French Romantic Travel WritingChateaubriand to Nerval

Abstract

Most leading French authors wrote travel books in the first half of the nineteenth century. This book is the first study exclusively devoted to surveying the Romantic travelogues they produced and the reasons for and significance of this trend. For while ‘the journey’ was a central image and myth of all Romanticism, suggesting as it did a dynamic, expanding, and evermore complex world in which artists' lives were increasingly experienced as wanderings and endless quests, the fashion for Romantic travel books was more marked in France than in Germany or England. Chateaubriand, Staël, Stendhal, Nodier, Hugo, Lamartine, Nerval, Gautier, Sand, Custine, Quinet, Mérimée, Dumas, and Tristan all wrote one or more travelogues, including four masterpieces — Hugo's Le Rhin (1842), Nerval's Le Voyage en Orient (1851), and Stendhal's two Rome, Naples et Florence (1817 and 1826). The book explores the reasons for this difference from England and Germany and its underpinning by the aims of French foreign and cultural policies as well as the needs of Parisian publishers. It puts the case for the collective achievement and essentially promising character of these Romantic travel books, compared to those of most later writers in nineteenth‐century France. A distinctive feature of the survey is its belief in the value of concentrating on the text of these books as published by their authors, as opposed to manuscript and peripheral material, whether recovered posthumously or published piecemeal in contemporary reviews.