliger encore à renoncer à certains témoignages trop longuement exprimés.”18 Among the archaeologists, Morlet in particular acquired a reputation for litigiousness and inveterate self-promotion; prefacing a letter that appeared in early February 1928, the Journal des Débats wrote somewhat wryly, “le docteur Morlet aime beaucoup à invoquer son droit de réponse. Nous y faisons droit bien volontiers et la lettre ci-dessous confirmera nos lecteurs dans l’éternelle vérité de la parabole de ‘La Paille et la Poutre’” (from the Sermon on the Mount).19 If from early on scholars like the eminent paleontologist Marcellin Boule fretted that all the publicity was discrediting French science, some journalists and commentators blamed the scientists themselves for their intemperance.20 “La science !” wrote an exasperated Victor Méric. “Quelle abominable plaisanterie ! Ils sont là une douzaine d’augures qui n’arrivent point à se mettre d’accord. Et, pourtant, il s’agit de vérifications relativement simples.”21 Calling attention to the uncertainties and gaps in archaeological knowledge as a whole, the Guardian noted that prehistory was still in its early stages, inviting prudence.22
It would, though, be unfair to characterize the media’s role in the controversy as simply a megaphone, or to view it as purely venal. Newspapers that published communications from scholars felt it their duty to do so, even if they knew or suspected that articles about Glozel would not hurt sales. Others took it upon themselves to act as interpreters: an article in the Belgian newspaper La Meuse explained key terms in archaeology, such as “mobilier,” detailed the types of objects found at Glozel, listed the main proponents of both sides of the controversy, and briefly set out the accomplishments of the members of the international commission.23 Newspapers also frequently published explanations – some summary, some much longer – of the larger significance of the affair. Over a photograph of the commission members at work, a headline in the staunchly Glozelian Le Matin screamed “les résultats des fouilles de Glozel apporteraient un bouleversement complet dans la chronologie de la préhistoire,” promising a new intermediate period between those currently known.24 Even more, as the journalist Marcel Sauvage put it in a thorough account of the controversy, “Mais voici que le problème soulevé par Glozel : quel est le chemin suivi par la civilisation, est-ce de l’ouest à l’est selon M. Salomon Reinach, ou de l’est à l’ouest comme le soutient M. Dussaud ? se dévoile peu à peu en son entier.”25 Of course some accounts personalized the controversy, but this was another way of conveying the stakes: Eugène Marsan wrote in Le Figaro that Reinach “sait à quel point l’enjeu de Glozel importe. Rien de moins que l’histoire de la civilisation. Si Glozel est faux, rien ne va : la civilisation a passé d’Orient en Occident : tout est venu du Jardin, entre le Tigre et l’Euphrate. Ce que M. Salomon Reinach ne veut à aucun prix admettre.”26
Marsan made this observation in an article on an earlier controversy involving Reinach, when as a young curator he had recommended the Louvre’s purchase of the so-called tiara of Saïtapharnès. The museum duly bought the crown, supposedly that of a Scythian king of the third century BCE, in 1896, only to face decisive evidence a few years later that it was a modern forgery.27 So many accounts of the Saïtapharnès affair, including caricatures, appeared in the press that when a group of anti-Glozelians tried to shout down a lecture by Joseph Loth, a pro-Glozelian professor at the Collège de France, they chanted “Saïta-pharnès.”28 Reinach came in for criticism for his omnipresence in the media; some of the attacks on him were tinged with anti-Semitism, though it was explicit only in far-right journals like the Action française, where Glozel fueled tangled, obsessive anti-positivist tirades by Léon Daudet.29 Loth, for his part, cast his controversial lecture series as a way of avoiding over-reliance on the media: “Je tiens à dire moi-même en public ce que je sais et ne veux d’aucune façon amorcer une nouvelle campagne de presse.” But Loth issued this statement, of course, in a newspaper interview clearly intended as a kind of teaser for the lectures; courses at the Collège de France had a long history of prompting media attention and public clamor.30 Nothing could have made clearer the symbiotic relationship between archaeology, its traditional academic relays, and the very media that archaeologists blamed for distorting and tarnishing properly scholarly debates.
“Fake News” and fausses nouvelles
In 1921, Marc Bloch, fresh from his experience as a sergeant during World War I, published an article in the Revue de synthèse historique entitled “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre.” Part review essay, part research agenda, part memoir, the article probed the psychological dimensions of the waves of fake news that had spread from the war zone (though they usually originated along the support lines to the rear) to the home front throughout the war.31 In his essay, the only scholarly article Bloch published on the Great War during his lifetime, he treats false news as a phenomenon of collective psychology, which survives and propagates only if it finds “un bouillon de culture favorable.” For Bloch, “la fausse nouvelle est le miroir où ‘la conscience collective’ contemple ses propres traits.”32 As Leonard Smith has observed, the perspicacity about experience and narration that Bloch demonstrates not only in this article but in his war diaries and correspondence anticipates questions historians would not begin to grapple with for decades.33 But the fact that, in 1921, he already had several books on fake news he could reflect on makes clear that the phenomenon itself had some purchase on “la conscience collective” in 1920s France. Indeed, several newspaper articles that appeared after the publication of the commission report in late December 1927 suggested that Glozel would be a fit subject for “des études de psychologie curieuse” or that Freud might have illuminating things to say about this “irritation du cerveau qui n’épargne personne et qu’on pourrait appeler la glozélite.”34
The study of fake news begins, as Bloch observes, with the historian treating error not as something to be eliminated but as “un objet d’étude.” In such a study, Bloch observes, even minor typographical errors may have some significance.35 Accounts of Glozel were riddled with errors, notably but not exclusively in the spelling of commission members’ names.36 Beyond this level, determining where fake news begins (and ends) and who is propagating it poses a problem at Glozel, since these questions to some extent involve subjective judgement. In some instances, however, the clippings files permit us to reconstruct the production and distribution of fake news almost in real time; one such instance is of particular interest because it involves reports on the archaeological process, that is the international commission’s verification dig at Glozel in November 1927. Conscious of the media frenzy surrounding their work, commission members issued a brief statement at the end of the dig saying they would not comment on press reports.37 Even before this statement, newspapers reported on the commission’s refusal to issue daily bulletins, the Loire républicaine noting with a mix of understanding and disappointment that the group had decided to say nothing until it completed its report.38 But this reticence did not prevent journalists from speculating, and, indeed, from telling readers that the commission had determined that Glozel was authentic. In the Dussaud files, the Loire républicaine story appears on a page between two others, one with a headline declaring that the Glozel discoveries “seraient authentiques,” another saying that that the site “est bien authentique,” leaving no doubt at all. The headline in Le Matin after the second day of the dig went even further: “L’authenticité du gisement de Glozel est reconnue à l’unanimité par la commission internationale. ” French publications were not the only ones fooled; a headline in the Daily Mail described “ancient history rewritten.”39 How could they have been so wrong?
For one thing, newspapers devoted a lot of time to describing the objects unearthed by the commission; for Le Quotidien, again in a headline, “Une tête de renne gravée sur un galet atteste l’authenticité du gisement de Glozel.”40 In this epistemology, seeing was believing, in the sense described by Reinach in a letter to Jullian the previous August: “Sous mes yeux, à portée de ma main,” he wrote, “on a extrait, fouillant de la lande vierge, une tablette inscrite, une idole d’argile du type lingam-yoni. C’est étonnant, c’est déroutant, mais c’est incontestable.”41 In another letter a day later, Reinach added : “Malgré les objections, je ne puis renoncer à rendre public le témoignage de mes yeux.”42 But the eyes cannot testify without the use of some other senses and faculties. The Daily Mail report contained this revealing sentence, which followed a description of some of the discoveries: “The scientists vouch that the finds were made in soil which had not previously been disturbed and could not have been placed there by a modern hand.” Yet “the scientists” – the members of the commission, that is – were making no declarations, so this assertion reflects some level of inference. The day after it asserted that Glozel’s authenticity “est reconnue,” Le Matin provided a detailed account of commission members’ expressions and gestures on the last day of the verification dig; it even offered (in paraphrase) the comments of another archaeologist observing the dig, who interpreted those gestures as confirming the radical importance of the finds.43 Rumor and the overheard conversational fragment could also find their way into such assurances, even though more prudent journalists pointed out the risks in attaching too much importance to them.44 Other admonitions against believing the speculation, such as Bégouën’s,45 could be dismissed as partisan – a familiar part of the fake news syndrome.
In the event, the commission’s report, published as a supplement to the Revue anthropologique just before Christmas, validated Bégouën’s warning: it concluded, on the basis of careful study of the soil surrounding the finds more than the finds themselves, that the objects found at Glozel were not ancient.46 With the Glozelians vehemently rejecting this assessment and attempting to discredit it, the press could and did keep busy with articles on the many responses to the reports, including, early in January, Loth’s lecture series at the Collège de France. For Le Matin, however, the mass circulation daily that had most heavily staked its reputation on Glozel’s authenticity, the prospect of the Glozel controversy receding from the headlines presented too much of a threat to its often shaky bottom line. Taking the story literally into its own hands, the newspaper decided to send one of its editors and another journalist to carry out and report on their own excavations in the vicinity of Glozel, where their close relationship with the Fradin family presumably facilitated access. “Les fouilles du Matin à Glozel,” ran the front-page headline on 6 January 1928, less than two weeks after the publication of the commission report, over photographs of the editor, Pierre Guitet-Vauquelin, and his colleague holding up their finds in what looks like a snowy field.47 The headline continues with details on the location of the dig, and finally this revealing phrase: “les Fradin ne veulent pas être traités de faussaires,” but of course similar discoveries nearby did nothing to exculpate them.
The Dussaud clippings include a number of reactions from Le Matin’s competitors. Writing in Paris-Soir, Maurice Verne praised the newspaper’s initiative, but said its efforts, in leaving out the controversy, were too simple.48 L’Humanité took a far harsher view. In an article entitled “Toujours Glozel” that mentioned neither Le Matin nor the correspondent by name, L’Huma dismissed the finds as well as Guitet-Vauquelin’s “brillante idée” of examining the clay in a nearby grotto, “comme s’il pouvait y avoir une analogie quelconque entre une cavité de rocher et une construction en pierre sèche pleine de fentes et de fissures !” Attempting to reassert the boundary between science and the news, L’Humanité declared that Parisian journalists could not discredit the unanimous report of reputable scientists: “Car, nous insistons, le problème de Glozel est d’un ordre purement scientifique. Les ‘profanes’ n’ont rien à faire là-dedans.”49
But probably the most damning response to Le Matin’s gambit came from the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné, then just over a decade old.50 The Canard took every advantage of the opportunities Glozel offered to mock the many types of people caught up in the affair: savants, local amateurs, peasants – and their fellow journalists.51 The Canard had a field day with objects known as the “idoles bisexuées” published by Morlet in the Mercure de France, regarded by many as “en quelque sorte la ‘Gazette officielle de Glozel’”.52 Dussaud had noted dryly that one seemed to have its breasts crossed over each other; the Canard, in an article entitled “D’une mode néolithique,” observed that such breasts must have been remarkably supple, postulating that it was perhaps this very suppleness that neolithic men valued above all else in their wives’ bosoms.53
But the Canard reacted with particular verve when Le Matin began its own excavations. A few days later, the Canard published an article claiming that it had itself carried out excavations at what it called “le lotissement de Glozel.” The article consists of a supposed dig journal in which the journalist spends all his time observing the other journalists who are trying to excavate at Glozel, sometimes coming to blows, as well as scouting out decent places to eat. Readers are treated to the details of his wardrobe, modeled on those of the Matin editor as recorded in a front-page photograph, but after three days at Glozel the reporter has yet to do any digging.54 For the rare reader who might be wondering if this piece of fake news actually represented real investigative journalism, something for which the Canard is now famous but which it did not undertake until much later in its history, the newspaper published several cartoons, one a schematic map of the new “lotissement,” with streets named after the main Glozelians as well as a “Cercle préhistorique,” conveying something of the repetitiveness of the story. Another cartoon presents a rendering of Boulevard Morlet, suggesting that such venerable institutions as the Institut and major newspapers had been reduced to carnival barkers.
Drawings published in Le Canard enchaîné in 1928.
The Canard’s account of its reporter’s get-up helps to contextualize one other dimension of the coverage of Glozel, not exactly fake news but on the blurry boundary between the fake and the merely superficial. Many newspapers offered detailed descriptions of the appearance and clothing of the commission members. Their group photograph needed little commentary: they appear in the dark suits, coats, and bowler hats in which archaeologists typically posed, embracing their status as scholars rather than as field workers, an incongruity that cartoonists gleefully and repeatedly seized upon. Such images set up a class distinction that makes the Fradin family look like aliens in front of their own home, and not only because of that crucial but incongruous word “Musée” posted behind them. But when the visitors put on work clothes, the newspapers took notice. Here, for example is the Cri de Paris on the delegation at work:
Tous ces doctes savants avaient revêtu des salopettes gros bleu dont la toile dure d’apprêt leur donnait l’air d’apprentis serruriers ou de poseurs électriciens équipés à neuf. M. l’abbé Sabret [sic, pour Favret] portait une combinaison kaki digne du meilleur mécano d’aviation. Comme ses collègues, Miss Garrod avait coiffé un béret basque fort seyant qui emprisonnait à peine sa courte chevelure ; seul, M. Ferrer [sic, pour Forrer], de Strasbourg, qu’accompagnait son épouse, opérait en melon.55
The comparisons to mechanics or apprentice locksmiths, notwithstanding the deliberately humorous tone, convey a certain sense of anxiety, as though Glozel has made it impossible to tell what an archaeologist looks like, or who really is an archaeologist. Clearly, Glozel troubled in multiple ways the epistemology of the eye, in which seeing led unproblematically to recognition and thence to deeper knowledge.
Émile Fradin at his museum in Glozel.
The museum’s collections, 1927.
Affairs to Remember
By focusing on the commercial aspect of Glozel – many reports cited the hefty four-franc fee the Fradins charged for admission to the small museum they had opened on their property – the Canard enchaîné cast newspaper competition as part of a larger problem with the journalism of the day. As should be evident by now, newspapers’ attitudes toward Glozel did not break down along conventional political lines: if L’Action française was anti-Glozelian, so was L’Humanité and an independent leftist daily, L’Œuvre; if the far-right Le Matin was Glozelian, so was the Socialist party daily Le Populaire and the generally left-leaning Le Quotidien.56 In this disconcerting media landscape, newspapers sought out familiar reference points with which to orient their readers. In so doing, they extended their role as interpreters and translators, offering an authoritative version of Glozel that would make sense of the unfamiiar and frame archaeology and science in general in terms their readers could understand.
Immediately upon publication of the commission report, three members of the Académie des Inscriptions, Reinach, Loth, and Espérandieu – according to Dussaud the only three out of fifty-eight who still accepted the authenticity of Glozel – issued a solemn statement. Referring to the group as “la commission Bégouën,” a shorthand for the charge that the anti-Glozelians had unduly influenced the commission’s composition, the three wrote:
Il manquait, à la découverte admirable de Glozel, la consécration la plus haute : celle dont l’Inquisition romaine honora le génie de Galilée. A ce titre, la commission Bégouën a bien mérité de la science, et les soldats de la juste cause lui doivent des remerciements. Quant à elle-même et à son inspirateur toulousain, ils partageront, avec les commissaires de 1633, la seule immortalité qui soit à leur portée, celle du ridicule.57
Widely reprinted, the three academicians’ statement provoked a vociferous, often mocking response. A few newspapers of a Catholic bent picked up on the religious overtones of the statement, taking offense at what they saw as disparagement of the Church; at the same time, some leftist papers charged that “sur l’affaire Glozel s’est greffée une campagne cléricale contre la préhistoire elle-même.”58 If the right-wing La Liberté mildly called the comparison of Morlet to Galileo “peut-être excessive,”59 a columnist for Le Temps scoffed at the reference, saying that no sensible spectactor would compare the commission members to Torquemada, and that no one wanted to burn Morlet – surely a lesser genius than “l’illustre Toscan” – alive.60 La Nation chimed in on the theme of civility, calling the statement “grossièreté envers d’éminents savants étrangers,” and evidence of a lack of “cette sérénité toujours nécessaire à l’emploi des méthodes scientifiques comme elle l’est à la conduite des affaires publiques.”61 Here the commentary at least returns to the original frame of reference, science. Attempts to find Catholic or anti-Catholic motivation for any position on Glozel, such as La Rumeur’s suggestion in February that Bégouën’s career had been shaped, and stymied, by his reactionary Catholic upbringing, founder on the multiplicity of available references and connotations.
If the Galileo reference in the end fizzled in its own hyperbole, another, more spontaneous comparison suffused discussions of Glozel in the media. For many, the divide over Glozel recalled the Dreyfus affair of a quarter century earlier, another moment when the authenticity of evidence was vigorously and divisively debated in public. Salomon Reinach was, of course, the younger brother of Joseph Reinach, a newspaper publisher and politician who was one of the first members of parliament to protest Dreyfus’s initial conviction and sentence to deportation. Just as the word “affaire” became emblematic of the Dreyfus affair, a two-frame cartoon by Caran d’Arche, first published in Le Figaro a month or so after the J’Accuse, became metonymic of the social divisions it caused. Thirty years later, a reference to one of the captions, “Ils en ont parlé” in a description of a bitter argument between two ladies at a tea party sufficed to convey the parallel between the Dreyfus affair and Glozel.62
Most references to the Dreyfus affair appeared under a similar sign of levity.63 At least two newspapers published an item about an orchestra in a town not far from Glozel (the town’s name was not given, suggesting that the story could be apocryphal) whose musicians were so divided on the matter that they could not play together.64 Occasionally, however, the evocation of Dreyfus turned into an invocation, as a protagonist and his press relay went off the rails. “J’accuse Emile Fradin, déclare M. Peyrony,” screamed a headline in Le Journal in early January 1928.65 Founder of the first French museum devoted to prehistoric man at Les Eyzies (Dordogne), Peyrony had served as the government representative on the verification commission and had appended to its report a statement recounting how he came to reject the authenticity of the finds. The Journal article proved less dramatic than its title: Peyrony was accusing Emile Fradin, the youngest member of the family and the one most active in the excavations, of having lied to him on several occasions about his knowledge of certain texts about early inscriptions. (The books were significant because they could have furnished Fradin with signs and images to use in a forgery.) Others had already pointed to Emile as the most likely forger, and Peyrony, who cultivated the image of a salt-of-the-earth former schoolteacher, was not “accusing” him directly. But the article had enough importance to be reprinted immediately in one of the principal establishment newspapers, the Journal des Débats. At a time many newspapers were facing financial difficulties, the story demonstrates the media’s understanding of the commercial and recursive power of references to the Dreyfus affair.
The leftist newspaper L’Œuvre, which in another kind of journalistic gamesmanship claimed to be the only Paris paper to have been anti-Glozelian from the beginning, took a dim view of such allusions.66 In an article that appeared a few days after Peyrony’s “J’accuse” (which it did not mention specifically), L’Œuvre accused the press of having “unleashed the Glozel affair – and Salomon Reinach.” Scientists detested each other, the journalist “D” observed, yet normally got along in private. But, the article went on, this was not a Dreyfus affair. “Nous nous sommes battus pour un homme et pour une idée ; nous ne nous battrons pas pour des tessons. Il faut que la vérité représente quelque chose de plus haut, de plus noble, de plus clair que l’opinion d’un savant !”67 The media’s responsibility – the blame it deserved – came from giving undue publicity to normal scholarly disagreement, and thus not only enflaming the dispute but harming the reputation of “une science que les citoyens respectueux pouvaient imaginer plus précise.” For L’Œuvre, though, the problem lay less with the science than with science’s need, indeed craving, for publicity.
The Commission report, for the most part dry and understated, views truth as something patiently and dispassionately arrived at; it expresses regret that the debate had “complètement dévié du seul terrain sur lequel il aurait dû rester : celui d’une discussion scientifique dans la sérénité scientifique, par des hommes dont la discipline scientifique est l’expression morale journalière.”68 Without the authority to order chemical testing of the objects (some tests were eventually carried out, with predictably ambiguous results, though none clearly supported Glozel’s antiquity), the visitors focused more on what they could say about the site itself. The report begins with a rehearsal of the members’ credentials as field archaeologists, and it carefully narrates archaeology as process, emphasizing their meticulous examination not just of the objects but of their placement in the soil, and the nature of the soil itself. Particularly damning evidence came from what appeared to be soil packets surrounding the objects unearthed, distinct for an inch or two from the composition of the earth the commission observed in this sector of the site.69
The lesson many archaeologists took away from Glozel thus involved the precarious balance between science and public attention. Commission members insisted that when they arrived at Glozel, they put aside all the impressions that articles on either side could have left, “décidés à ne se laisser guider que par les constatations qu’ils feraient.”70 But the word “constatations” implies something that goes beyond seeing to involve a certain level of understanding. The report’s concluding section begins on a philosophical note, which suggests an external knowledge or professional culture that archaeologists shared:
La Commission croit devoir rappeler que l’histoire de l’archéologie, comme celle d’ailleurs d’autres sciences – pour toutes les époques – a enregistré de nombreuses mésaventures (certaines gravures paléolithiques, âge de la corne en Suisse, vases et statuettes de Spiennes, vases moabites, etc.). C’est pourquoi elle avait le devoir de s’entourer de toutes les précautions possibles.71
To avoid “mésaventures” one must have in place all possible “précautions,” what we might now call professional standards. Though the commission members did not offer any specifics, looming on the horizon of this contrast we can glimpse all the norms and constraints of professional standards, and beyond them of scientific discipline, of the sort that few amateur archaeologists would be able to master.
Fueled as much by belief in the importance of public debate in science as by a clash of egos, Glozel pitted against each other two different visions of archaeology, one a structured discipline with recognizable subfields and areas of expertise, the other a more informal enterprise in which gifted amateurs could still make important discoveries. After the spectacle of Glozel, only a stricter set of rules delimiting the boundaries between amateurs and professionals could secure archaeology’s scientific status; under this new regime, as Laurent Olivier has put it, “c’est la fouille et non plus la collecte qui produit des données scientifiques.”72 Such rules, Dussaud argued in a lecture shortly after the report’s publication, would have to be enforced by state regulation of excavations, the norm, he observed, in most countries besides France.73 In both visions, however, publicity would play an important role. If in the ensuing decades archaeology’s methods and procedures would certainly become better defined and more recognizably “scientific,” its professional practitioners have never been able entirely to forgo or to control the media attention that helped shape their field. And archaeology’s wider public arguably still wants to believe in the possibility relayed by the media, in all its multiple twenty-first century dimensions, that we too can, at first by chance, unearth evidence of hitherto unknown worlds beneath our feet.
Notes
1
On the Argus de la Presse, see Boris Dänzer-Kantof and Sophie Nanot, De Mata Hari à Internet: Le roman vrai de l’Argus de la Presse, Paris, Hervas, 2000, an anecdotal corporate history that seems to have been commissioned by the company, which is still in existence today.
2
Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Fonds Camille Jullian (hereafter BI/FCJ), Ms 5765, letter Dussaud to Jullian, 17 October 1927.
3
In Stiebing’s chronology, the “heroic age” consists of two “phases,” a long early stage of travel and discovery, and a shorter period he describes as “Archaeology Comes of Age,” and which covers roughly 1860-1925, though with some variation depending on the particular subfield: William H. Stiebing, Jr., Uncovering the Past: A History of Archaeology, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993, especially p. 23-25.
4
Nathan Schlanger, “Ancestral Archives: Explorations in the History of Archaeology,” introduction to a special section of Antiquity, March 2002, 127-131, here 130. See also Nathan Schlanger and Jarl Nordbladh (eds.), Archives, Ancestors, Practices: Archaeology in the Light of its History, New York, Berghahn, 2008.
5
“La commission des Monuments préhistoriques se prononce contre le ‘classement’ de Glozel,” Petit Journal, 29 January 1928.
6
AN F17 17263, Cabinet du Directeur, Direction de l’Enseignement Supérieur, Note pour Monsieur le Ministre, 29 September 1927.
7
The chief characteristic of the Glozel archive – I use the singular to designate a virtual or imaginary archive, its actual contents dispersed among a number of physical locations – is selectivity. When I referred to slim official dossiers, it was to distinguish between those generated by agents of the state and those that come from private collections. Both the national and departmental archives actually have quite substantial holdings on Glozel, as does the Regional Archaeology Service (S.R.A.) in Clermont-Ferrand, but they acquired these documents not through the normal, regulated process of versement but by gift. The Archives Nationales has the private papers of Maurice Garçon, a prominent society lawyer who represented some of the anti-Glozelians in the legal proceedings generated by the affair (Garçon has retained a certain notoriety for trials he argued after the Glozel affair and for his wartime diaries, first published in 2015 and reviewed in Le Monde after a mass-market edition was published in 2017. See Gilles Antonowicz, Maurice Garçon: Les procès historiques, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2019 and Maurice Garçon, Journal 1939-1945, Paris, Perrin, 2017, orig. publ. by Les Belles Lettres, 2015). The holdings in Moulins include the archives of the Société d’Emulation du Bourbonnais, the local learned society that was called on to provide advice on the initial find but became a center of anti-Glozelian skepticism after Morlet took over the dig. The S.R.A. papers in Clermont-Ferrand come from Auguste Audollent, an epigraphist and dean of the faculty at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, who vocally endorsed the authenticity of Glozel and whose son was a lawyer on the Glozelian side. In addition, the papers of Salomon Reinach at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence and those of René Dussaud and another prominent academician, Camille Jullian, at the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France in Paris, contain a great deal of correspondence about Glozel. The Audollent papers in Clermont-Ferrand deal exclusively with Glozel; they were given to the S.R.A. by descendants clearly impressed, and perhaps also puzzled, by the sheer quantity of material their kinsmen had assembled. Both the Audollent and the Société d’Emulation papers contain a large proportion of clippings. In addition to the Dussaud and Jullian correspondence, which readers may consult in the august but reasonably accessible reading room of the Institut library, the Institut keeps another portion of Dussaud’s papers in its cramped, dimly lit, and erratically open archives; these include perhaps the mother lode of Glozel clippings.
8
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 2006, p. 32-6; on archaeological epistemology, Eugenio Donato, “The Museum’s Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet,” in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1979, p. 213-38; also Susan Stewart, On Longing Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, Duke University Press, 1993 [1984]).
9
Serge Joannidès, “L’affaire de Glozel,” L’Avenir, 24 December 1927.
10
“Le docteur Morlet va répondre à la Commission internationale,” Le Quotidien, 29 December 1927.
11
G. Archambault, “L’enseignement de Glozel: Quand le renne vivait en Limagne,” Paris-Soir, 13 November 1927: “Glozel accède aux honneurs du fait divers.” On the fait divers see Alain Monestier (ed.), Le fait divers, catalogue of an exhibition at the Musée national des arts et traditions populaires, Paris, 1982-83.
12
BI, Fonds René Dussaud (hereafter FRD), Ms 4850, letter Alfred Boissier to Dussaud, 27 October 1927, second part.
13
A. Vayson de Pradenne, “Chronologie de Glozel,” Bulletin de la société préhistorique française, vol. 24, September 1927, p. 300.
14
“Autour d’une controverse scientifique: Le gisement de Glozel,” Le Temps, 30 November and 4 December 1927.
15
“Une lettre de M. le comte Bégouen,” Mercure de France, 1 August 1927, p. 708: “Il est vraiment étrange que le Dr Morlet ne comprenne pas que lorqu’on n’a rien à se reprocher, rien ne vaut le grand jour et la discussion publique.”
16
“Une lettre de M. le comte Bégouen,” Mercure de France, 1 August 1927, p. 708.
17
“Une lettre de M. le comte Bégouen,” Mercure de France, 1 August 1927, p. 711.
18
J.L., “Autour d’une controverse scientifique: Le gisement de Glozel,” Le Temps, 21 November 1927.
19
“Une lettre du docteur Morlet,” Journal des Débats, 30 January 1928. See Matthew 7:3-5 and Luke 6:41. “Mote” and “beam” are from the King James Version; revised versions substitute “speck” and “plank,” but the basic point is, why obsess on microscopic flaws in your neighbor while ignoring huge ones of your own.
20
Emile Dermenghem, “Le mystère de Glozel: M. Marcelin Boule donne pour la première fois son opinion,” L’Information, 27 October 1927.
21
V. Méric, “Mon point de vue: La leçon de Glozel,” Le soir, 8 January 1928: “La Science!...” Méric went on to wonder what would happen if such minor disagreements were to arise in medicine, preventing doctors from treating a patient.
22
Raoul Bouillerot, “Causerie archéologique: Une opinion sur Glozel,” Progrès de la Côte d’Or, 25 November 1927; Title obscured, Manchester Guardian, 23 November 1927.
23
“L’affaire Glozel: Le monde archéologique en emoi,” La meuse (Liège), 3 November 1927.
24
Le Matin, 9 November 1927.
25
Marcel Sauvage, “Les problèmes que soulève l’affaire de Glozel,” Réforme, 5 November 1927. The Argus identifies the place of publication for this paper as Alexandria, but Sauvage’s main affiliation was with the Paris daily L’Intransigeant, and it is likely this piece was syndicated.
26
Eugène Marsan, “De Tauride en Glozel,” Le Figaro, 30 December 1927. For a similar charge on the other side “Une interview du Ct Espérandieu: L’authenticité des objets découverts à Glozel est affirmée,” Petit méridional (Montpellier), 14 November 1927.
27
A good summary account of the Saitaphernes case can be found at “Saitaphernes’ Golden Tiara,” Archaeology Archive, accessed 27 May 2017; see also James McCauley, The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2021, p. 74-77.
28
“La bataille pour Glozel: Les antiglozéliens chahutent le cours du professeur Loth,” Petit Journal, 22 January 1928.
29
On omnipresence: René Aigrain, “Pourquoi y a-t-il une ‘énigme’ dans l’affaire de Glozel,” Journal de l’Ouest (Poitiers), 2 December 1927; veiled anti-semitism, “Professeur Dusssaud: Antiglozélien,” Carnet de la Semaine, 15 January 1928; L. Daudet, “Glozel or not Glozel?,” Action française, 11 and 31 December 1927.
30
Marcel Sauvage, “Glozel: M. Loth annonce des révélations,” L’Intransigeant, 5 January 1928.
31
Marc Bloch, “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre,” Revue de synthèse historique, vol. 33, 1921, p. 13-35.
32
Marc Bloch, “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre,” Revue de synthèse historique, vol. 33, 1921, p. 17, 31.
33
See Leonard V. Smith, “Le récit du témoin: Formes et pratiques d’écriture dans les témoignages sur la Grande Guerre,” in Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen (eds.), Vrai et faux dans la Grande Guerre, Paris, La Découverte, 2004, p. 295-300, and Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self: French Sodiers’ Testimony of the Great War, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2007, chapter 1.
34
Gaëtan Sanvoisin, “La commission internationale se prononce contre l’authenticité du gisement,” Le Gaulois, 24 December 1927; Paul Voivenel, “La glozélite,” La Rumeur, 1 January 1928.
35
Marc Bloch, “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre,” Revue de synthèse historique, vol. 33, 1921, p. 15, 29-30.
36
“Vendredi,” Carnet de la Semaine, 13 November 1927.
37
Henry de Varigny “L’enquête de Glozel, quatrième journée,” Journal des Débats, 10 November 1927, reprinting the text of the statement; it is also included in the report.
38
“Des pièces rares au tableau,” Loire républicaine, 8 November 1927.
39
Le Matin, 8 November 1927 (3.10); “Scientists’ Rich Finds at Glozel: Ancient History Rewritten, Stone-Age Man’s Alphabet,” Daily Mail, 7 November 1927.
40
Le Quotidien, 7 November 1927.
41
BI/FCJ, Ms 5765, Reinach to Jullian, 26 August 1927. Reinach’s handwriting is extremely difficult to decipher, so the translation represents the sense, with a few words omitted.
42
BI/FCJ, Ms 5765, Reinach to Jullian, 27 August 1927.
43
“Le gisement préhistorique de Glozel,” Le Matin, 9 November 1927.
44
“Autour des fouilles de Glozel: Oui, mais que signifie l’expression: ‘Nous sommes fixés’?” L’Œuvre, 11 November 1927.
45
“Autour de Glozel: L’opinion de M. le Professeur Bégouën,” L’Express du Midi (Toulouse), 11 November 1927.
46
“Fouilles de Glozel: Rapport de la Commission Internationale,” Revue anthropologique, no. 10-12, 1927, p. 389-416.
47
“Les fouilles du ‘Matin’ à Glozel: De vieilles galeries obturées sont ouvertes à la ‘Goutte’ Barnier; les Fradin ne veulent pas être traités de faussaires,” Le Matin, 6 January 1928.
48
“Pour ou contre Glozel,” La Rumeur, 9 January 1928; Maurice-Verne, “Le petit Glozel de Mistral,” Paris-Soir, 16 February 1928.
49
“Toujours Glozel,” L’Humanité, 7 January 1928, first part.
50
The literature on the Canard enchaîné is vast: a solid detailed study is Laurent Martin, Le Canard enchaîné: Histoire d’un journal satirique (1915-2005), Paris, Nouveau Monde, 2005; on its political stance between the wars, see especially p. 104. For an excellent concise summary, see Pierre Taminiaux, “Le canard enchaîné,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), The Columbia Dictionary of Modern French Thought, New York, Columbia University Press, 2006, p. 690-92.
51
See, for example, a satirical account of a wholly invented party in Vichy on the eve of the excavations: Pierre Bénard, “Les membres de la Commission internationale ont fait, à Glozel, une sérieuse enquête,” Canard enchaîné, 15 November 1927.
52
Georges Maurevert, “Le mystère de Glozel,” L’Eclaireur de Nice, 26 November 1927.
53
“D’une mode néolithique,” Canard enchaîné, 14 December 1927.
54
Jules Rivet, “Le lotissement de Glozel: Le Canard a, lui aussi, entrepris des fouilles préhistoriques,” Canard enchaîné, 11 January 1928.
55
“On fouille à Glozel,” Cri de Paris, 13 November 1927.
56
Le Quotidien was close to the Cartel des Gauches; see Claude Bellanger et al. (eds.), Histoire générale de la presse française, t. 3, Paris , Presses Universitaires de France, 1969-1976, p. 569-71.
57
Charles Dauzats, “Le rapport de a commission internationale,” Le Figaro, 24 December 1927.
58
The most comprehensive article on connections between the Church and the anti-Glozelian position is “Le glas de Glozel,” Cité, 8 January 1928; see also Albert Bayet, “L’Eglise et la science ou chacun chez soi,” Ere Nouvelle, 9 January 1928 (date hypothetical), which was attacking an article in La Croix (Diégo, “Les civilisés préhistoriques,” 30 December 1927) offering an interpretation of the “civilized” nature of prehistoric man compatible with the Bible. There is a reply from “Diégo” entitled “Les dogmes de M. Bayet,” La Croix, 27 January 1928.
59
“La bataille continue autour de Glozel,” La Liberté, 25 December 1927. On its political orientation, see Claude Bellanger et al. (eds.), Histoire générale de la presse française, t. 3, Paris, PUF, 1969-1976, p. 521.
60
“La comédie de Glozel,” Le Temps, 25 December 1928.
61
“A propos de Glozel,” La Nation, 31 December 1928. The Histoire générale de la presse française (Claude Bellanger et al. [eds.], t. 3, Paris, PUF, 1969-1976, p. 296) lists La Nation as a “journal-fantôme,” without any significant circulation, in 1910-12, but does not mention any political orientation; at the very least, the article indicates it was to the right of the center-left Radicals, in other words on the right.
62
“Autour des procès,” Comoedia, 11 January 1928. The placement of the clipping on the sheet makes it difficult to identify the date with any certainty.
63
Without specifically referring to Dreyfus, an article in Le Figaro helpfully observed that “La grande différence entre une question et une affaire est que dans l’une on discute et dans l’autre on se dispute,” and Glozel had clearly become the latter: Artigny, untitled article, Le Figaro, 23 January 1928, date hypothetical.
64
“Glozel et la musique,” Comoedia, 9 January 1928 (38.5); untitled article, Le National, 15 January 1928.
65
“J’accuse Emile Fradin, déclare M. Peyrony, conservateur du musée des Eyzies,” Le Journal, 7 January 1928.
66
Henri Simoni, “Ainsi que l’Oeuvre avait prévu, la Commssion internationale a conclu à la ‘non-ancienneté’ des documents de Glozel,” L’Oeuvre, 24 December 1927. On L’Oeuvre’s political positioning and reputation, see Christophe Charle, Le siècle de la presse (1830-1939), Paris, Seuil, 2004, p. 252; Bellanger et al. (eds.), Histoire générale de la presse française, t. 3, Paris, PUF, 1969-1976, p. 566-67.
67
Untitled article, L’Oeuvre, 14 January 1928: “Ils ont déclenché l’affaire Glozel, - et Salomon Reinach”.
68
“Fouilles de Glozel: Rapport de la Commission Internationale,” Revue anthropologique, no. 10-12, 1927, p. 413.
69
“Fouilles de Glozel: Rapport de la Commission Internationale,” Revue anthropologique, no. 10-12, 1927, p. 390, 400-401.
70
“Fouilles de Glozel: Rapport de la Commission Internationale,” Revue anthropologique, no. 10-12, 1927, p. 413.
71
“Fouilles de Glozel: Rapport de la Commission Internationale,” Revue anthropologique, no. 10-12, 1927, p. 413.
72
Laurent Olivier, “Du musée des antiquités nationales au musée d’Archéologie nationale,” in Jean-Paul Demoule and Christian Landes (eds.), La Fabrique de l’archéologie en France, Paris, La Découverte, 2009, p 91.
73
“Une conférence de M. Dussaud à Moulins,” Le Figaro, 4 January 1928. These restrictions were enacted just over a decade later by an archaeologist turned Vichy minister of education, Jérôme Carcopino. See Jean-Pierre Reboul, “Genèse et postérité des lois Carcopino,” in Jean-Paul Demoule and Christian Landes (eds.), La Fabrique de l’archéologie en France, Paris, La Découverte, 2009, p. 120-33. Although subsequently modified, the Carcopino laws remain the basis of French jurisprudence about archaeology to this day.