Colonial Prospecting in Independent Mexico: Abbé Baradère's Antiquités mexicaines (1834-36)

The frontispiece to Antiquités mexicaines, a two-volume folio published from 1834 to 1836 by a French ecclesiastic named Jean-Henri Baradère, shows a Mexican temple partially shrouded in clouds. Two Indian warriors stand casually at the temple's foot, just within the frame of a heavenly shaft of light. Accompanying the plate is a phrase from one of the book's essays: "Learned research will dissipate the clouds that envelope the Mexican monuments, and will reveal to the future the history of the past."[1] As Baradère made clear, France was leading the way in this scholarly endeavor. By extension, it was helping to lead Mexico into the civilized world of the nineteenth century.

Bearing messages of fraternity and indigenous achievement, Antiquités mexicaines made quite a splash in France. Luxuriously produced, it was the most comprehensive visual and written account to date of Mexico's ancient monumental architecture and sculpture. It benefited from a first-rate team of engravers and a distinguished line-up of contributors, including Chateaubriand, Alexander von Humboldt, and the antiquarian Alexandre Lenoir. It received a subsidy from the French government, and it inspired the European Historical Congress to take up the question of the origins of ancient American civilizations at its meeting of 1835. Baradère had gone to Mexico in 1827 as an agent for a French project to found an agricultural community on the isthmus of Tehuantepec. While this settlement scheme soon failed as French emigrants succumbed to yellow fever, Baradère achieved fame as a prospector of Mexico's ancient history. His publication served as a cornerstone for the French scientific construction of ancient Mexico during the coming decades.

Specialists in the history of Americanism (the study of ancient indigenous America) have tended to characterize productions such as Baradère's Antiquités mexicaines as the less serious work of dilettantes.[2] I will argue that Baradère was not just a lone romantic figure who dabbled in exotica, but was part of a coordinated system of knowledge production, embedded in and supported by French intellectual traditions and imperial ambitions. This was a system of exchange and appropriation involving the production of scientific norms, instructions, and expectations in Paris and the activities of voyagers in the field. As an international hub of science, moreover, France was well placed to arbitrate the pasts of other lands, as it had done in Egypt in 1798 when a large scientific expedition accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte's army. The system in which Baradère operated, however, rested in crucial ways on Mexican knowledge and participation. The patriotic study of antiquity had a long and distinguished tradition in Mexico, and for a variety of reasons, French scholar-voyagers often found amiable collaborators there to further their ambitions. Despite Baradère's success both on the ground and in learned circles, in important ways Antiquités mexicaines did not fit the emerging set of values and procedures being dictated by metropolitan scholars.

Antiquités mexicaines was, in the first place, made possible by Mexico's independence in 1821, which opened new opportunities in commerce, settlement, and scientific travel, activities that were often carried out simultaneously. Although the Spanish Crown sponsored important archeological expeditions in the 1780s and 1800s, remarkably little of Mexico's pre-Columbian architectural record was known in the early nineteenth century. Humboldt's publications, especially Vues des cordillières et monumens des peuples indigènes de l'Amérique, which first appeared in 1810, triggered new interest in the study of American monuments, while independence made it possible for more voyagers to visit them.

Specific scientific agendas in France also propelled Baradère's publication. In 1821, the same year that Mexico secured its independence, the Société de géographie was founded with "knowledge of the globe that we inhabit" as its "unique goal."[3] It was the first geographical society in the world and included prominent figures like Chateaubriand and Guizot, military officers, and dozens of the era's top scientists.[4] At a time when ethnography and anthropology lacked disciplinary and institutional grounding, the Société de géographie was a vital forum for the study of foreign peoples and societies. Although it rarely funded scientific travel, by issuing instructions to voyagers, encouraging research through competitions, and publishing the results of their work, the society served as an important institutional support for the study of indigenous America. Two of its members played central roles in this regard: David Bailie Warden, and Edmé-François Jomard. Warden was an Irish-born U.S. citizen who had come to Paris in 1805 as tutor, secretary, and translator for the U.S. minister to France. He developed close ties to French intellectual circles, including such figures as Humboldt, Lafayette, and Henri Grégoire, and he served as a well-connected agent for U.S. scholars and travelers in France.[5] Edmé-François Jomard was an engineer-geographer in Napoleon's scientific expedition to Egypt in 1798, and in 1805 he became secretary of the commission in charge of the publication of the expedition's influential Description de l'Egypte (1809-1828). A major figure in the interconnected fields of geography, ethnography, and archaeology in the first half of the century, he became conservator of the geographical collection at the Bibliothèque du roi in 1828.[6] He and Warden were among the active core of the Société de géographie through its early decades and were the principal forces behind the society's patronage of studies of indigenous America, especially Palenque and the Yucatán Peninsula.

Warden introduced his fellow geographers to the mysterious land of Palenque by bringing to their attention a London publication of 1822. Description of the ruins of an ancient city, discovered near Palenque, which was bound with sixteen plates of sculpture and architecture, had been written by a Spanish artillery captain in 1787.[7] In Warden's view, the material was proof "that this continent, referred to as the New World, was much more anciently populated than we thought."[8] "It seems," said Jomard, "that there existed in those countries, as well as in all of Yucatan, a large population cultivating the arts with success and given over to the same customs and religious ideas."[9] The information on Palenque so impressed the Société de géographie that it decided to sponsor a competition for the best new work on "American antiquities." A gold medal worth 2,400 francs would be awarded for "a more complete and exact description of the ruins of the ancient city of Palenque than the one we possess." Contestants were asked to make "picturesque views of the monuments," as well as plans and sections and drawings of the sculpture; to conduct excavations of underground galleries and aqueducts; and to carry out research on other ancient sites in the region that had come to light. The announcement also called for maps "constructed according to exact methods" of the areas in which the ruins were located, topographic plans, altitude notations, and general information on the area's "physical state" and resources. Finally, it asked voyagers to conduct research on "the traditions relating to the ancient people to whom the construction of these monuments is attributed, with observations on the mores and customs of the indigenous peoples, and vocabularies of the ancient languages."[10] Fantastically over-ambitious and unrealistic, the announcement nevertheless reflected the geographers' interest in comprehensive empirical research and represents the first time European scholars issued a research program for the study of indigenous America. In doing so, they were extending decades-old scientific practices to a new field of inquiry.

Since the seventeenth century, in order to guide the untrained traveler and render the voyage scientifically useful, scholars sought to "direct the voyagers' gaze," according to Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, and to "regulate their gestures and behavior."[11] A large literature of manuals and instructions developed to help normalize the voyage and ensure that metropolitan science would be able to capitalize on the activities of its many emissaries abroad.[12] These efforts expanded in the industrial and imperial nineteenth century as sedentary scholars based in Europe enjoyed an ever-greater global reach. By 1800, the model scientific voyage was systematic, encyclopedic, and grounded on empirical knowledge, much like the work associated with the French expedition to Egypt.[13] By disciplining and guiding their traveling emissaries, the geographers at the helm of the society followed standard French practice, based on the division of labor and authority between the sedentary European cabinet and the American field.

It was above all Jomard, a graduate of the Ecole polytechnique, who brought the spirit of comprehensive measurement and metropolitan discipline to the study of indigenous America. In one of his contributions to the Description de l'Egypte, Jomard said, "My sole intent is to relate observations whose exactitude I guarantee, having made them and written them at the sites themselves."[14] Like other members of the Commission de l'Egypte, Jomard privileged precise, accurate, and unembellished observation within the framework of an all-encompassing territorial investigation, and he wanted to see such methods applied to the ruins of Mexico and Central America. This concern with precision and comprehensiveness is clear in his unpublished instructions for a French voyager planning on going to Palenque in 1827. The voyager was instructed to "measure one of the principle figures, member by member and part by part." He should make precise geometric plans of the monuments, for "the picturesque aspect cannot substitute for these measured drawings." He should consider the nature of the stones used in the buildings, obtain fragments of sculpture, study the indigenous peoples' traditions and ancient languages, and take in the local geography. Finally, he should study the "physiognomy" of the indigenous people with care "by copying the portraits of characteristic individuals."[15] For voyagers to attain scientific legitimacy they would need to heed such calls for the unvarnished and comprehensive retrieval of data, procedures for which few of them were particularly well equipped. While voyagers to Palenque tried to meet the demands of sedentary scholars like Jomard, different habits of seeing and thinking, as well as complex circumstances on the ground in Mexico, pulled them in other directions.

Jean-Henri Baradère's work on Mexican antiquities unfolded in lockstep with new French business interests in independent Mexico and expressed scholarly impulses that were quite different from Jomard's. Born to a clerical family in the Hautes-Pyrénées, Baradère (1792-1839?) was ordained a priest in 1816. A strong interest in the world overseas and a liberal temperament made Baradère's career an unorthodox one. After serving the Church in the provinces and then Paris, he went to the French colony in Senegal in 1820 and worked as a missionary and church official for two years. Back in Paris his associates included Henri Grégoire, the former revolutionary bishop, and Gabriel-Jacques Laisné de Villevêque, a prominent member of the Chamber of Deputies. Although Bourbon France, in deference to Spain, had not yet officially recognized independent Mexico, businessmen in French port cities were eager for a commercial treaty with the new nation. The liberal Laisné de Villevêque, who in various contexts argued for the need for an aggressive French colonial policy and would soon become involved in one of many French schemes to install a European prince in Mexico, developed a plan to establish a colony of French emigrants in southeastern Mexico on the isthmus of Tehuantepec. Intrigued by the prospect of adventure in the New World and presumably aware of the archaeological competition sponsored by the Société de géographie, Baradère became Laisné de Villevêque's agent and left for Mexico in November 1827. He soon obtained a concession from the Mexican government of 300 square leagues around Coatzacoalcos, an area near the Gulf coast south of Veracruz.[16] While the abbé laid the groundwork for the future colony, he also cleared the way for a collection of Mexico's past.

Given access to the holdings of the recently founded Museo Nacional, he came across the documents resulting from a series of archaeological expeditions commissioned by the king of Spain twenty years earlier. With a military escort and substantial funding, Guillermo Dupaix, a retired army officer, and artist José Luciano Castañeda, undertook three expeditions from 1805 to 1808 and studied numerous sites in central and southern Mexico, including Palenque. The war for independence brought an end to their work.[17] Dupaix's reports and Castañeda's illustrations were transferred to the Museo Nacional upon its creation in 1825. The Dupaix-Castañeda collection easily constituted the most complete record of Palenque and of Mexican antiquity in general, and Baradère set out to acquire it. He also wanted to explore the ruins themselves, since a voyage to Palenque would lend more weight to his claim to the prize. To realize these ambitions, he worked out an extraordinary agreement with the conservator of the museum, Isidro Ignacio de Icaza. Baradère was authorized to explore the ancient ruins and collect antiquities "that he will judge worthy of figuring in a museum."[18] He would hand over all the antiquities he found to local authorities, who would transport them to Mexico City at the museum's cost. At the end of his explorations, Baradère would receive half of this collection as well as the 145 original illustrations by Castañeda and a copy of Dupaix's reports. The exchange was finalized in November 1828 and approved by the Mexican congress.[19] Baradère returned to France in early 1829 as a highly successful archeological and colonial prospector.[20] The documents from the Dupaix expedition would constitute the core of the abbé's acclaimed publication. Spain's recent scientific work on the ancient history of its colony would be reworked as a scientific and humanitarian French triumph.

Why would the museum's conservator hand such an important collection over to a French traveler only three years after the museum opened? Baradère's acquisition is not easily explained, given Mexico's rich tradition of historical scholarship concerning its prehispanic past, strong anti-foreign sentiment in the late 1820s, and an 1829 law prohibiting the unauthorized excavation and export of antiquities.[21] Such factors were countered by financial penury, political instability, cosmopolitanism, and even liberalism, which viewed the contemporary indigenous peoples as obstacles to progress.[22] These latter circumstances contributed to the fact that Mexican officials frequently contracted out the business of patrimony to foreigners in these years. It is also possible that Icaza simply did not hold the collection in very high regard and that his priorities lay in natural history rather than antiquities. In 1829, he spent over 4,000 pesos on "among other tools the work of the comte de Buffon."[23] Mexico's patrimonial practices in the 1820s and 1830s were in fact contradictory and full of ambiguous messages.

Baradère had entered a bustling field of foreign travelers and Mexican scholars who were busy rediscovering the newly independent nation's past and present. These voyagers (William Bullock, Latour-Allard, Maximilien Franck, Carl Nebel, Johann Moritz Rugendas, Claudio Linati, François Corroy, Jean-Frédéric Waldeck, and Juan Galindo) were part of a small but influential cosmopolitan elite, frequently integrated into the upper circles of Mexican society. Many of them had been spurred on by the possibility of financial reward and scientific recognition from the Société de géographie and would give Baradère a run for his money.[24] The diplomatic corps was also an important part of the French production of knowledge of Mexico. Diplomats gave precious assistance and protection to their voyager nationals when they ran afoul of the law or experienced threats or persecution; at more mundane levels they provided useful information for travel. Many diplomats viewed themselves as emissaries of science and made contributions of their own to the exploration of Mexico. Adrien Cochelet, who became consul in 1829, came to view himself as the Société de géographie's representative with regard to the Palenque competition.[25]

Baradère began lobbying for the Palenque prize as soon as he got back to Paris. He first announced his discoveries to Warden and secured his enthusiastic patronage. Warden quickly issued a glowing report for the Société royale des antiquaires de France, praising Castañeda's drawings and the abbé's service in bringing them to light. The Société de géographie, however, was ambivalent. It nominated the abbé as one of its members, but it was in no hurry to bestow the medal on him. Although Baradère's material was interesting, reported the geographers in 1830, it did not provide "the solution to questions posed by the program," which had called for geographical, ethnographic, and linguistic research. In effect, the society was still waiting for "a complete work, executed on the sites themselves, and responding to the expectations of scholars." In view of the fact that Palenque was now attracting widespread attention, the geographers decided to extend the competition's deadline until 1832.[26]

At the same time that he fought for scientific recognition, Baradère waged an even more daunting campaign to promote the colony at Coatzacoalcos. He published a letter to his employer, Laisné de Villevêque, hailing the future colony's natural resources, fertility, salubriousness, and commercial potential.[27] Because of its isthmian location, sponsors predicted that within a few years "this country ought to be the center of the most extensive commerce in the world."[28] Such rosy views were short-lived, however. By 1830, colonists were returning with dismal reports about Coatzacoalcos and its deadly fevers. Although one survivor's claim that 400 colonists died from fever is probably exaggerated, Coatzacoalcos was a fiasco.[29] Finally, there were still other controversies swirling around the abbé Baradère. Having gone to Mexico without episcopal permission, he temporarily lost his title as canon.[30] He also caused a scandal among the clergy when he performed mass for the dead abbé Grégoire in 1831 in defiance of the archbishop of Paris.[31]

Not all scholars shared the geographers' reserve when it came to Baradère. In fact, the abbé was able to gain the interest and support of well-established antiquarians in Paris. Antiquarianism, rather than the geographical sciences, became the primary social and cognitive setting for Antiquités mexicaines and for much French scholarship on American antiquities during the nineteenth century. Charles-François Farcy took on the tasks of translating Dupaix's manuscripts and putting all the material in order. Alexandre Lenoir, creator of the musée des Monuments français, contributed a lengthy essay comparing the Mexican monuments with those of Egypt and India. Warden offered a sprawling piece surveying indigenous antiquities throughout the Americas. Antiquités mexicaines also included excerpts from other recent accounts of Mexican ruins, extracts from the European Historical Congress, and documents and testimony regarding Baradère's acquisition and the subject of Mexican antiquities, including a short reflection by Chateaubriand. The success of Antiquités mexicaines was largely due to this collaboration, which ensured that the work would meet the expectations of at least one part of the French scholarly community.

The most important contributors, Farcy, Lenoir, and Warden, all belonged to the Société des antiquaires de France, a learned society founded in 1813 to study the Gallic, Roman, and medieval remains of the national territory. Antiquarianism flourished in the climate of religious renewal and romanticism of the Empire and especially the Restoration. Moreover, with the new sense of nationhood ushered in by the Revolution, the study of antiquities in France took on a new significance as an enterprise involving the national past. In fact, it was the abbé Baradère's good friend, the abbé Grégoire, who had helped invent the modern idea of national patrimony while engaged in the government's efforts to inventory and preserve art and architecture threatened by popular disorder and revolutionary violence. Symbols of the Old Regime became national treasures to be preserved against "counter-revolutionary" vandalism.[32] It was in this context in 1795 that Lenoir opened the first museum in France devoted to the Middle Ages.[33] Like the new historical school that emerged during the Restoration, the erudite study of ancient French culture served both to construct the national past and to overcome the political divisions of the Revolution. After the July Revolution of 1830, the study and preservation of French history met with increased support from the French state, especially through the efforts of historian and statesman François Guizot. As Minister of the Interior, Guizot created the Inspection générale des monuments historiques in 1830. As Minister of Public Instruction, he founded the Société de l'histoire de France in 1833 and the Comité historique des arts et des monuments the following year, with the aim of inventorying and publishing documents relating to France's national history.[34] Official support for historical studies was not limited to work on France, though; Guizot took an interest in Baradère's project and channeled some state money to it. Guizot once said, "The greatest interest of a new government is to become old, because for governments especially, strength is born of duration."[35] Baradère well understood the value of old monuments for new nations.

Antiquités mexicaines strove to resurrect ancient America and make it commensurable with the rest of the world. It insisted that "the New World is as ancient as the Old" - it suggested that the age of the ruins was three or four thousand years - and that America harbored monuments and whole cities that were on par with anything the Old World had to offer.[36] While Jomard and Humboldt ranked Mexican ruins within a developmentalist framework, the authors of Antiquités mexicaines celebrated them unapologetically alongside Greek, Roman, and Egyptian ones as "new Pyramids . . . other Herculaneums." For Baradère, the discovery of Mexico's ancient ruins augured a bright future for the young, independent republic and would "hasten the connections that should exist among all members of the human family, from which Mexico was separated for too long."[37] Modern scholarship here constituted a second discovery and conquest of America, one that would right the wrongs of the first conquest by exhuming a dead but noble civilization. Where the Spaniards, in their blind search for gold and Christian converts, had destroyed the vestiges of indigenous history, now the French would take up the difficult task of recognition and reconstruction. Henceforth, said Baradère, Mexico's "historical treasures" would "no longer be condemned to flames by a senseless fanaticism."[38] The discourse of vandalism coined by Grégoire was easily and liberally applied to the former conquerors.[39]

What distinguished Baradère's work from his competitors was its emphasis on France's special role in the scientific study of the New World. By "entrusting to a Frenchman" the results of the Dupaix-Castañeda expeditions, said the abbé, "the Mexican government has proven its partiality and predilection for the French nation."[40] Baradère and his colleagues also repeatedly emphasized that his "discovery" and publication stood in marked contrast to decades of neglect by colonial authorities. Without the French voyager, the Dupaix-Castañeda documents would have moldered away, forgotten and neglected by officials who failed to appreciate their value.[41] It was a familiar message in the age of empire: through European efforts, Mexico would come to recognize its own past.

To meet the expectations of the sedentary scholars, the creators of Antiquités mexicaines emphasized the accuracy of the illustrations. The 166 color lithographs represented the ruins in classical and romantic terms, as stately but disintegrating structures in harmony with picturesque landscapes, however. Towering mountains in the background mirror the pyramid near Chachicomula and the palace at Mitla. Part of the structures' beauty is precisely their ruined state: their crumbling staircases, tufts of vegetation, and exposed, cracked, and irregular surfaces. Rather than imagine whole cities, the engravers present a few noble, half-naked individuals shown in casual situations, interacting with the ruins as though they were part of their daily scenery. Apart from their brown color, the human figures have no readily apparent racial identity; their primitive nobility is suggested by their dress and their body language. The scenes, in short, follow the romantic era's artistic conventions for depicting landscapes and classical ruins.

Neither the beauty nor the supposed accuracy of the illustrations swayed the geographers, however. In 1836, a decade after the Palenque competition had been opened, the Société de géographie issued its much anticipated report. Neither the materials sent in by voyagers who had traveled to Palenque nor the major works published by Lord Kingsborough and Baradère fully satisfied the prize committee. Jomard reminded his listeners that the program had not asked candidates "to emit more or less probable or uncertain conjectures on American origins." Rather, in addition to excavations at several sites, the society had asked for "facts, positive observations made on site, geographical discoveries, exact maps, topographic plans, accurate points of view of the country, collected at various points of Central America, and notably there where monuments of the ancient indigenous peoples lie."[42] Sadly, reported Jomard, after ten years of exploration, the Yucatan remained largely unknown and unmapped beyond the coasts. Jomard did not participate in the critical acclaim for Baradère's work. While Antiquités mexicaines was packaged with the competition in mind, it could never fulfill Jomard's expectations of original and comprehensive research. The prize was meant for voyagers who went to "the theater of the monuments," explained the geographer, "not for editors of discoveries made prior to the program."[43] The geographers decided to postpone the award yet again until 1839 and raise its value to 3,000 francs. Jomard was convinced that "general attention is now turned towards the American monuments," but one wonders if his parsimony effectively fostered research on American antiquities.

Baradère had already left Paris by the time Jomard issued his critical report. Through the Mexican minister in Paris, he had managed to renew his authorization with the Mexican government to do archaeological explorations. In his last letter to the Société de géographie, he explained that he was planning an expedition that would take him to Mérida, the island of Carmen, Palenque, Chiapas, Mitla, Xochicalco, Texcoco, and Mexico City and that he would take along two draughtsmen, an engineer-geographer, a "master mason," a carpenter, and a naturalist. Baradère once again made his case for the prize while also asking for questions and instructions from the geographers to help orient his research.[44] He left France in 1835, was apparently sighted in Mexico in 1839, and was never heard from again.[45] However, his work proved to be highly influential for specialists. It was a crucial source for the curator Adrien de Longpérier, who organized what was probably the first public exhibition of Mexican antiquities in France at the Louvre in 1850. Assessing Antiquités mexicaines in 1886, the anthropologist E.-T. Hamy said that "the archaeology of Mexico henceforth had its rank in the history of humanity's past."[46] Ironically, Jomard, heir to the eighteenth-century enquête, was more site-sensitive and holistic in his direction of archaeological exploration than Hamy would ever be. But the most productive French voyagers to Mexico did not carry out such careful studies; in the end they were not well disciplined by their metropolitan masters. Their importance rather lies in the collections they managed to acquire.

1. Charles Farcy, "Discours préliminaire. Historique des découvertes, et considérations sur leur importance," in Antiquités mexicaines, by Jean-Henri Baradère, 2 vols. and atlas (Paris: Jules Didot l'ainé, 1834-1836), 1: x.

2. Pascal Riviale, Un Siècle d'archéologie française au Pérou (1821-1914) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996), 209; Claude Baudez and Sydney Picasso, Lost Cities of the Maya, trans. Caroline Palmer (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 42-43.

3. Bulletin de la Société de géographie 1 (1822): 2.

4. See Alfred Fierro, La Société de Géographie, 1821-1946 (Paris: H. Champion; Geneva: Droz, 1983); Dominique Lejeune, Les Sociétés de géographie en France et l'expansion coloniale au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993).

5. C. Edward Skeen, "Warden, David Bailie," in American National Biography, 24 vols., eds. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 22: 656-57. Warden produced respected scholarship on the history and archaeology of North and South America and translated Grégoire's De la littérature des Nègres.

6. Nélia Dias, "Une science nouvelle? Le géo-ethnographie de Jomard," in L'Invention scientifique de la Méditerranée, ed. Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, et al. (Paris: Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1998), 159-83.

7. Antonio del Río, Description of the ruins of an ancient city, discovered near Palenque, in the kingdom of Guatemala, in Spanish America . . . (London: Henry Berthoud, 1822). On del Río, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Historiographies, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 328-29; Paz Cabello Caro, ed., Política investigadora de la época de Carlos III en el área maya: descubrimiento de Palenque y primeras excavaciones de carácter científico (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1992).

8. David Bailie Warden, "Recherches sur les antiquités des Etats-Unis de l'Amérique septentrionale," Recueil des voyages et des mémoires publié par la Société de géographie, 8 vols. (Paris: L'Imprimerie d'Everat, 1825), 2: 494-95.

9. Edmé-François Jomard, Bulletin de la Société de géographie 4 (1825): 309.

10. Bulletin de la Société de géographie 5 (1826): 595-96. The society also published the Description and six of the accompanying illustrations in Recueil des voyages, 2: 170-93.

11. Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, "La collecte du monde: voyage et histoire naturelle (fin XVIIème siècle-début XIXème siècle)," in Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire, eds. Claude Blanckaert, Claudine Cohen, Pietro Corsi, and Jean-Louis Fischer (Paris: Editions du Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, 1997), 170-71.

12. On instructions for voyagers, especially in the human sciences, see Nélia Dias, Le Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878-1908): anthropologie et muséologie en France (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1991), 72-91; Claude Blanckaert, ed., Le Terrain des sciences humaines: instructions et enquêtes (XVIIIe-XXe siècle) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996). See also Jean-Luc Chappey, La Société des Observateurs de l'homme: des anthropologues au temps de Bonaparte (1799-1804) (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 2002).

13. An important standard was Constantin-François Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784 et 1785 (Paris: Volland and Desenne, 1787).

14. "Observations sur les Arabes de l'Egypte moyenne," in Description de l'Egypte (1809), 1: 545, cited by Dias, "Une science nouvelle?" 164.

15. "Questions de M. Jomard sur l'Amérique pour M. Choris," 22 Aug. 1827, #1628, Colis 3 bis, Commission centrale de la Société de Géographie, Questions et instructions pour les voyageurs 1821-1895, Archives de la Société de Géographie de Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France [hereafter ASGP].

16. Dictionnaire de biographie française (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1951), 5: 160-61. Michaud, Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne (Paris: A. Thoisnier Desplaces, 1843-65), 22: 587-88; Nancy Nichols Barker, The French Experience in Mexico, 1821-1861: A History of Constant Misunderstanding (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 10-15, 27.

17. Luis Castillo Ledon, Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia, y Etnografía, 1825-1925 (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía, 1924), 8.

18. David Bailie Warden, "Rapport de la commission de la Société royale des Antiquaires de France (Séance de 29 juin 1829)," Bulletin de la Société de géographie 12 (1829): 48.

19. Farcy, vi.

20. Besides the Dupaix-Castañeda documents and his collection of antiquities, he brought back an impressive collection of indigenous pictorial manuscripts, at least three of which had belonged to the eighteenth-century collector Lorenzo Boturini. In 1829, Baradère sold several of these manuscripts to the Bibliothèque du roi, thereby initiating that institution's phenomenal nineteenth-century acquisitions of Mexican material. See Baradère to Warden, Paris, 4 June 1829, Colis No. 19bis, #3253, ASGP; Jacqueline de Durand-Forest and Michael W. Swanton, "Un regard historique sur le fonds mexicain de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France," Journal de la Société des Américanistes 84: 2 (1998): 10.

21. On anti-foreign and especially anti-French sentiment in 1828-30, see Barker, 24-28. On the 1829 restrictions on the export of antiquities, see Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 321.

22. Keen, 327; Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821-1853 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 120, 220.

23. Icaza to Sec. de Estado y del Despacho de Relaciones, Mexico City, 7 April 1829, exp. 14, c. 118, s/s, c. 118, Gobernación, Archivo General de la Nación.

24. Claude François Baudez, Jean-Frédéric Waldeck, peintre: le premier explorateur des ruines mayas (Paris: Hazan, 1993), has captured some sense of the competition among the foreign artists and collectors residing in Mexico City.

25. Cochelet to Jomard, Philadelphia, 8 Aug. 1832, Bulletin de la Société de géographie (1832): 190.

26. Baradère to Warden, Paris, 4 June 1829, SG Colis No. 19bis, #3253, ASGP; Warden, "Rapport de la commission de la Société royale des Antiquaires de France (Séance de 29 juin 1829)," 43-48; "Prix pour la Description des monumens de Palenquè et de la Péninsule d'Yucatan, et pour celle des pays dans lesquels se trouvent ces monumens," Bulletin de la Société de géographie 13 (1830): 186.

27. Lettre de M. l'abbé Baradère, chanoine titulaire de l'église de Tarbes . . . à M. Laisné de Villevêque (Paris: J. Tastu, n.d.).

28. Colonie du Guazacoalco dans l'état de Vera-Cruz, au Mexique. Projet de société en commandite par actions (Paris: J. Tastu, 1829), 4, 5.

29. Pierre Charpenne, Mon voyage au Mexique, ou le colon du Guazacoalco, 2 vols. (Paris: Roux, 1836), 1: iv; Barker, 38.

30. In 1823 Baradère received the title of canon for the next available opening at the cathedral of Tarbes. He was finally removed from the post in 1840. See Archives nationales, F 19 2851, "Affaire Baradère, chanoine de Tarbes, absent de son lieu de résidence pendant 12 années. Privation de son traitement et nomination de son successeur après trois sommations successives. Avis du Conseil d'Etat et du Conseil d'Administration (1828-1840)."

31. Baradère, Derniers Moments de M. Grégoire, ancien évêque de Blois, et relation exacte de tout ce qui a eu lieu au sujet des sacrements et honneurs funèbres refusés par M. l'archevêque de Paris . . . (Paris: Delaunay, 1831).

32. André Chastel, "La notion de patrimoine," in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1997), 1: 1441.

33. Dominique Poulot, "Alexandre Lenoir et les musées des monuments français," in Ibid., 1: 1515-43.

34. Chastel, 1448-49; Laurent Theis, "Guizot et les institutions de mémoire," in Nora, 1: 1575-597.

35. Quoted by Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 228.

36. Page 1 of announcement located at front of copy of Antiquités mexicaines in the Bibliothèque nationale de France; Farcy, v.

37. H. Baradère, "Au Congrès général de la fédération mexicaine," Antiquités mexicaines, 1: i-ii.

38. Early version of dedication, Antiquités mexicaines, 1: i. See also Farcy, xi.

39. For example, J. C. Beltrami, Le Mexique, 2 vols. (Paris: Crevot, 1830), 1: ix, 53.

40. Baradère to president of the Société de géographie, Paris, 4 June 1830, SG Colis 5 bis, #1930, ASGP. The extract published in Bulletin de la Société de géographie 14 (1830): 40 is altered.

41. "Collection d'Antiquités Mexicaines," Revue des deux mondes, 2d ser., 1 (1830): 454.

42. "Rapport sur le concours relatif à la géographie et aux antiquités de l'Amérique centrale, par une commission composée de MM. le baron Walckenaer, de Larenaudière et Jomard, rapporteur," Bulletin de la Société de géographie, 2d ser., 5 (1836): 257.

43. Ibid., 290.

44. Baradère to president of the Société de géographie, Paris, 8 July 1834, ASGP.

45. Dictionnaire de biographie française, s.v. "Baradère."

46. E.-T. Hamy, "La Science française au Mexique," Revue d'Ethnographie 5 (1886): 9.