Louis Dimier

Louis Dimier
Born	(1865-02-11)11 February 1865 Paris
Died	Saint-Paul-sur-Isère, Savoie
Alma mater	Institut Catholique de Paris, Sorbonne
Genre	World history, Western history
Spouse	Henriette Louise Marie Dimier
Children	Anselme Dimier and Henri Dimier

Louis Dimier (11 February 1865 – 21 November 1943) was a French art historian, critic, translator and royalist political writer.

Biography

Louis Dimier was born in Saint-Paul-sur-Isère, the son of a Savoyard immigrant, Joseph Louis Dimier, originally from Moûtiers, and his wife Marie Virginie Delsart.

He ran for the legislative elections of 1893 as an independent Republican in the district of Moûtiers, but failed against a Radical candidate. Dimier later was philosophy teacher at Saint-Omer high school.

He was awarded a doctorate in literature after defending his thesis on Le Primatice, painter, sculptor and architect to the kings of France (1900) under Eugène Müntz. In 1903, professor of rhetoric at the Collège Stanislas de Paris. He was the director of the newspaper Le Réveil savoyard founded in 1906. In 1907, he founded the Institut d'Action Française with a few friends, and taught the history of political ideas at the Rivarol chair.

In March 1908, with Charles Maurras, he was one of the co-founders of the daily L'Action française (successor to the monthly Revue d'Action française), the press organ of the political movement of the same name, where he was a regular contributor. Dimier was among the many early members of the Action Française who were practising Catholics (along with Bernard de Vésins and the and Léon de Montesquiou). They helped Charles Maurras (1868–1952) develop the royalist league's pro-Catholic policies.

After having been a long time militant with Maurras, he fell out with the latter following a violent polemic around 1925 and left active political life to devote himself exclusively to art criticism. He recounted these years of commitment in an autobiographical work entitled Twenty Years of Action française (1926). He wrote numerous studies on French painting, several novels and polemical works.

In 1915, during the First World War, Dimier published Les troncons du serpent: idée d'une dislocation de l'empire allemnd at d'une reconstitution des Allemagnes in which he advocated partitioning Germany into around one hundred free cities and allocating German lands to Poland and Sweden, with the Rhineland and the Ruhr to constitute a workers' state entrusted to the trade unions.

He became the perpetual secretary of the Val d'Isère Academy (1938–1940).

Louis Dimier died at Saint-Paul-sur-Isère, Savoie.

The INHA holds an important archive, including personal papers, manuscripts of works and correspondence, donated by his descendants in 1946 and 1976, with an additional donation in 2022.

Thought

A specialist in French art from the end of the Middle Ages, he was an admirer of the Old Regime and a supporter of the Grand Siècle. Dimier "advocates the absolutist and feudal institutions that guaranteed order, protected faith, spread happiness and prosperity, and ensured the cultural superiority of France." Thus, Dimier makes a total rejection of the French Revolution: the Republic, in its will to forget the monarchic past, would have been harmful for the Fine Arts (speaking in particular about the revolutionary destructions). Thus, the violence "against the political and social edifice laboriously built through time" scorned the cultural superiority of France, replacing it with a form of anarchy.

However, the integral nationalism of the Action française that Dimier shares puts the author in a position of fragile equilibrium, since some of his intellectual convictions are in contradiction with the guidelines of the movement: as an art historian, Dimier is clearly antinationalist. Dimier's thesis, defended in 1900, maintains, through the example of Primaticcio, that the French Renaissance appearing under the patronage of Francis I was due to the Italian artists called by the monarch. Thus, while some saw in the School of Fontainebleau a "dangerous contamination of a national art by the importation of a foreign and decadent art", Dimier considers Primaticcio as the initiator of the Renaissance in France, it is thanks to these Italian artists that France finally reaches the classical culture.

Dimier was thus patriotic and nationalistic, tempted by the restoration of the Crown by placing the Duke of Orleans on the throne. However, artistically he was radically anti-nationalist and "considered as hollow the idea of authentic French art", positioning himself "against the partisans of a native art".

Thus, although he did not believe in cultural nationalism, Dimier believed that France's artistic superiority existed because of progressive effort (mainly since the Fontainebleau experiment). "Progress is the slowly accumulated fruit of experience that matures in the institutions shaped by each generation [...] [it is an] enrichment of the present by a past that adapts to the changes of life through time."

But the French Revolution, corrupted by the philosophy of Rousseau, erased everything. Dimier writes: "Fifteen centuries of illustrious politics, of glorious wars, of flourishing art, of unique and admirable intellectual growth would have waited for the verdict of an ignorant and fanatical sect judging according to maxims that are shameful of civilized reason!" Thus, according to Dimier, for France to keep its glorious and resplendent heritage, it is necessary to maintain its traditions, the roots of its history.

For Dimier, then, artistic tradition merges with political ideology: the political environment is the essential framework for cultural success. Under the Old Regime, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture allowed France to reach "the height of its artistic glory" while the reforms of the French Revolution led to the downfall of French art; the monarch is the guarantor of the progress and influence of art.

However, tradition also rhymes with innovation: "[the] regular progress [...] [the] enrichment of art [...] it is a peaceful change that it is a question of, operated of the general consent, like a step forward in the resources of art". This organized structure was compromised by the Revolution; 1789: the tradition as guide is rejected and abolished. One looks for a new primitive and natural state of the art in agreement with the foundation of a new society; "not to raise of any teaching of the history, but of the philosophical reason only".

The History of French Painting in the 19th Century (1914) paints a picture of the misdeeds of the Revolution. Thus, according to Dimier, David betrayed the tradition that had guaranteed the progress of art; the classical age believed in universal principles of beauty, with its "archaizing doctrines", David perverted classicism. "This affected purism [...] infallibly leads to worse decadences than all those it claims to cure". The suppression of the institutions of the Old Regime led to unbridled individualism and thus to an incoherence and dispersion of the arts in the nineteenth century. For Dimier, it is therefore the national institution and tradition that are the only vehicles of national identity: France has been shaped by its kings since its birth under the Capetian dynasty, the nation is therefore a creation forged through time.

Private life

In 1904, he married Henriette Louise Marie (née Barbeau). The couple had five children. One of his sons, Joseph, who joined the Trappists and took the religious name of Anselme, is known in particular for his work as historiographer of the Cistercian order. His younger son Henri Dimier was a noted painter.

Works

• Le Primatice, peintre, sculpteur et architecte des rois de France (1900)
• In philosophiae partem quae dicitur eastheticae prolegomena (1900)
• La Souricière (1901)
• Les Impostures de Lenoir, examen de plusieurs opinions reçues sur la foi de cet auteur, concernant quelques points de l'histoire des arts (1903)
• Le Portrait du XVIe siècle aux primitifs français (1904)
• French Painting in the sixteenth century (1904)
• Les Maîtres de la Contre-Révolution au dix-neuvième siècle (1907)
• Fontainebleau (1908; 1925; 1932)
• Les Préjugés ennemis de l'histoire de France (1908)
• Critique et controverse touchant différents points de l'histoire des arts (1909)
• L'Hôtel des Invalides (1909)
• Joshua Reynolds, Discours sur la peinture. Lettres au flâneur, suivis des Voyages pittoresques (1909; translator)
• Portraits des rois et des reines de France (1910)
• Les Grands Palais de France, Fontainebleau (1910)
• Les Primitifs français, biographie critique illustrée (1911; 1923)
• L'Architecture et la Décoration française aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (1912)
• Veuillot' (1912)
• Histoire de Savoie, des origines à l'annexion (1913)
• Histoire de la peinture française au XIXe siècle (1914; 1926)
• L'Appel des intellectuels allemands (1914)
• Les Tronçons du serpent. Idée d'une dislocation de l'Empire allemand et d'une reconstitution des Allemagnes (1915)
• Paul Clemen, La Protection allemande des monuments de l'art pendant la guerre (1915; translator)
• Souvenirs d'action publique et d'université (1920)
• Faits et idées de l'histoire des arts (1923)
• Histoire de la peinture de portrait en France au XVIe siècle (1924-1926)
• Le Bois d'illustration au XIXe siècle. Recherche sur ses origines. Mémoire sur Godard d'Alençon (1925)
• Histoire de la peinture française. Des origines au retour de Vouet (1300-1627) (1925)
• Histoire de la peinture française. Du retour de Vouet à la mort de Lebrun (1627-1690) (1926)
• Vingt ans d'Action française (1926)
• Douze crayons de François Quesnel provenant des collections de Fontette (1927)
• L'Art d'enluminure (1927; translator)
• Les Peintres français du XVIIIe siècle. Histoire des vies et catalogues de leurs œuvres (1928–1930; editor)
• Le Primatice (1928)
• Physionomies et Physiologies (1930)
• La Gravure (1930)
• Le Château de Fontainebleau et la cour de François Ier (1930; 1949; 1967)
• Histoire et causes de notre décadence (1934)
• Le Nationalisme littéraire et ses méfaits chez les Français (1935)
• L'Église et l'Art (1935)
• Dessins français du XVIe siècle (1937)
• De l'esprit à la parole. Leur brouille et leur accord (1937)
• Primitifs français (1939)
• Le Roi Cottius (1940)
• La Peinture française au XVIe siècle (1942)

References

Chauvin, Benoît (1988). "Bio- et bibliographie de Louis Dimier (1865-1943)." In: Mélanges Anselme Dimier, Vol. I. Pupillin: B. Chauvin, pp. 31–44.

Colombier, Pierre du (1956). "Louis Dimier: Historien et critique d'art," Revue de Savoie, Vol. IX, 79–88.

Dard, Olivier (2009). "Jeunesse, élite et Action française." In: Jeunesse(s) et élites: Des rapports paradoxaux en Europe de l'Ancien Régime à nos jours. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, pp. 323–37.

McWilliam, Neil (2005). "Action française, Classicism, and the Dilemmas of Traditionalism in France, 1900-1914," Studies in the History of Art, Vol. LXVIII, pp. 268–91.

McWilliam, Neil (2008). "Érudition et engagement politique. La double vie de Louis Dimier." In: Claire Barbillon, Roland Recht & Philippe Sénéchal, eds., Histoire de l’histoire de l’art en France au xixe siècle. Actes du colloque international, Paris, INHA et Collège de France, 2-5 juin 2004. Paris: La Documentation Française.

Havard de La Montagne, Robert (1950). Histoire de l'Action Française. Paris: Amiot-Dumont.

Lionnet, Jean (1905). L'évolution des idées chez quelques-uns de nos contemporains. Paris: Perrin.

Passini, Michela (2010). "Louis Dimier, l’Action française et la question de l’art national." In: Le maurrassisme et la culture, Volume III: L’Action française. Culture, société, politique. Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, pp. 209–218.

Passini, Michela (2012). La fabrique de l’art national. Le nationalisme et les origines de l’histoire de l’art en France et en Allemagne, 1870-1933. Paris: Editions de la Msh.

Paugam, Jacques (2018). L'âge d'or du maurrassisme. Paris: Pierre-Guillaume de Roux.

Sérant, Paul (1978). Les dissidents de l'Action française. Paris: Copernic.

Serina, Elena (2020). "Nuovi elementi sul rapporto fra Action Française e Santa Sede: il ruolo di Louis Dimier nella difesa di Maurras", Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo, Vol. II, pp. 497–518.

Thérive, André (1948). Moralistes de ce temps. Paris: Amiot-Dumont.

Zerner, Henri (1965). Louis Dimier, l'art français. Paris: Hermann.

Zerner, Henri (2008). "Histoire de l'art et idéologie politique chez Jules Renouvier et Louis Dimier." In: Claire Barbillon, Roland Recht & Philippe Sénéchal, eds., Histoire de l'histoire de l'art en France au XIXe siècle. Actes du colloque international. Paris, INHA et Collège de France, 2-5 juin 2004. Paris: La Documentation Française.

Wilson, Stephen (1969). "The 'Action Francaise' in French Intellectual Life," The Historical Journal, Vol. XII, No. 2, pp. 328–50.

Wilson, Stephen (1976). "A View of the Past: Action Francaise Historiography and Its Socio-Political Function," The Historical Journal, Vol. XIX, No. 1, pp. 135–61

External links

• Works by Louis Dimier at Gallica
• Works by Louis Dimier at Persée
• Works by Louis Dimier at Unz.com
• Works by Louis Dimier at Hathi Trust
• Works by Louis Dimier at Internet Archive
• Works by Louis Dimier at Open Library