ABSTRACT
IN Chapter 2, we saw how the emergence of ‘Modern Europe’, with its competing nations and ideas,and its driving ethos of Progress, had stimulated the emergence of a new sensitivity towards old ‘monuments’. That trend, however, had remained rather amateurish and sentimental, the business
of gentlemen antiquarians, architects or Romantic poets. From the late 18th century, all that changed
utterly. Political and economic modernisation in Europe and America accelerated to a furious pace,
leaving behind the leisurely tinkering with Improvement and the gentlemanly nostalgia for the things
of the past. Now, with everything increasingly in chaos, and all previous norms thrown upside down,
the cause of old monuments suddenly took on a new sharpness and urgency. It became an ‘ideology’,
a dynamic ‘movement’ of a typically modern kind, a movement with clear political significance and
its own historical trajectory. It became – in the words of Austrian writer Alois Riegl at the end of the
19th century – a ‘modern cult of monuments’. The new ascendancy of Progress was founded on a new
sensitivity to history. Increasingly, ‘historic monuments’ served as a ‘mirror of modernity’ in the built
environment, as a cultural anchor in turbulent times. The Conservation Movement was unam-
biguously a child of modernity. This modernity, however, took not one, but several forms.
