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Cholula, and, of course, teotihuacán. At the same time in Mexico, Joseph Marie Aubin started collecting pictorial manuscripts, which he took back to Paris before selling them to Eugène Goupil. These were the basis for Boban and Ternaux-Compan’s studies. One of the richest collections outside Mexico, they remain in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Andean civilizations received much less attention at this time than their Mexican counterparts. However, Alcide d’Orbigny traveled extensively through Peru and bolivia between 1826 and 1833, and the results of his expedition, as recorded in his journal, were on a par with discoveries in Mexico.

By the time of Stephens’s travels, France was deeply involved in the discovery of American antiquities, and several of the most famous French explorers had already completed their research. Stephens and Catherwood’s book contributed to a renewal of interest in the Americas and to the appearance of the second generation of explorers, such as Charnay and Brasseur de Bourbourg. A short lapse of twenty years separated their contributions from those of their predecessors, and during the interim only Castelnau’s travels in South America in 1843 are worth mentioning. In France itself official structures designated to strengthen field research were set up. The Mission Service of the Ministry for Public Education was established in 1842 to provide funds for exploration, and several societies conceived a corpus of instructions to direct and orient investigations to fill in the blanks of knowledge about past American civilizations. Linguistics, physical anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology were included in these objectives. Now, for the first time, American objects found their way into French museum collections. At the louvre Longperier gathered together over 1,000 American artifacts—an improvement when compared to the few items available at the end of eighteenth century but also proof that French knowledge of the Americas was still scanty.

From 1860 on, explorations tended to become more systematic and coordinated; this was true for every country and all the more so for France. Under the auspices of recently established institutions, research grew steadily, and during the last four decades of the nineteenth century thirty-two expeditions were sent to America (Riviale 1991):

One must remember, of course, that this total represents only 6.5 percent of all the official missions, for France’s greatest activities were directed toward its areas of colonial interests in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. However, the preceding list does include almost the whole of the Americas. Among explorers and adventurers, several scholars were included, such as Charnay, Génin, Brasseur de Bourbourg, or Pérogny in Mexico; Crevaux in Guyana; Pinart in Alaska; and Wiener, Ber, Vidal-Senèze, and Créqui-Montfort in the Andes. Americanist research attracted greater public attention, as exemplified by the inclusion of exhibits in the Universal Expositions of 1867 (with Méhédin’s reconstitution of the Xochicalco pyramid) and 1878 (with Wiener’s collections).

The work of the French Scientific Commission in Mexico, founded by Napoleon III at the time of French intervention in Mexican politics, though still underestimated, stands as a great French achievement. Mexico’s victory and the subsequent fall of the French empire obliterated much of what it accomplished. The commission was directed by men such as Aubin, jean de quatrefages, Larrey, Longpérier, and Daly; in Mexico scholars such as Charnay, Brasseur, and Guillemin-Tarayre and Mexican archaeologists such as Garcia Cubas and Ramon Almarez participated in its activities. Successes of the commission include the first excavations at Teotihuacan by Méhédin and Almaraz, ill-fated research in Uxmal by Brasseur, and Remi Simeon’s identification of the Aztec system of numeration. The political failure of this commission did not prevent further archaeological research.