CULTURAL STUDIES

AND MODERN LANGUAGES

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

WEEK 3 MONUMENTS
The Obelisk of Luxor with Professor Gino Raymond
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I am in front of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the shape of which reminds us of the
passion for things Egyptian in 19th century France as well as Britain.
At first sight, the Obelisk of Luxor might seem an odd choice as a monument that gives
you an insight on France. Twenty-three metres high and carved out of a pinkish granite
from Aswan in Egypt, under the reign of Ramses the II in the thirteenth century BC, it is
about as un-French as you can get in origin. And yet now it sits at the heart of Paris, on the
Place de la Concorde, at the junction between the Champs-Elyses and the Tuileries
gardens, and is as authentic a symbol of France as the Bastille or the Eiffel Tower.
The story of how the obelisk came to Paris is an important part of the story of how France,
after the great Revolution of 1789, forged a sense of itself and its relationship with the rest
of the world. Those two things are, of course, closely related and helped shape the identity
of modern France.
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It was during the French Revolution that France launched its first major military
expedition, to the land of the Pharaohs. The Directory, which was the body governing
France between 1795 and 1799, authorised Napoleon Bonaparte to lead a French force to
Egypt. France could not attack Britain, its arch-rival, directly, but the hope was that
Napoleon could hurt British commercial interests by targeting its trade routes to the East.
The campaign in Egypt and Syria lasted from 1798 until 1801, before Napoleon was forced
to withdraw by superior British power. But it had lasting effects.
Intellectually, it marked the start of a massive rise in the passion for Egyptology in France.
In political terms, it marked a new phase in Frances encounter with the world. The authors
of the French revolution believed that the values for the new society they wanted to build
were not only right for France, but also right for the rest of the world. Thats why the
slogan libert, galit, fraternit is often referred to as summing up the universalist
values of the Revolution. And in the nineteenth-century this develops a cultural dimension,
called the mission civilisatrice, or civilising mission. So, in its contact with the outside
world, France is guided by the thirst for knowledge that was created by the Enlightenment
movement in the 18th century, but its also driven to share the universalist values of the

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Revolution the values that had brought it into the modern age. So its a movement in
which France brings the world to itself and offers itself to the world.
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When, in 1829, the Viceroy of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, offered an obelisk as a gift to the
French, it was too good an opportunity to miss. There was, however, a snag. The obelisk
was one of a pair the other having been offered as a gift to the British and the obelisks
were the ones in Alexandria. So the great French scholar, and the man who unlocked the
mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Jean-Franois Champollion, persuaded Mehmet Ali to
give the French the more distinguished pair of obelisks which stood at the entrance of the
temple at Luxor. Transporting the one which made it to Paris was an epic journey which
captured the imagination of the French public. Loaded onto a purpose-built vessel, suitably
christened the Luxor, it would take the obelisk two years to complete the journey to the
port of Le Havre, before it was towed up the Seine to be installed in Paris on the 25th of
October 1836.
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The site chosen was highly symbolic. It was where Louis XVI and many others had been
guillotined during the Revolution, and the name Concorde had been chosen by the
Directory after the period of the Terror to mark a new era of national reconciliation. In
1830, there had been an uprising that had brought down the Bourbon constitutional
monarchy, and a new constitutional monarchy under the junior branch of the royal family,
the Orleanists, came to power. So the installation of the obelisk at the Concorde was an
opportunity to celebrate a renewed sense of national unity, and remarkably some
200,000 people came to watch the obelisk being erected. But it was also a celebration of
Frances success as a modern nation, its intellectual genius and its engineering prowess.
Soon afterwards, France had conquered Algeria, and by the end of the century it had an
empire that would be second only to Britains. And a key justification for this enterprise
was a belief in Frances civilizing mission. So the next time you are crossing the Place de
la Concorde, look up at the obelisk. It actually tells you a lot more about France than that
perennial tourist favourite, the Eiffel Tower.

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