Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem Reading Order

Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (Travels from Paris to Jerusalem, 1811) by François-René de Chateaubriand is the travel account of his journey to Greece, the Levant, and North Africa in 1806 — a journey he undertook specifically to research the background for Les Martyrs, his Christian epic, and which produced one of the most influential travel books of the French Romantic period. The Itinéraire is not a conventional travel book: Chateaubriand is less interested in describing what he saw accurately than in overlaying what he saw with the literary and historical associations it carried — the ruins of Athens, the streets of Jerusalem, the Egyptian desert, the sites of Biblical and Classical narrative. The result is a form of literary pilgrimage in which the present landscape is perpetually haunted by the past, a technique that would become one of the defining characteristics of French Romantic historical writing. Chateaubriand's Athens, Jerusalem, and Alexandria are all simultaneously the geographical places he visited in 1806 and the literary and spiritual places they had been for Homer, the Bible, and the Church Fathers; the Itinéraire is the first great work of what would later be called 'literary travel' — the genre in which the traveler writes simultaneously about what they see and what they read.