Around modernity: genealogies, critiques, deconstructions (2nd session)

Universalism and the Politics of Memory. The Case of Jean-François Champollion Jean-François Champollion is a hero of French republicanism. Streets, squares, and schools bear his name. It is his statue that stands in front of the country's most important educational institution, the Collège de France, sculpted by none other than Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the creator of the Statue of Liberty in New York. If Napoleon's France staged itself as heir to the universally human civilization that many believed to have begun in Egypt, then Champollion's philological achievement was to underwrite this claim. Champollion is thus known today mainly for deciphering the hieroglyphs—an achievement that has been celebrating in 2022 a two-hundred-year anniversary. The social significance of Champollion's life and thought, however, remains for us to discover, and one telling place to start is the same marble statue at the Collège de France. Restored to shine brightly, it has long provoked criticism from Egyptian intellectuals and politicians. It thus serves as a focal point for fundamental questions about traditions and reparations of the French Republic, in that its visual claims appear to be as contradictory as Champollion's own consciousness of the world: the universalism to which he owed his rise as the first professor of Egyptology—stemming from the first French Republic, surviving through the restoration and into the Third Republic—did not blind him to the destruction originating in European modernity.