ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, the perspective of philology and Classical archaeology, dominated by German science, the idea of a French superiority finds its roots in the Enlightenment. The only original French contribution appears to be the very bad economic crisis in which its metropolitan archaeology found itself at the end of the 1970s, when the available resources were only one-tenth of those in comparable European countries. The Durkheimian school under the leadership of Mauss continued on a course which had been temporarily interrupted, opening itself to linguistics, to comparative studies, and to orientalism, archaeology does not seem to have been affected by the same renaissance. It is significant that from then on major political figures expressed a personal interest in archaeology, an interest further accentuated by the economic crisis, which was also experienced as a cultural crisis. Just like Napoleon III and Field Marshal Petain before him, President Mitterrand referred to our Gallic ancestors in his appeal for national unity.
