Descriptions of journeys take many forms—diary, letter, retrospective narration—and the journeys themselves spring from many different impulses—business, pleasure, adventure, science, escape, self-discovery, etc. The first French travel writing was a by-product of the medieval pilgrimages and Crusades. Villehardouin and Joinville give some account of the countries visited by the crusaders, as do some of the poems of the Crusade Cycle and the unheroic epic Voyage de Charlemagne. There are also accounts by private travellers, e.g. the late-14th-c. Voyage de Jherusalem of Ogier d'Anglure, with its descriptions of pyramids, elephants, and giraffes (see
Printed accounts of the great voyages of discovery launched the new genre on its popular course. Of the French writers of the 16th and 17th c., the most influential were those writing about the New World, including Léry, Thevet, and Villegagnon for South America, and Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain, and the Jesuit authors of the famous Relations for Canada [see Quebec]. Jesuits also wrote accounts of their missions in other lands, including China and India; these are some of the most informative works of their kind. Other classic accounts of travels in Africa and Asia were written by Belon du Mans, Villamont, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (Turkish Letters, written in Latin, 1555-62), Bernier, Chardin, Tavernier, and Thévenot. These travellers wrote with a view to publication; others, like Montaigne and, in the 18th c., Montesquieu, left travel diaries which were only published (posthumously) because of their authors' celebrity.
All these writers offered new information about the geography, fauna and flora, government, trade, customs, and culture of the countries they visited. Their writing was rarely subjective, more akin to science than to autobiography. The same goes for their numerous successors in the 18th c., when the popularity of travel writing remained undiminished—being fed by Prévost's 15-volume Histoire générale des voyages (1746-59). French travel writers of the period include Labat, Chastellux, La Condamine, de Brosses, Bougainville, and
Much travel writing was a vehicle for social, political, or philosophical comment; Lahontan's accounts of his travels in North America are moulded by his subversive convictions. In the same way, inspired by real voyages, the many imaginary voyages of this period were full of criticism of the established order and dreams of Utopia. Thomas More's example was followed in their different ways by
Travel writing underwent a sea-change with Romanticism. While 19th-c. writers such as Custine or Gobineau continue to publish more or less accurate accounts of distant places, the emphasis is increasingly on the poetic sensibility of the observer, the ability to convey the essential quality of the alien place. Travel is also seen as a voyage of self-discovery, a way of reviving the exhausted energy of the tired European. Travel writing comes closer to autobiography. Two key figures here are Stendhal and Chateaubriand. The former mixes compilation and first-hand observation in his Italian travel books, and breaks new ground with his description of the French provinces in the Mémoires d'un touriste, but always it is the author, with his opinions, aversions, and desires, who is at the centre of the picture. Chateabriand's grandiose accounts of his American and oriental journeys are also pictures of the self, not without some fictional embellishment, and are recycled in his
The mid- to late 19th c. was the second great period of French colonization. This is reflected in the travelogues of a Fromentin (Un été dans le Sahara, 1857) or of a Loti, and more indirectly in the imaginary voyages of Jules Verne and the heroic adventures of Malraux's novels. There is a strong globe-trotting element in much 20th-c. French literature, e.g. the fictions of Larbaud, the poems of Cendrars, and (in a blacker mode) Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit, closely based on its author's travels. As for travel writing proper, two outstanding figures are the utterly different Segalen and Morand, but one should also mention Gide's political journeys, Michaux's inward-looking Un barbare en Asie, and Leiris's L'Afrique fantôme. Many of these express a typically modern distrust of the confident travel narrative; writing at the end of Empire, Lévi-Strauss too voices his dislike for the genre at the beginning of Tristes tropiques, which is in its way one of the great travel books of the 20th c.
Some prominent novelists of recent decades, including Butor and Le Clézio, have written extensively about foreign travel, and more generally the late 20th c. has seen a renewed interest in travel literature, witnessed in the republication of classics of the genre, the launching of the periodical Gulliver, and the essays collected in Pour une littérature voyageuse (1992). Among the writers associated with this movement are the Scottish-French poet Kenneth White (b. 1936); Michel Le Bris (b. 1944), author of L'Homme aux semelles de vent (1977); the Swiss writer Nicolas Bouvier (1929-98), whose L'Usage du monde (1963, reissued 1985) is a landmark in the new travel writing; and Jacques Lacarrière. Lacarrière's Chemin faisant, a journey through France, showed that travel writing need not be exotic. Even closer to home, François Maspéro has described a journey through the depressed Parisian suburbs (Les Passagers du Roissy-Express), and Jacques Réda writes evocatively in prose and verse of his wanderings through the heart of France.
[Peter France]
Bibliography
- G. Atkinson, Les Relations de voyages au 17e siècle et l'évolution des idées (1924)
- M. B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (1988)
- A. Borer et al., Pour une littérature voyageuse (1992)
