For centuries the society and politics of Old Regime Europe relied on the strong connection between past, present, and future and on a belief in the unstoppable continuity of time. What happened during the eighteenth century when the Age of Revolutions claimed to cancel the previous social order and announced the dawn of a new era? This book explores how antiquarianism provided new political bodies with allegedly time-hallowed traditions and so served as a source of legitimacy for reshaping European politics. The love for antiquities forged a common language of political communication...