Les Martyrs Reading Order

Les Martyrs (1809) by François-René de Chateaubriand is the large-scale Christian epic in prose that Chateaubriand spent years preparing — the work for which the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811) provided the research material, and which was intended as the supreme demonstration of his argument in the Génie du christianisme that Christian literature could surpass classical epic. Set in the third century during the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, Les Martyrs follows Eudore, a young Greek Christian soldier, whose love for the pagan priestess Cymodocée ends in both their conversion to Christianity and their martyrdom in the Roman arena. Chateaubriand modeled the structure on Virgil's Aeneid and Fénelon's Télémaque, using the supernatural machinery of Christian theology (angels, demons) in place of the pagan gods, and attempted to show that the Christian epic could achieve the formal grandeur of classical epic while adding the emotional depth that Christianity uniquely provided. The work was enormously successful when it appeared: Chateaubriand's descriptive prose — the description of the Athenian landscape, the Roman games, the persecution of the Christians — was recognized immediately as some of the finest in the language, and the work established Chateaubriand as the undisputed master of descriptive prose in French Romanticism.