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Edward William Lane
Françoise-René de Chateaubriand was a French politician, diplomat, and writer who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As a lay (that is, non-academic) Orientalist, Chateaubriand’s contribution lies in the account he wrote of his trip through the Near East (Asia Minor, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Tunisia) in 1806. In Orientalism, Said uses Chateaubriand to illustrate how pervasive the ideas of Orientalist discourse had become even in the early 19th century. His work helps to perpetuate ideas like the hopeless degeneracy of the modern Orient (which therefore needs to be conquered for its own good), and it typifies the Orientalist’s sense of their ability to control the world by circumscribing it with language.
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Françoise-René de Chateaubriand Character Timeline in Orientalism
The timeline below shows where the character Françoise-René de Chateaubriand appears in Orientalism. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2, Part 4
François-René de Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire tells the story of his trip through the Orient in 1805-1806. In it, he...
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When Chateaubriand travels back to Europe via Egypt, he hires a representative to carve his name into...
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...to be used as a mirror reflecting his own poetic genius—he goes even farther than Chateaubriand in imposing himself on the Orient.
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Narratively, Nerval structures his trip as a voyage into the depths of an Orient that Chateaubriand and others had only superficially described. Ultimately, then, Nerval’s Orient becomes nothing more than a...
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