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This article presents a history of the experience of seeing and feeling the presence of the past in the medieval ruins at the time of romanticism. Rather than providing a cultural history of the spreading of “romantic sensibility,” it offers a reflection on the political efficiency of the publication of images and literary texts that were able to show the past to nineteenth century readers. From the series launched under the Restoration by Charles Nodier and Justin Taylor, the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’Ancienne France, to the first tourist attractions in Jumièges at the beginning of the 1830s, we follow the erasure of a political and religious use of the ruins under the Restoration (with the Voyages bearing a discreet trace), in favor of a cultural and patrimonial use of the ruins, destined to pass through time.