ABSTRACT
The eternal monuments of our history must be allowed to tower in solitary grandeur.
Benito Mussolini, 19341
THE years from 1914 to 1945 saw the climax of the Conservation Movement as a Church Militant.Its chief ‘denominations’, the national heritages, furiously attacked each other, even as their underlying common values continued to strengthen. The Conservation Movement was swept along
by, and in turn fuelled, the new, ferocious currents of the age. These curbed some of its more long-
standing passions, such as the debates for and against restoration, and infused others, such as the
idea of living heritage, with a new and hyper-politicised urgency. The turn of the century’s intense
focus on the sacrosanctity of the built fabric, and its elaborate theoretical debates and speculations,
faded from view. Never again would there be a Heidelberg-style debate, with thousands of opinions
about a single, relatively small building. The new preoccupations were external to the Movement,
and above all political: in an age of nationalist extremism, some of the most respected strands of
19th-century conservation thought were simplified into stereotyped, bellicose rhetoric. There was an
unprecedented inclusiveness about what could be part of the heritage, yet buildings also took their
place in a wider palette of ‘memory landscapes’. Mirroring the way in which the 20th century’s other
favourite ‘total’ architectural doctrine, the Modern Movement, was co-opted by socialism, it was
almost exclusively nationalism that enlisted conservation into its service, a service that involved
complicity in warlike antagonisms as well as support for benign forms of small-country emanci-
pation and pride. Nationalist movements mobilised the Conservation Movement; and that driving
force would increase until its eventual exhaustion in 1945, allowing a more peaceful renewal of
energies to follow.
