Page 47 - Beholding Liberty!

PERISTYLE
I.1.6
F.[rançois] A. de Chateaubriand
Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris, en allant par la Grèce, et revenant par l’Égypte, la Barbarie et l’Espagne; Tome premier. Troisieme edition.
Paris, Le Normant, Imprimeur-Libraire. 1812. Library of the Hellenic Parliament
VICOMTE François René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), a writer and politician, made his journey to and from Jerusalem between July 1806 and May 1807. He found himself in Greece for 19 days only; yet the corresponding entries take up a third of his Travels. Specifically, on August 10, 1806, he landed in the south-western Pelopon- nese (Methoni); after visiting important historical sites such as Sparta, Argos and Mycenae, he ar- rived in Athens, from where he sailed on 29 Au- gust for Smyrna.
Chateaubriand, an admirer of Antiquity, sees and describes its traces in the Greek lands, but he is under no illusions: He recognises – and laments – the distance between the ideal Greece of literature and his contemporary impoverished Greece, with its inhabitants tyrannised by a conqueror of a dif- ferent faith. In fact, he promotes the Christianity of the Greeks as the value that could give them a new identity and a common point of contact with the
rest of Christian Europe. After all, he had himself defended Christianity in general, as a fundamental force of modern European civilisation, in his Genius of Christianity (Génie du Christianisme, 1802) and in Les Martyrs (1809).
Chateaubriand’s survey of depraved Greece, a mere shadow of its historical greatness, led him to Phil- hellenism, which actively manifested itself in multi- ple ways in the midst of the Greek Revolution [cat. nos III.8.C.7-8].
Thanks to its quality of writing, Chateaubriand’s Travels raised the bar for travel literature about Greece – often limited to recording information, pedantic and tedious. It is amongst his literary works that left their mark on nineteenth-century French literature.
It was first published in 1811; this edition, of 1812, is revised and augmented due to the success of the work. It was translated into Greek in 1860 by Emmanuel Roidis.
THE AWAKENING OF HELLENISM From Archaeoloatry to Philhellenism 47