Although the French seized upon the idea of national patrimony during the July Monarchy (1830–48) and have never let go, the constructed nature of the past this engendered has not been widely studied in France. In the past twenty years, Pierre Nora’s volumes of essays on “lieux de mémoire” have spawned French editions of the writings of Prosper Mérimée and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, among others. Jean Nayrolles’ L’invention de l’art roman à l’époque moderne is a...