Un-layering Greece: imagined classical heritages in French nationalist travel writing

This article looks at the ways Ancient Greece was received by Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès, two important French nationalist figures of the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that, whilst often taken for granted, the valorisation of classicism by French nationalist movements (as a political heritage to reclaim or as an aesthetic reaction against turn-of-the-century avant-gardes) also represents a challenge to nationalist narratives. Both authors’ reception of Antiquity was shaped by their travels to Greece. This article thus focuses on the texts they brought back from their respective journeys, Anthinéa (1901) by Maurras and Le Voyage de Sparte (1906) by Barrès, to understand how their ideological development was informed by their perception of Ancient Greece, as well as, reciprocally, how Greece was constructed through their particular political lens. Travel writing offers a particularly relevant corpus to study the role of material experience in the perception of Classical Antiquity, as a genre that overwhelmingly purports to offer its readers a testimonial of things seen and experienced by its authors. Drawing from Shane Butler’s ‘Deep Classics’ theory of reception, this article shows how visions of intellectual and cultural heritage(s) as well as shared identities are complicated by material experiences of historical alterity.