This idealization of the Vandals lasted from Procopius to Franklin, but was not to survive in popular currency much longer. In 1794, less than two decades after the abandonment of the planned ‘Vandalia’ colony, the French Bishop Gregoire de Blois coined the phrase ‘Vandalisme’ to refer to the widespread destruction of works of art in the aftermath of the French Revolution.26 Within months, the term had been adopted by journalists throughout Europe, by 1798 it had been enshrined in the Dictionnaire de I’Academie Frangaise, and by the early years of the nineteenth century the term was a commonplace in all of the major European languages. From then on, the Vandals were no longer remembered simply as one barbarian group among many, but as particularly powerful agents of destruction. ‘Vandalisme’, ‘vandalismo’, ‘Vandalismus’ and ‘vandalism’ increasingly came to define the way in which the barbarian kings of Carthage were remembered.
Bishop Gregoire himself (or the Abbe Gregoire, as he is most commonly known) was a prominent Revolutionary and a devout French Catholic. Best remembered now for his agitation against racial discrimination within the Revolutionary state, his putative formulation of a national policy on heritage was a relatively minor feature of an impressive curriculum vitae. In his Rapports sur le vandalisme (Reports on Vandalism), issued in the summer of 1794, Gregoire advocated a national policy of protection for the arts. In doing so, he drew upon an existing stereotype of the Vandals. Whilst many historians, poets and playwrights regarded the group relatively fondly, the collapse of the western Roman empire was still viewed with a sort of awed horror, and the Vandals were among the barbarians felt to have been responsible. Consequently, the group had long been viewed as agents of destruction, even as they appeared in Romantic novels and elaborate genealogies. In a letter to Pope Leo X in 1517 for example, the artist Raphael condemned the builders of modern Rome, who plundered ancient ruins to beautify their own houses as ‘Goths and Vandals’.27 Rather closer to Gregoire in time, and feasibly a direct influence upon him, was the English poet William Cowper. In circumstances strikingly similar to those faced by the French Abbe, Cowper lamented the destruction of the library of Lord Mansfield during the Gordon riots of 1780:
So then - the Vandals of our isle, | Sworn foes to sense and law, | Have
Burnt to dust a nobler pile | Than ever Roman saw!28
Other references abound. Alexander Pope referred to the decadent Catholic Church as ‘these Holy Vandals’ in his vitriolic Essay on Criticism in 1711; in 1734, John Theophilus Desaguliers happily condemned Descartes and all opponents of Isaac Newton as ‘this army of Goths and Vandals in the philosophical world’.29
Gregoire, then, drew upon a well-established tradition in invoking the barbarians of the dark ages to express his horror at contemporary events. Prior to Gregoire, however, that it was the Goths, rather than the Vandals, who were the most common emblems of barbarian destruction. While the Vandals do feature occasionally in these jeremiads, the Goths appear with almost monotonous regularity. Indeed, the negative associations of the group were so strong that Gibbon remarked in the tenth chapter of his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
So memorable was the part which they acted in the subversion of the
Western empire that the name GOTHS is frequently but improperly used
As an appellation of rude and warlike barbarism.30
Two decades after Gibbon had published this observations, Gregoire’s coinage had made it redundant. From 1794 on, it was the Vandals who stood as symbols for the violent destruction in the Age of Revolutions. Gregoire’s motives in making the Vandals as the point of his metaphor are not clear. ‘Vandalisme’ certainly has a pleasing phonic quality, and trips off the tongue more readily than ‘Gothicism’ or (say) ‘Langobardisme’, and it is likely that this influenced the initial coinage of the term, and would certainly have helped its later popularity. While the Goths were familiar characters in the popular imagination, moreover, and had lent their name to styles of medieval architecture and an embryonic form of literature, the Vandals had few such associations: in invoking the Vandals, therefore, Gregoire did not have to compete with other contrasting usages. Finally (and perhaps most importantly), the short Vandal occupation of Gaul in ad 406-9 had become a subject of considerable interest to French historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a particularly vivid episode in the great narrative of Roman decline. While many of these historians shared the idealized view of fifth-century history propounded by poets like D’Urfe and Baro, they regarded the Vandals as violent interlopers within this world, and were scathing in their criticism of the group.31 Gregoire knew his history (and particularly his French history), and may well have been drawn by these traditions in his condemnation of the most zealous revolutionaries. Probably influenced by all of these factors, and apparently indifferent to the more positive associations that the group enjoyed at the time of writing, Gregoire cheerfully determined that the Vandals would forever be remembered as the agents of destruction.
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