Holy Land

The Holy Land is a central destination in Edward Said’s account of nineteenth-century European pilgrimage to the Orient, but it is never presented as a neutral setting. Pilgrims pass through Biblical lands carrying inherited religious and literary frameworks; in Chateaubriand’s and Lamartine’s accounts, the landscape becomes material for private reconstruction, while Lamartine’s journey culminates in a vision of European sovereignty over the Orient.

Pilgrimage and the Inherited Landscape

Nineteenth-century pilgrimages to the Orient passed through, or had to pass through, the Biblical lands. For Said, these journeys commonly sought to relive or recover some portion of Judeo-Christian or Greco-Roman actuality from the larger Orient. The Holy Land therefore arrived already crowded with predecessors: the Bible, the Crusades, Islam, Napoleon, and Alexander. The contemporary traveler’s encounter was shaped by these inherited histories before it could become a fresh account of place.

That inheritance could obstruct the pilgrim’s imaginative freedom. Learned Orientalist writing imposed its own antecedence and official requirements, while the archive stood between traveler and experience. Yet literary pilgrims sought to escape that constraint by making travel a new repository of Oriental experience. Their apparent freshness did not necessarily free them from inherited representations; Said notes that such projects often returned to Orientalist reduction, shaped by the traveler, the writing, and the intended form of the work.

Chateaubriand’s Holy Land

Chateaubriand’s Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem, et de Jerusalem a Paris records a journey undertaken in 1805–1806, after his travels in North America. Its hundreds of pages display a self-conscious authorial presence: Chateaubriand admitted that he spoke eternally of himself, and Stendhal criticized what he considered the traveler’s stifling egotism. He carried personal objectives and assumptions into the Orient, then arranged its people, places, and ideas according to an imagination that treated resistance as negligible.

The journey to the Holy Land belonged to a project of personal completion as much as geographical travel. Having seen the natural monuments of the New World, Chateaubriand sought the Orient’s monuments of knowledge; after studying Roman and Celtic antiquity, he turned toward the ruins of Athens, Memphis, and Carthage. He also sought to replenish his store of images and to affirm religion as a universal language. These aims made the region serve a design already formed before arrival: he interpreted Islam through dismissive claims about the Qur’an and the character of its teachings, rather than allowing the place or its religious life to revise his premises.

Lamartine’s Reconstructed Palestine

Lamartine began his 1833 journey by describing an Oriental voyage as a great act of his inner life. He traveled with pronounced sympathies and antipathies, and initially treated what he encountered as confirmation of poetic expectation or as material for analogy. Once he reached Palestine, however, he openly turned from observation toward imaginative reconstruction: he claimed that the plains of Canaan appeared to best advantage in the paintings of Poussin and Lorrain. His journey, previously called a translation, became a prayer engaging memory, soul, and heart more than sight or intellect.

That shift authorized a stream of analogies and judgments. Lamartine compared a woman he saw to Haidee in Don Juan, likened Jesus’ relation to Palestine to Rousseau’s relation to Geneva, and made the actual Jordan less important than the spiritual mysteries it evoked for him. He characterized Orientals, particularly Muslims, as lazy and their politics as capricious, passionate, and without a future. His confident discussion of Arabic poetry showed no corresponding concern about his ignorance of Arabic. The account thus made Palestine legible through European literary and religious associations, while reducing the people and societies encountered there to the pilgrim’s established categories.

Sacred Destination and Political Possession

At the end of his narrative, Lamartine had accomplished what Said describes as the purpose of his pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, the point he treated as the beginning and end of time and space. Having internalized reality, he wanted to withdraw from it into contemplation, solitude, philosophy, and poetry. The sacred destination marks not an opening onto an unmediated place but the completion of a private spiritual itinerary.

The ending also enlarges the scale of possession. Lamartine rises above the merely geographical Orient and becomes, in Said’s analysis, a transpersonal ego identifying its power and consciousness with Europe. He imagines the Orient undergoing inevitable dismemberment and European suzerainty, with European powers entitled to occupy territory and coasts and establish free cities, colonies, or commercial ports. The Holy Land’s pilgrimage significance is therefore inseparable from a political transformation: a sacred landscape and a traveler’s private fulfillment become part of a European claim to govern and dispose of the Orient.