Les expériences de Johann Peter Reichart (1702-1755), tonnelier, marchand, voyageur, écrivain

Abstract

We tend to associate early modern travel writers’ veni with their vidi, their ritual truth claims with their observer’s status. Yet the two are not indissociable. That, at least, is the impression one gains from the account published in 1755 by J. P. Reichart, a German cooper who became a merchant and who travelled widely in the first half of the 18th century, in Europe and beyond. His cult of the travel experience aimed to secure the recognition of his educated readers. At the same time, he compromised his work of persuasion in criticizing their lack of such experience while offering his own ideas on how to translate that experience into prose. Such ambivalence reflects the marginality of this trespasser in the world of the educated and in the regional society of his birth.