Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem Reading Order

Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem, 1811) by François-René de Chateaubriand is the account of his journey from Paris to Greece, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Egypt, and Spain in 1806-07 — a journey undertaken primarily to gather material for the epic Les Martyrs (1809) but which produced, in the Itinéraire, a travel narrative that stands on its own as one of the most beautiful books in French about the Mediterranean world. Chateaubriand was the first major French writer to travel extensively in Greece and to the Holy Land since the Crusades, and his account of Athens (the Acropolis under Turkish occupation), of Constantinople, and of Jerusalem (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the route of the Via Dolorosa) is both a primary document of the Eastern Mediterranean world at the beginning of the nineteenth century and a prose poem of remarkable beauty. The Itinéraire belongs to the tradition of the literary travel narrative that runs from Montaigne's Journal de Voyage to Flaubert's Voyage en Orient and Nerval's Voyage en Orient, and it is one of the founding texts of the French Romantic fascination with the Orient that would be called Orientalism by Edward Said — a fascination in which the East serves as a mirror for the Western writer's meditation on time, civilization, and decline.