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The Monument as a Mirror for the History of Historical Epistemology

Lisa Regazzoni, The Episteme of the Gallic Past. French Historical Research in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Routledge, 2025. Cover.

Deep inside Lisa Regazzoni’s The Episteme of the Gallic Past: French Historical Research in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, we find the following quotation from a book by Théophile‑Malo de la Tour d’Auvergne published in 1796:

The language of the peoples of Armorica, this speaking monument of their ancient origin, seems to replace the silence of history concerning the deeds that bring our nation the greatest honor . . . The Celtic language, preserved in its original purity in Armorica, testifies that our liberty, although under fierce attack by the Romans and threatened . . . by the Franks, by their descendants, and by the insular Britons [i.e. the peoples of Britain], yet never succumbed completely to any of the assaults launched against it.1

Fig. 1: Cover Page of Théophile‑Malo de la Tour d’Auvergne’s Work on the Bretons as Europe’s Ancient People, Paris 1796.

As Regazzoni explains, La Tour d’Auvergne was a soldier and ‘celtomaniac’ who, at the time of the French Revolution, became deeply invested in arguing for the Gaul as the ancient original peoples of Europe. Regazzoni’s purpose in this book is to show that, in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, the term “monument” had a variety of meanings that underwent significant change with the passage of time. She leverages deep archival research to argue that tracking the term’s multiple significations can help us rethink the evolution of European ideas about history in this important period. La Tour d’Auvergne’s assertion that the language of the peoples of Armorica was a ‘speaking monument’ that subverted the ‘silence of history’ is a striking example in this regard. I will unpack three valences embedded in the example to help us appreciate the arguments presented in Regazzoni’s book.

Three Valences of Monuments

The first issue of note here is the very treatment of a living language as a ‘monument’, a word that we now associate with solid objects. As Regazzoni shows, La Tour d’Auvergne’s usage followed the work of intellectuals working before the French Revolution who posited new ways to generate historical narratives through close observation of material evidence available in the present. Such intellectuals treated matters like language, culture, and customs associated with particular populations as bounded domains awaiting examination and excavation that would reveal histories that were not obvious on first encounter. This approach made seemingly ephemeral entities, which were objects of thought rather than the material world, cognates of statues and ancient ruins, whether in situ or reproduced in drawings and casts. Originally traceable to the Counter Reformation, the idea was adapted for French revolutionary ideology at the end of the eighteenth century as evident in the text I have quoted above.2

The second point worth highlighting in La Tour d’Auvergne’s statement is the use of the adjective ‘speaking’ (French: parlant) for language, which does not denote what a listener might actually hear. The speaking agent here is the language itself while the obvious semantic content of the discourse is irrelevant. What matters is the way linguistic elements such as nouns, verbs, phrases, euphemisms, etc., can be understood to signify hidden temporal continuities. Treating language this way makes it into a “thing of history”, meaning an “unwitting bearer of information about the past.”3 This leads us to one of Regazzoni’s important contributions, namely the differentiation between “things of commemoration” and “things of history”. The first are objects whose utility resides in their obvious messages regarding the past. And the second are entities that yield, upon systematic observation, information that can then be used to create narratives about the past credible as history. For instance, the language of the people of Armorica was initially a thing of commemoration since it conveyed information through semantic transfer between speakers and hearers. The language’s ‘surface’ meaning and utility are its contents. To depart from this and to carry out linguistic and ethnographic analyses that reveal embedded structures, continuity and discontinuity with respect to other languages, and so on, turn the language into a thing of history. Overarchingly, The Episteme of the Gallic Past tells the story of how, in eighteenth-century France, objects and ideas that were understood as monuments went from being things of commemoration to things of history.

The change from objects being regarded as things of commemoration to that of history tracked shifting from the synchronic to the diachronic, the obvious to the latent, and the apparent to the hidden. This was a complex of interrelated transferrals that collectively required the presence of a historian, the investigator/observer who made the leap from apprehending the monument through the senses to placing it in an epistemological framework predicated on a form of chronological sequencing in which the ‘past’ had authenticating and authorizing functions. The past was a truth waiting to be discovered through encounter with evidence available in the present. Regazzoni’s detailed account of the epistemological transformation we see play out for the case of the Gallic past, interpreted through many types of monuments, helps to place the birth of the modern historical method within eighteenth-century European intellectual history.

The third issue that I would like to highlight in the above quotation from La Tour d’Auvergne above is the tendentious and ideological tone. While seen well enough in the bombast of the text, Regazzoni helps us to trace the ideology more precisely by contrasting La Tour d’Auvergne’s 1796 book with an earlier work on the same topic he published in 1792. In the first work, his assessment of the language and culture of the Bretons (meaning the people of Brittany, and not Britons, the inhabitants of Great Britian) aimed to prove that they were the true descendants of the ancient Celts. This was a case of interpreting local conditions in a region in France in relation to the ancient history of its peoples. When La Tour d’Auvergne republished the work in 1796, he retained the general epistemological principles through which he claimed to know the past by focusing on the present. However, keeping with the change of times to revolutionary nationalism, the 1796 version tied the evidence to the French as a whole, rather than being limited to people of a single provincial region.4 The living peoples of Armorica now came to be seen as unwitting preservers of the ancient French nation, rather than being that of the Celts.

It is instructive that, in the quoted text above, enduring national characteristics that peep out of the monument that is the language of the peoples of Armorica signify the nation as being suspended between eternality and history. The nation is said to have an essence that has survived the ravages of the Romans, the Franks, and the British. And yet, the language is also clearly laden with inheritances coming from precisely these alleged external agents. The job of the national historian (such as La Tour d’Auvergne in his post-Revolution incarnation) then becomes to delineate the essential/eternal from the accidental/historical. By discovering liberty in the monument, such a historian helps substantiate the French nation’s transhistorical investment in liberty in line with revolutionary ideology. The historian nevertheless casts an ironic figure, operationalizing a time-based process for the benefit of an atemporal or eternalist ideology.

Historical Thought and Epistemological Change

The Episteme of the Gallic Past is, simultaneously, a philosophical inquiry, an account of changes in epistemological presumptions pertaining to the past, and a deep dive in the archive available for a pivotal period in European intellectual history. As befits a philosopher, Regazzoni writes very precisely, attending to definitions, whenever needed, and arguing from first principles rather than through summary references to earlier scholarship. There is, throughout the book, a sense of conscientiousness with respect to the effort required to meet the burden of all arguments offered to the reader. This makes the book equally a highly rewarding and a demanding read.

As reflected in the title, the book’s main philosophical arena is the conjunction between epistemology and history. These two terms are abstractions and, as I understand it, Regazzoni’s interests reside in connecting them through the ‘monument’ as a material as well as ideational form. To put it reductively for the sake of clarity, she shows that, in the context of her study, the monument as an idea holds indexical value for understanding a great transformation in the very notion that the past can be known. Keyed to becoming an object of history rather than an object of commemoration as discussed above, the monument is the harbinger of a far-reaching shift that underpins what we find in not just books of history but also museums, archaeological sites, public history discourses, and so on. To the book’s great credit as a bellwether text, much of what Regazzoni shows us to be the case in eighteenth and nineteenth-century France can be instantiated in historiographical practices that prevail in twenty-first century academic and public discourse on history. The book therefore illuminates an important element in the genealogy of what we understand as history up to our own day.

The Episteme of the Gallic Past is a decisive and inspirational investigation into historical epistemology as an analytical domain. It is, moreover, a history of epistemological presumptions pertaining to history as an intellectual endeavour. Its theoretical arguments derive from close reading of published and unpublished sources, including multiple French national, provincial, and museum archives, and the voluminous existing literature on eighteenth and nineteenth-century French intellectual and social history. I should emphasise that I am not a specialist in French intellectual history and would defer to colleagues in that field for assessing Regazzoni’s coverage of the relevant sources and how she unpacks them. My appreciation of the book stems from what I see as the author’s exemplary attention to historical shifts large and small that tend to disappear from view when the long eighteenth-century operates as a general historiographical umbrella.

Notably in this regard, Regazzoni’s treatment exemplifies the benefits of making a clear distinction between temporalities associated with political history versus the history of knowledge. Very often in historiographical practice, a pivotal political event such as the French Revolution becomes a temporal token that is seen as a moment of transformation in the epistemological field as well. Regazzoni demonstrates that the ideas we see becoming prominent in discourses created after the French Revolution had long prior histories and were not born from the fact of political change. For example, La Tour d’Auvergne perspective on the Celts that I have highlighted above predated the revolutionary period in the book he published in 1792. Moreover, this work was based on theoretical presumptions we can see first in the work of earlier religious authors part of the Counter Reformation. When he published a version of the same work after the Revolution, in 1796, he grafted a nationalist and seemingly anti-religious ideology onto the same basic approach to the past. Observing the characteristics of this change tells us that development of ideas pertaining to knowledge need to be plotted on a temporal trajectory that is distinct from political transformations. This is not to deny that political changes affect knowledge. Rather, the point is to be wary of attributing causality to political events in the field of knowledge, thereby subordinating or predicating the history of knowledge on that of politics. Distinguishing between the two distinct, although possibly intersecting, temporalities leads to greater historiographical clarity.

Changing the Venue

Reading about a historical context outside of one’s area of expertise is an instructive experience. Interpolation from external contexts into one’s own work can expand the possibilities for processing ideas and evidence. In this vein, I found reading Regazzoni’s book extremely generative for my own ongoing attempt to write a cultural history of knowledge in India during the approximate period 1750-1850. The temporal extension that concerns me overlaps substantially with what comes under Regazzoni’s purview, although the sociopolitical context is starkly different.

For India, the century I seek to cover is the period of European colonial expansion, a circumstance that provided a different field of epistemological possibilities than France in the same era. Based on what I have encountered in the archive, I am, like Regazzoni, inclined to treat epistemological history of this world as a matter apart from political history. As I have explained, Regazzoni’s observation regarding authors such as La Tour d’Auvergne is that their views on historical knowledge pertaining to monuments and other matters derived from ideas that had come forth long before the French Revolution. These ideas were put to new uses during and after the Revolution. Political events thus intersected with the history of knowledge, but they did not cause or drive epistemological change. In a similar vein, India during the period that interests me was the scene of great epistemological expansion, where knowledge systems of Indian, Middle Eastern, and European origins intermingled as authors sought to create new amalgamated horizons. While British political power in India expanded greatly in the period, Indian producers of knowledge did not regard Europeans as uncontested superiors. What we witness, instead, is an environment characterised by questioning and creative experimentation.

Reading Regazzoni’s account of French authors concerned with physical monuments has a parallel in an Urdu work by Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) published in two versions, in 1847 and 1854 respectively. A young man at the time of publishing this work, Khan would go on to become a major figure in Indian intellectual and political life.5 Entitled Asar as-sanadid (Signs Remaining from Ancient Heroes), the book is a description of the monuments and history of the city of Delhi.6

Fig. 2: Cover of a Reprint of the First Version of Syed Ahmad Khan’s Asar as-sanadid (circa 1900 [original 1847]).

As in the case of La Tour d’Auvergne’s work on the Bretons discussed by Regazzoni, the two versions of Khan’s Asar, published eight years apart, reflect changes in the author’s circumstances as well as intellectual outlook. The 1847 version is written in the ornate literary idiom common for Urdu at the time. It signifies the author’s emotional attachment to the city and its peoples, leading to a narrative marked by a sense of intimacy. The 1854 version, in stark contrast, is composed in simple language that would later become a hallmark of Khan’s efforts at cultural reform aimed at making Indians better suited to modern conditions.

While the first version of Khan’s work is entirely in Urdu, the second contains an English preface and summary. Both the simpler language and the English content suggest a change in the way Khan perceived his audience. Altogether, the considerable difference between the two versions of the book reflects a reduction in Khan’s attention to conventions regarding religious formulae and acknowledging Indian ruling authorities. Such matters are either eliminated in the second version or replaced by seemingly ‘secular’ commitments tied to British tastes and authority.

As a detailed study has shown, the first version of Khan’s Asar was a book unique for its period for augmenting his verbal descriptions of monuments with more than a hundred sketches done by the author himself and reproduced in the printed work at considerable expense.

Fig. 3: Syed Ahmad Khan’s Drawing of the Tomb of the Emperor Humayun in Delhi, published in the First Version of Asar as-sanadid (from a reprint circa 1900 [original 1847]).

The second version omits the illustrations and streamlines the narrative by tying the description of monuments to a straightforward chronology.7 Taken together, the two versions of the book are substantially different texts that the author published under the same name. Interestingly, both versions were reprinted multiple times in later decades, both during the author’s lifetime and after his death. Parts of the book in the second version were published in a French translation in 1860, indicating a wide reception.

Fig. 4: First Page of Garçin de Tassy’s French Translation of Syed Ahmad Khan’s Work on the Monuments of Delhi, published in Journal Asiatique (December 1860), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k931762/f521.item#

The issue to highlight for present purposes is that, in the two versions, Khan puts the monuments of Delhi to quite different uses. Both versions are innovative in their own right. The first transforms what may have looked like a traditional narrative through the addition of precise measurements and sketches. The second ‘objectifies’ the monuments (and the past they are now seen to denote) into something distant from the author and places them in the depersonalised temporality of the calendar.

While the basic fact of epistemological and rhetorical change in the Indian case I am highlighting is akin to what Ragazzoni describes for France in Episteme of the Gallic Past, the actual parameters of change are quite different in the two instances. We cannot, for example, call the Indian case a situation of entities transforming from things of commemoration to that of history. Instead, this may amount to things (and histories) that were deemed intimate changing to a past that needed encapsulation and cordoning in order to generate personal and community identities better suited for modern conditions. Between when Khan published the second version of book (1854) and his death (1898), he worked as an educational and cultural reformer in line with the transformation of his views presaged in the difference between the two versions of Asar as-sanadid published in 1847 and 1854.

Can Lisa Regazzoni’s Episteme of the Gallic Past help us understand the change in attitude toward monuments we see reflected in the two versions of Khan’s work on the city of Delhi published in the middle of the nineteenth century? I believe that this is the case from the perspective of considering Episteme a book on historical theory. The French and Indian contexts are different, and the transformational changes we can observe do not match across the two cases. It would be misleading to think that the French pattern replicates in India, or vice versa. Epistemological issues as well as politics pertaining to history track along very different temporalities in the two cases.

Yet, for me, reading Regazzoni’s work has proven exceedingly valuable because of the philosophical care with which she traces patterns across authors and texts relevant for her. In all instances, her instinct is not to stop at noticing differences or similarities, but to move consistently from surfaces to underlying epistemological conditions. This approach yields, in sum, an epistemological investigation that is suspended between philosophy and history. Seen in this light, Regazzoni’s Episteme of the Gallic Past is one of the most inspiring books I have read for thinking about the relationship between evidence and argument as a cornerstone of historiographical practice, whether in eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century India, or the conjunction between history and theory in our context today. Regazzoni’s decision to focus on the monument as a touchstone for plotting changes in the conceptualisation of knowledge about the past seems to have been an inspired choice.

This blog post is the revised version of the commentary that the author gave in the context of the Domino Talk with Lisa Regazzoni on June 5, 2025 at the Center for Theories in Historical Research (Bielefeld University) about the book “The Episteme of the Gallic Past. French Historical Research in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries” (for more information click here).


Shahzad Bashir is Dean of the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC) in London. Before moving to AKU-ISMC in 2024, he taught at Brown University (2017-24) and Stanford University (2007-17) in the United States. He is the author of five books, including the digital monograph A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022), The Market in Poetry in the Persian World (Cambridge, 2021), and Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (Columbia 2011). His work has been supported by numerous major fellowships, including from the Carnegie, Guggenheim, and Mellon Foundations. He is an associate editor of the journal History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History.


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  1. Lisa Regazzoni, The Episteme of the Gallic Past: French Historical Research in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Routledge, 2025, 295. []
  2. Ibid., 168. []
  3. Ibid., 8. []
  4. Ibid., 243-244. []
  5. Shafey Kidwai, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan: Reason, Religion and Nation. New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. []
  6. Choudhri Mohammed Naim, “Syed Ahmad and His Two Books Called ‘Asar-al-Sanadid’,” Modern Asian Studies 45, 3 (2011), 669-708 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X10000156.). []
  7. Naim, “Syed Ahmad and His Two Books Called ‘Asar-al-Sanadid,’” 698. []

The text only may be used may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Shahzad Bashir (November 11, 2025). The Monument as a Mirror for the History of Historical Epistemology. Geschichtstheorie am Werk. Retrieved January 22, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/154le


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