Reading Order
Voyage en OrientVoyage en Orient Reading Order
Voyage en Orient (Journey to the East, 1835) by Alphonse de Lamartine is the most ambitious of the French Romantic travel books — a vast account of his journey from Marseille through Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt in 1832-33, undertaken partly for his health (he was recovering from illness), partly out of the Romantic imperative to see the Oriental world that literature had made imaginatively present, and partly as a pilgrimage to the sites of Christianity's origin. The Voyage runs to several volumes and combines detailed observation of landscapes, ruins, and peoples with lyric reflection, digressions on political history, religious meditation, and fictional interludes (the story of Graziella, the Neapolitan girl he loved as a young man, is embedded here in an early version). It was read throughout Europe and translated into multiple languages; for a generation it was the definitive French literary account of the Orient, and its influence on poets, painters (Delacroix made sketches for it), and subsequent travelers was immense. The Voyage is the work in which Lamartine most directly enters the tradition that Chateaubriand had established with the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811) and that would continue through Nerval and Flaubert.
Where to start
The Greece and Turkey sections are the most purely beautiful; the Palestine section is the most intense in religious feeling. Readers primarily interested in the literary quality of the prose can read any section independently — the Voyage works as a series of episodes as well as a continuous account.
Complete Voyage en Orient Book List
- 1Buy
Voyage en Orient
Alphonse de Lamartine·1835·Usually published in 2-3 volumes in French (older Hachette and Garnier editions); Victorian English translations exist as A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. - Buy
Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem
OptionalFrançois-René de Chateaubriand·1811·The great predecessor text — Chateaubriand's Oriental pilgrimage that established the genre Lamartine is working in.
Voyage en Orient — Frequently Asked Questions
What does Voyage en Orient add to the tradition of French Romantic travel writing?
Voyage en Orient sits at the center of a tradition that runs from Chateaubriand's Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811) through Nerval's Voyage en Orient (1851) and Flaubert's Notes de voyage (Egypt, 1849-50, published posthumously) — the French Romantic literary pilgrimage to the Mediterranean and Oriental world. What Lamartine adds to Chateaubriand's model is scale (the Voyage is much longer and covers more territory), a more Romantic emotionalism (he weeps at every ruin), more genuine interest in contemporary political conditions (he reflects at length on Greek independence, on Ottoman rule in Syria, on the political future of the region), and a more personal tone (the embedded Graziella story, the accounts of his own illness and recovery). He also adds a practical dimension: the Voyage contains detailed observations of geography, climate, agriculture, and social conditions that make it a useful document for historians as well as a literary text.
What is the story of Graziella in the Voyage en Orient?
The Graziella episode embedded in the Voyage en Orient is an early version of the novella Lamartine would later publish separately as Graziella (1852). It describes his youthful sojourn on the island of Procida near Naples — where he lived as a young man with a fisherman's family and fell in love with the daughter, a girl called Graziella. The story is essentially autobiographical but shaped into a tale of innocent, doomed love: Lamartine leaves to return to France, Graziella dies before he can return. The episode has the qualities of the best of Lamartine's prose — lyric intensity, beautiful landscape description, and an elegiac quality that transforms personal memory into something universal. In the Voyage en Orient it appears as a retrospective episode, a memory of Italy summoned during the journey to the East; the separate Graziella publication twenty years later expanded and refined it.
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