Our ancestors were not Celts: history, folklore and the Celtic past in Napoleonic France

This article offers a new interpretation of the Académie celtique. Active between 1804 and 1813, the Académie sought out megaliths and collected popular customs, songs and stories, which they understood as the vestiges of the ancient Celtic inhabitants of Gaul. The Académie has often been associated with nation-building projects, either as a manifestation of concern with the cultural diversity of the French population, or as a search for the nation’s glorious ancestors. Based on close reading of the Académie’s publications, manuscript correspondence and minute books, this article argues that the Académie was also a vehicle for the enthusiasm of its members for a vision of the Druids as Deist Philosophes, an aspect hitherto overlooked in the literature. In doing so it demonstrates the complexities of French nation-building projects, revealing both the crucial role of religion in debates over popular culture in France during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, and the contested place of the Gauls in the memory culture of the period.