Pierre Loti (1850-1923)
It was in Stamboul, the old heart of an ancient empire, that Pierre Loti, the final epigone of romanticism, was to have an experience that would radically alter his life and give it an aspect that is still familiar to us:...
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Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869)
Alphonse de Lamartine, the French writer and politician, member of the Académie Française, author of both intimately and religiously inspired poems, Les Méditations and Les Harmonies, in 1832-1833 undertook a voyage in th...
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Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Victor Hugo never travelled to the Middle East. And yet, the history of Romantic Orientalism could not be written without mentioning his name, given the extent to which Les Orientales have lastingly inspired poets, painte...
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
At the time when Goethe undertook his journey westwards, he had just discovered, thanks to the translation of the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, the full amplitude of the “Diwān” of the Persian poet Moh...
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Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882)
In 1855, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau was appointed secretary to a diplomatic mission to Persia for three years. He could not have dreamed of a better destination. During his adolescence in Brittany, he had become enamoured ...
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Théophile Gautier (1811-1872)
It was in Moorish Spain, which he visited in 1840 with Eugène Piot, that Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), novelist, poet, librettist, and art, literature and theatre critic, formed his initial vision of the Orient.
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Anatole France (1844-1924)
One of the particularities of Anatole France in his day, in comparison with Loti, Maupassant or Lemaître, as well as the Romantic and Parnassian generations, was quite clearly the fact that he was practically not an Orien...
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Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Even though his Voyage en Orient was published posthumously, the great novelist Gustave Flaubert contributed to his century’s passion for the Orient with his Temptation of Saint Anthony, Salammbô and Herodias.
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Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
With minarets, the play of orange suns across the Sinai desert, green palm trees and blue skies, ancient ruins and traces of the expedition to Egypt, the imaginary of Alexandre Dumas was saturated with Orientalism.
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François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848)
The Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811) of Chateaubriand, so famous that it was soon designated as Itinerary, is the model of all the travels in the Orient of the nineteenth century : trying to measure itself with the ...
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