The work of early French antiquarians – Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), Jacques Spon (1647–1685), Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741), and Anne-Claude-Philippe Comte de Caylus (1692–1765) – were mainly descriptive inventories which laid the basis for the subsequent systematic study of ancient objects. Bernard de Montfaucon, a monk of the Benedictine congregation of Saint-Maur, philologist, paleographer, and antiquarian, is considered as the initiator of modern “antiquarian science” in France. After travels in Italy and a visit to Rome (1698-1701), he spent his life at the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. His surveys L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (15 folio vols, 1719-24) and Les monuments de la monarchie française (5 folio vols, 1729-34) ranged from megalithic monuments to medieval antiquities. Caylus, a widely-travelled collector and engraver, introduced the study of antiquities to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, of which he was made a member in 1742.

Archeology proper developed out of systematic antiquarianism in the first half of the 19th century, serving a purpose similar to that of philology but based on material retrieved from excavatory fieldwork rather than textual remains retrieved from archives. An academic professionalization process was driven partly by rivalry with philologists as to the best way of investigating the past, partly by the growing competition of artists and travellers. The term “historical monument” was introduced in France by Aubin-Louis Millin de Grandmaison (1759–1818) in his Antiquités nationales, ou recueil de monumens pour servir à l’histoire générale et particulière de l’Empire françois, tells que tombeaux, inscriptions, statues, vitraux, fresques, etc., tirés des abbayes, monastères, chateaux, et autres lieux, devenus domains nationaux (5 vols, 1790-98). Despite the programme announced in that work’s title, national antiquities occupied an almost irrelevant place in early-19th-century France, the focus being mainly on Greek-Latin tradition. Indeed, domestic archeology played only a minor role in the emergence of a French national consciousness.

Even so, at the time of the Revolution, collective and individual efforts bore testimony to the growing interest in Celticism, as the Gauls were gaining recognition as the true ancestors of the French nation. From the mid-1790s, the Girondist Cercle social, founded in 1790, published Celticist treatises such as Jean-Baptiste Bullet’s Mémoires sur la langue celtique (originally published in 1753), Joseph Lavallée’s Voyage dans les départements de la France, Jacques Cambry’s Voyage dans le Finistère, ou État de ce département en 1794 et 1795. The Breton Cambry (1749–1807) was one of the founding members of the Académie celtique and went on to publish Monuments celtiques ou Recherches sur le culte des pierres (an XIII, 1804-05), Notice sur l’agriculture des Celtes et Gaulois (1806), and a few texts published in Mémoires de l’Académie celtique (6 vols of which appeared between 1807 and 1812). The most substantial manifestation of Celticist antiquarianism was the book Galerie des mœurs, usages et coutumes des Bretons de l’Armorique (1808), a joint effort by the painter Olivier Perrin and the physician Louis Mareschal and dedicated to the Académie celtique. That body ran into difficulties in 1812, and in 1813 resumed its activities as the Académie celtique ou Société des Antiquaires de France. From 1813 on, this Société (which soon dropped the “Académie celtique” from its name) focused on medieval Gallo-Roman and pre-Roman archeology; it served as a model for antiquarian associations that proliferated in the French provinces from 1824 onwards.

The destruction of Ancien-Régime monuments and heirlooms in the fervour of the French Revolutionary provoked a salvage instinct as the notion of “vandalism” entered into the national vocabulary (introduced by Abbé Grégoire in the Rapport sur les destructions opérées par le vandalisme et sur les moyens de le réprimer, 1794). The recovery and preservation of historically valuable objects sparked new initiatives in inventory, storage, and display. Artworks pillaged from monasteries or seized from emigrants, and collected in depositories, were recorded on lists and inventories, and in the process were invested with an educational public-pedagogical value. The creation of museums, as well as the appropriation of properties by the state, gave rise to the idea of a collective heritage to be preserved for future generations. Displayed in museums, these object had no function but to confirm their heritage value. It was in this context that the painter Alexandre Lenoir (1761–1839), appointed as the temporary guardian of the Couvent des Petits-Augustins, gave birth to the first museum of French monuments. It was organized chronologically, from the 13th to the 17th century, and a catalogue accompanied visitors through the centuries. Although it was closed down by Louis XVIII in 1816, the Romantic movement gradually fostered interest in the Middle Ages, and a taste for medieval antiquities spread through France under the Restoration.

It was not until the July Monarchy that the preservation of antiquities was institutionalized as part of the nation’s cultural heritage. Guizot created the post of “Inspector general of historical monuments” in 1830 as part of his programme to encourage the spread of learned societies (sociétés savantes) across the French provinces, which he considered an effective means of ensuring the conservation of monuments. He offered as a model for these societies the Société des antiquaires de Normandie, which, established in 1824 on Arcisse de Caumont’s initiative, focused on antiquities and monument conservation in that region. Arcisse de Caumont (1801–1873) was in 1834 to be the instigator of the Société archéologique de France. Together with the Commission des antiquités de la Seine-Inférieure (1818), the Société des antiquaires de Normandie provided a model for a number of associations and commissions proliferating under the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. Thus, the Société archéologique du Midi, established in Toulouse in 1831 and recognized as a public service in 1850, opened its annual Mémoires; the Société archéologique de Montpellier (1833) to historians, art historians, and archeologists; the Société archéologique, scientifique et littéraire de Béziers (1834) were founded to establish museums in these two localities, which in Béziers led to a number of spin-off museums. Subsequent foundations in the south of France included the Société archéologique et historique du Limousin (Limoges, 1845), Société d’études scientifiques et archéologiques de Draguignan et du Var (1855), and Société archéologique et historique de Tarn-et-Garonne (Montauban, 1866).

In January 1835, with the aim of boosting research into the history of France and the writing of a national history, Guizot, then Minister of Public Education, established not only the Société d’histoire de France (1833) and the Comité pour la recherche et la publication des documents inédits relatifs à l’histoire de France (1834), but also a Comité des arts et monuments with the twofold objective of inventorizing ancient monuments so as to ensure their conservation, and coordinating the historical research carried out by a network of provincial scholars. The Comité des arts et monuments counted among its member Arcisse de Caumont, Alexandre Lenoir’s son Albert Lenoir, Montalembert, Victor Hugo, and, notably, Prosper Mérimée, who was also appointed “inspector-general of the monuments historiques”, a post created in 1830 and initially occupied by Ludovic Vitet (1802–1873). In 1840, Mérimée entrusted the restoration of the abbey of Vézelay to Viollet-le-Duc, marking the beginning of that architect’s central role in French restoration work.

Viollet-le-Duc also contributed drawings to the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, a lithographed work published in 21 volumes between 1820 and 1878 depicting all the French provinces, conceived in 1818 by Isidore Taylor, Royal Commissioner of the Théâtre-Français. The project also attracted luminaries like the writer Charles Nodier and the artists Géricault and Ingres, and grew into an enormous inventory of French monuments, with an emphasis on the country’s medieval architectural heritage showcased against Romantic-picturesque landscape or cityscape backgrounds. Texts and drawings took readers along on the travellers’ itineraries, and the formula spawned a veritable genre, often with a penchant for picturesque ruins. Regionally, Brittany stood out as focus of a developing iconography, thanks to Christophe-Paulin de La Poix de Fréminville’s Antiquités de la Bretagne, monuments du Morbihan (1827-29), Antiquités de la Bretagne, monuments du Finistère (1832-35), Antiquités de Bretagne, monuments des Côtes du Nord (1837), Mérimée’s Notes d’un voyage dans l’Ouest de la France (1836), and the 1845-46 instalments of Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques.

In 1852, the Minister of Public Education and Culture, Hippolyte Fortoul, transformed the Comité pour la recherche et la publication des documents inédits into a Comité de la langue, de l’histoire et des arts de la France, with philological, historical and archeological sections; at the same time, he founded the Bulletin des Sociétés savantes. In 1858 it was again reorganized into a Comité des travaux historiques et des Sociétés savantes. Meanwhile, in 1837, another institution had been established, the Commission des monuments historiques. Among its members were Vitet, Taylor, and the architect Félix Duban; its secretary, until 1839, was Mérimée. In 1840, the Commission produced the first list of protected monuments. Unlike the Comité pour la recherche et la publication des documents inédits, which had a scientific purpose, this Commission des monuments historiques had a more practical remit.

Despite all these state institutions and government-sponsored initiatives, archeology remained little more than a succession of individual endeavours of antiquarians for most of the century. Under the Third Republic, finally, an Inventaire général des richesses d'art de la France appeared (14 vols, 1874-1910), with the purpose of stimulating and methodically systematizing the study of ancient monuments. A sub-commission to salvage megalithic remains was established in 1879 under the chairmanship of the popular historian Henri Martin. In 1887, a law on monument protection standardized the rules of heritage conservation and determined the conditions of state intervention in the protection of historical monuments deemed nationally valuable.