In particular, he flattered himself on being complimented for his historical intuition, when, in front of the ruins of Carthage, he claimed to have “put back the gates of Dido in their right place” and, in the Peloponnese, identified the site of ancient Sparta. For, while exalting Christianity, Chateaubriand was an antiquarian at heart and saw himself as having almost divinatory powers. As Jean-Claude Berchet observed in his edition of the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (Gallimard, 2005), “his journey to the Orient was programmed like a voyage back in time, in other words an anamnesis which was not to lead him to encounter any form of fallacious otherness, but on a quest for what had forged his own identity from the very start.” Chateaubriand was interested above all in stones, and historical landscapes dominate, or rather relegate, any views of nature: as he himself admitted, he was writing a “survey of ruins”.

It was with this in mind that he planned his journey. As a legitimist, he had fought against the Republican forces before joining the Émigrés in London in 1793, where he was to stay until the end of the century, and where he started to draft his Le Génie du christianisme (1802), which he found more favourable to the arts and freedom than paganism or the Enlightenment. However, Chateaubriand, who had gone to North America in 1791, was naturally adventurous.

This fact can seem doubly paradoxical: the author, from an old Breton family, saw himself as a Northerner he was not attracted by the inhabitants, customs or religions of the Orient, nor by the picturesque which Choiseul-Gouffier, the ambassador in Constantinople, who was also an antiquities enthusiast, had highlighted in his Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1782-1822). From July 1806 to June 1807, François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), member of the Académie Française, writer, diplomat and politician, went on a long journey, considered to be the first “journey to the Orient” of 19th-century French literature, on the cusp between the “antiquarian” and romantic sensitivity: the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811).

François rené de chateaubriand rené