From Alesia to Rome, the archaeological adventure of Napoleon III

During the 19th century, archaeology found itself at the heart of new political and scientific issues. On one hand, the European states competed to acquire knowledge of vanished cultures and to build their national identity. On the other hand, real excavation sites are being opened, using new techniques and innovative tools. Emblematic of this double movement, the archaeological excavations undertaken at the instigation of Napoleon III adopted a very different approach from those carried out by the "antique dealers" of the previous century. Closely linked to the person of the Emperor, they constitute a veritable archaeological epic on the scale of Europe and the Mediterranean basin, in Greece, Italy and the East. The impetus for the project came from France with the writing of the History of Julius Caesar. Napoleon III intended to follow in the footsteps of the Roman conqueror and the Commission de Topographie des Gaules, or CTG, was officially invested on 17 July 1858. The aim of the exhibition is to retrace the history of collections now dispersed in institutions of various kinds (libraries, museums, private collections and art schools). By bringing this corpus together, it hopes to retrace the course of the excavations that Napoleon III undertook in the footsteps of the Caesars, while proposing a new approach that questions the role of photography and recording methods in this archaeological programme
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