Travels in the Near East (Voyage en Orient, 1832-33)

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) author, poet, and statesman was a major representative of the French Romantic movement in poetry, and a traveller and historian of note.

He was born in Mâcon, Burgundy, into a family of provincial nobility, spending his youth on the family estate. His father, Pierre de Lamartine, the Chevalier de Pratz, was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror, and was fortunate to escape the guillotine. Lamartine was educated at the college at Belley (near Lac du Bourget), which was maintained by the Jesuits though they were suppressed in France at that time.

Though he had aspirations to enter the diplomatic corps, he was unable to do so, due to family sentiment, until 1814 and the restoration of the monarchy; he then served in Louis XVIII’s bodyguard. During the Hundred Days, he emigrated to Switzerland, and following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the second Bourbon Restoration, he abandoned the military profession.

In 1816, in ill-health, he visited the spa of Aix-les-Bains, where, beside Lake Bourget, he met the desperately ill Julie Charles, with whom he fell in love. Through her Paris connections, he was able to find a position in the capital. After her death in December 1817, Lamartine, wrote a number of poems in her memory. In 1820 Lamartine married Maria Ann Birch, a young Englishwoman connected to the Churchill family, and finally joined the diplomatic corps, as secretary to the French embassy at Naples. His first collection of poems, Les Méditations Poétiques, in which Romanticism, sincerity, sentiment, and religiosity mingled, published that year, brought him instant fame. Between late 1826 and mid-1828 he was attaché to the embassy, and then chargé d’affaires, in Florence. He abandoned his diplomatic career in 1830 and entered politics, being elected as a member of the Chamber of Deputies in 1833.

In 1835, Lamartine published the journal of his 1832-33 travels in the Near East, Voyage en Orient, during the course of which travels his ten-year old daughter Julia had died.

Initially a moderate royalist, he became a leading critic of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, aligning himself with the Republican Left and, as a religious and political idealist, with Social Catholicism. He was a leading figure in the Revolution of 1848, and instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic. During that year he served as Foreign Minister, and was a candidate representing the moderates in the presidential election, which was however won by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. After his failed bid in the election, Lamartine retired from political life.

In his later years, he was burdened by debt, penning many works in order to make a living, particularly his histories of the Restoration (published 1851-2) of Russia (1855), and of Turkey (1854-55).

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