Abstract
Maxime Du Camp, a 19th century French writer and famous photographer, who is still being rediscovered nowadays, was a close friend and travelling companion of Gustave Flaubert, together with whom he made in 1849 a classic journey to the Middle East, which he illustrated in his own travel accounts.This paper will explore Du Camp's writings in terms of the significance of journey (mainly the journey to the Orient), which in the author's vision becomes an initiatic experience, a passage rite, an act of sacralization of a profane itinerary, by means of which he can return to the origins of our European culture and civilisation, to what Mircea Eliade called our ‘cosmogonical and intellectual cradle’. Travelling means for the writer appropriating a different world, it confers on him a new identity, a new status: he has the privilege of seeing and contemplating an exotic space which is for Du Camp a source of spiritual enjoyment, a space which he desires to know from inside, as an ethnologist. For this purpose he renounces the European costume, rhythm and lifestyle, choosing to live like a genuine Oriental.This article aims to illustrate that for Maxime Du Camp the journey also signifies a quest to find his own Self, an attempt to find an answer to his identitary dimension and, more importantly, to the ultimate question: what is the meaning of life?
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