François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand: Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem. A. S. Kline translation. London: On-Demand Books, 2011. [1811].
Part Three: Rhodes, Jaffa, Bethlehem, the Dead Sea.
Part Four: Jerusalem.
Part Five: Jerusalem—Continued.
Part Six: Egypt.
Part Seven: Tunis and Return to France.
Chateaubriand voyaged to Jerusalem on a ship with some 200 Greek pilgrims, joyful at the thought of visiting the Holy Land, fearful of Mediterranean storms on the way. (“The ancient Greeks were, in many respects, no more than delightful credulous children, who passed from sadness to joy with extreme fluidity; the modern Greeks have retained aspects of that character: happy at least in having recourse to levity to combat their misery.”) Listening to his fellow passengers, he observed, “the chanting of the Greek Church possesses considerable sweetness, but lacks gravity,” although he admires “the sadness and majesty” of the Kyrie eleison, “doubtless a remnant of the ancient singing of the primitive Church.” He was disappointed that the captain refused to land near the plain of Troy (“though our agreement obliged him to do so”), as “it is a rare destiny for a country to have inspired the finest verse of two of the world’s greatest poets,” Homer and Virgil, neither a singer lacking in gravity. But on balance, “Who could not bless religion, whilst reflecting that these two hundred pilgrims, so happy at this moment, were nevertheless bowed under an odious yoke?”—the yoke of the Ottoman Turks. “They were traveling to the tomb of Jesus Christ to forget the lost glories of their homeland, and find solace from their present evils.” As for himself, “I was about to reach a land of wonders, the source of the most astonishing poetry, places where, even speaking of mankind alone, the greatest of events occurred, that changed the world forever, I mean the coming of the Messiah.” Contemporary reality nonetheless intrudes. Along the coast off Caesarea, he saw “Arabs, wandering the coast, follow[ing], with a covetous eye, our ship passing by on the horizon, anticipating the spoils of shipwreck on the same coast where Jesus Christ commanded us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.”
He lodged at a monastery, where the monks “were lively but modest—; familiar but polite; no pointless questions, no idle curiosity,” concerned only with his trip, especially “on the measures needed for me to complete it in safety.” They well represented “the land where Christianity and charity had their birth.” He should not go to Jerusalem alone, they tell him, as the Arabs will rob and possibly kill him. Go with some guides, disguise yourselves as poor pilgrims. The Arabs’ avariciousness results from tyranny. Although the soil “appears to be extremely fertile,” “thanks to the despotic Muslims, the ground on all sides offers only thistles and dry withered grasses, interspersed with stunted patches of cotton, sorghum, barley and wheat.” Still, “if I live a thousand years, I shall never forget that desert which seems to breathe again the greatness of Jehovah and the terror of death (our old French Bibles call death the king of terror).” As a Frenchman, he thinks not only of the prophets and saints of the Bible but of the Crusader, Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the triumphant First Crusade against the Sunni Muslim Turks of the Seljuk Empire and briefly King of Jerusalem. His successor, Baldwin I, built the strong walls of the next monastery Chateaubriand lodged in, which “could easily resist a siege against the Turks.” He arrived in Bethlehem. The monastery in the place of Jesus’ birth housed “three or four thousand skulls, those of monks massacred by the infidels” over the centuries. From the monastery, he could see Jerusalem, “a heap of shattered stone,” a “city of desolation, in the midst of a desolate solitude,” truly “the Queen of the Desert.”
Moving next to the shores of the Dead Sea, “we found ourselves on the paths of the desert Arabs, who gather salt from the sea, and wage pitiless war on the traveler,” following a “Bedouin morality [that] has begun to deteriorate through too much traffic with the Turks and Europeans,” permitting them to “prostitute their daughters and their wives, and slaughter travelers, whom they were once content merely to rob.” They resembled the Amerindians physically, but “in the Americas everything proclaims the savage who has not yet reached the state of civilization; amongst the Arabs all proclaims the civilized man fallen once more into a state of savagery.” He prayed on the banks of the Jordan River, drinking from it; “it did not seem as sweet as sugar, as a good missionary has said,” but a bit salty, potentially improved “if purged of the sand it carries.”
In Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher burned down a year after Chateaubriand’s return to France, so he takes care to describe it as it was, a building “roughly in the form of a cross,” with a dome that was supported by cedar beams from Lebanon. Inside, priests from eight Christian sects abide: Latins, Abyssinians, Greeks, Egyptian Copts, Armenians, Nestorians (from Chaldea and Syria), Georgians, and Maronites. The priests rotate in and out, with two-month stints, since the staleness and “unhealthy coolness” of the air would make any longer stay dangerous. Nonetheless, Chateaubriand met a solitary Franciscan who had lived there for twenty years, busily maintaining the many lamps and keeping the holy places clean. The Sepulcher encompasses the place Jesus was crucified and the tomb where He was resurrected, although these claims have been disputed. Chateaubriand will have none of that. “It is, indeed, with the Bible and the Gospel in our hands that we must travel to the Holy Land. If one wishes to bring to it a spirit of contention and argument, it is not worth the trouble of making the long journey to Judea.” For himself, “all I can state is that in sight of that victorious tomb I felt only my own feebleness.” Death, where is thy victory? “Where might one find anything as moving in all antiquity, anything as wonderful as the last scenes of the Gospel? Here are not the bizarre adventures of some deity alien to mankind: here is a story filled with pathos, a story that not only causes one to shed tears at its beauty, but of which the consequences applied to the universe, have changed the face of the earth.”
Outside the Church, he does not fail to stop at monuments to Godfrey and Baldwin, “those royal knights, who deserve to rest near to the great sepulcher they had delivered.” As always, Chateaubriand mixes reverence for the universal Church with patriotism: “Those ashes are French, the only ones buried in the shadow of the tomb of Jesus Christ. What a badge of honor for my homeland!”
Nearby, Chateaubriand saw the ruins of a church dedicated to Mary, where, as Church tradition has it, she met her Son carrying the cross. “Saint Boniface says that the Virgin fell like one half-dead, and could not utter a single word.” “Faith is not contrary to these traditions: they show how the marvelous story of the Passion was etched in the memory of mankind,” and in the eighteen centuries since the Crucifixion, seeing “persecutions without end, endless revolutions, ruins ever falling,” nothing could “efface or hide the traces of a mother come to mourn her son.” Chateaubriand himself followed the Via Dolorosa. At Gethsemane, he recalled “the terrible degradations in life” that Jesus suffered, degradations “that virtue itself finds difficulty in overcoming,” requiring an angel “to descend from heaven to support Divinity, faltering under the burden of human misery, that merciful Divinity is betrayed by Mankind.” But after this torture and death, “while the world worshipped a thousand false deities under the sun, twelve fishermen, concealed in the bowels of the earth,” in the caves to which they had fled, “uttered their profession of faith on behalf of the human race and recognized the unity of God, the creator of those stars beneath which they dared not, as yet, proclaim his existence.” “And yet they would overthrow [the] Roman’s temples, destroy the religion of his fathers, alter the law, politics, morality, reasoning, and even the thoughts of mankind.” From these facts, Chateaubriand concludes, “Let us never despair then of the salvation of nations”; even today, Christians “mourn the waning of faith,” but “who knows if God has not planted in some neglected place that grain of wild mustard seed that multiplies in the fields?”
Far from a credulous believer, Chateaubriand doubts that a footprint in the rock on the spot where Jesus ascended into Heaven is really His, despite the assertions of Saints Augustine, Jerome, Paulinus, and other authorities. He concedes that even Descartes and Newton never denied such traditions; Racine and Milton “repeated them in poetry.”
Recounting Jerusalem’s subsequent history, Chateaubriand defends the Crusades, portrayed in “an odious light” by the Enlighteners of the eighteenth century and, it might be added, by many in the centuries after Chateaubriand wrote. “The Christians were not the aggressors.” “If the subjects of Umar,” the great caliph, father-in-law of Mohammad, “leaving Jerusalem, eventually descended, after ranging through Africa, on Sicily, Spain, and even France itself, where Charles Martel destroyed them” at the Battle of Tours in 732, “why should the subjects of Philip I, emerging from France, not range through Asia Minor, as far as Jerusalem, to take vengeance on the descendants of Umar?” Moreover, the Crusaders weren’t “simply armed pilgrims seeking to deliver a tomb in Palestine.” “It was not only a question of the holy tomb, but also about which [religion] would prevail on earth, a religion which was an enemy of civilization, systematically maintaining, ignorance, despotism, and slavery, or a religion that revived the spirit of ancient knowledge in the modern world and abolished slavery,” a religion of “persecution and conquest” against a religion of “tolerance and peace.” For eight centuries, Christians endured the Muslim conquest of Spain, the invasion of France, “the ravaging of Greece and the two Sicilies,” and “the whole of Africa enchained.” “If, ultimately, the cries of so many slaughtered victims in the East, and the barbarian advance to the very gates of Constantinople, awakened Christendom and roused it to its own defense, who would dare claim that the Crusaders’ cause was unjust? Where would we be if our fathers had not met force with force?” Chateaubriand has already shown where Europe would be: it would be in the condition of Greece under “the Muslim yoke” of the Turks. Would “those who applaud the progress of enlightenment today…wish to see a religion prevail among us that burned the library of Alexandria” and “considers it a merit to trample mankind underfoot”? Far from shameful, “the era of these expeditions represents the heroic age of our history,” the “age that gave birth to our epic poetry,” with Tasso, a Christian Homer or Virgil. (“Above all a poem for soldiers, Jerusalem Delivered “breathes valor and glory.”) All that cloaks a nation with wonder ought not to be despised by that nation itself,” and “there is something in our hearts that makes us love glory,” human beings being more than utilitarian calculators of “their own good and ill.”
The Muslim Saladin, Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria, founder of the Ayyubid Dynasty, besieged and reconquered Jerusalem in 1187. Nominal legitimacy in Jerusalem passed to several European monarchs, and rule over the city was contended for, until 1291, when “the Christians were driven from the Holy Land, utterly.” “Is it any surprise that a fertile country was turned to a wasteland after such devastation,” having been sacked seventeen times? After that, Muslim empires contended for it, with the Turks finally seizing it from Egypt and Syria in 1516—this “pile of rubble, called a city.” As Chateaubriand understates it, “the people of the East are much more familiar than we with the ideas of invasion,” although Europeans of Napoleon’s time are sufficiently familiar with them. As a result of their violent geopolitical experiences, Asians have become “accustomed to follow the destiny of some master or other,” with “no code binding them to concepts of order and moderation; to kill when you are the stronger seems to them a legitimate proceeding; they submit to it, or exercise, it, with a like indifference…. Freedom, they do not know; rights, they have none: force is their god.” Back at the monastery, Chateaubriand encountered an example of such moeurs in the form of two drunken soldiers of the Pasha’s army, who tried to push him around. He returned the insult, with no further troubles. “A Turk once humiliated is never dangerous, and we heard nothing more of it. The monks, “guardians of the tomb of Jesus Christ,” have been “uniquely occupied, for several centuries, in defending themselves” against similar “kinds of insult and tyranny,” the “most bizarre inventions of Oriental despotism.” He notices also the Jews of Jerusalem, similarly subject, yet “fortified by their poverty,” “clothed in rags, seated among the dust of Zion, looking for insects which they devour,” but with “their eyes fixed on the Temple” and never neglecting to study the Pentateuch with their children.
Chateaubriand does not neglect to provide an outline of Jerusalem’s ruling offices. The regime consists of a military governor, a minister of justice, a mufti (both a religious leader and “head of the legal profession,” since the city is under the sharia or Muslim law), a customs officer, and a city provost. “These subordinate tyrants all belong, except the mufti, to a tyrant in chief, and that tyrant in chief is the Pasha of Damascus,” himself appointed by the Turks. “Every superior in Turkey…has the right to delegate his powers to an inferior, and those powers extend to control over property and life.” As for the mufti, when he is “a fanatic or a wicked man, like the one found in Jerusalem during my visit, he is the most tyrannical of all the authorities as regards Christians.” This remained so more than a century later, as seen in the tenure of Grand Mufti Mohammad amin al-Husayn, the Nazi ally during World War II. Since mounts and Bedouins stand between Damascus and Jerusalem, protests against local tyranny are often impossible to lodge, which is rather the point: the rulers “want mute slavery.” The current Pasha, “driven by sordid avarice, like almost all Muslims,” enriches himself by inducing the merchants to close their shops, thereby starving the people; when permitted to reopen, the merchants “bring in food at extraordinary prices, and the populace, dying of hunger for a second time, are forced, in order to live, to strip themselves to their last garment.” The Pasha thus takes his cut of the profits and keeps the people down. In a more straightforward maneuver, the Pasha used his cavalry to plunder Arab farmers of their livestock, which he then sold to Jerusalem butchers at exorbitant prices, which they were forced to purchase “on pain of death.” “After exhausting Jerusalem’s resources, the Pasha withdraws,” along with his soldiers, leaving the city governor with inadequate resources. Gangs of thieves take over and neighboring villages resume blood feuds previously suppressed. Once he regroups, in a year or so, the governor imposes peace by “exterminat[ing] whole tribes.” “Gradually the desert spreads further.” Walking the streets of the unpaved and deserted streets of the city, where “a few miserable shops display their wretchedness to your gaze,” the only sound to be heard is a horse bearing a Janissary “who brings the head of some Bedouin, or who is off to rob the fellahin.” Chateaubriand can leave Jerusalem, without having delivered it. For the foreseeable future, from the perspective of 1806, no human being will.
Still, “I confess that I felt a certain sense of pleasure, in considering that I had accomplished the pilgrimage I had meditated for so long.” He expected his return to France through Egypt, the Barbary States, and Spain to be easy. “I was wrong, however.” Back on the Mediterranean, he praises the adventurousness of the sailor’s way of life, with its “continual passage from storm to storm, the rapid change of land and sky,” which “stimulate the voyager’s imagination”: “It is, in its unfolding, the very image of man here below; forever promising himself to remain in port, and forever spreading his sails; seeking enchanted islands which he will never reach, and where if he landed he would only experience ennui; speaking only of repose, yet delighting in the tempest; perishing in the midst of some shipwreck, or dying an old pilot on the shore, unknown to the young voyagers whose vessels he regrets being powerless to follow.” Chateaubriand’s immediate future would confirm those observations.
Egypt is “the country where civilization was born, and where today ignorance and barbarism reign.” In Alexandria, once “the sanctuary of the Muses, and which echoed in the darkness to the noisy revels of Antony and Cleopatra,” “a fatal talisman has plunged into the silence of the people,” the talisman of despotism, “which extinguishes all joy an allows not even a cry of pain.” Ancient Alexandria had a population of three million; today, a million remain, “a sort of palpitating trunk that has not even the strength, between the ruins and the tombs, to free itself from its chains.” The beautiful Nile, with its magnificent Delta, lacks only “a free government and a happy people. “But no country is beautiful that lacks liberty: the most serene of skies is odious, if one is chained to the earth.” “The only thing I found worthy of those beautiful plains was the memory of my country’s glory. During the Seventh Crusade, in 1250, the French army under the command of Louis IX—Saint Louis—were defeated by Egyptian forces, which captured the king. The French knights “were avenged by the soldiers at the Battle of the Pyramids” in 1798, in one of the very few Napoleonic ventures Chateaubriand can bring himself to praise. The brief French occupation (they were expelled by the British in 1801) saw the founding of the Institut d’Égypte, institutionalizing research on ancient Egypt; it saw the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, whose bilingual texts enabled scholars to translate hieroglyphics much more fully; and it enabled the establishment of Egypt’s first newspapers, giving Egyptians a chance at self-government. But self-government is a long way off. Now a land infested with “Albanian brigands” and “foolish Muslims,” once a country “where so industrious, so peaceful, so wise, a people once lived, a people whose customs and morals Herodotus and above all Diodorus Siculus were pleased to describe for us,” Egypt illustrates what difference “the rule of law can make between men.”
To the past, then. Ancient Egypt’s pyramids excited Chateaubriand’s imagination. “I know the philosopher may well smile or groan at the thought that the greatest monument built by human hands is a tomb; but why see in the pyramid of Cheops only a heap of stones and a skeleton?” The pyramids are monuments not to death but to immortality, “mark[ing] the entrance to life without end, it is a species of eternal portal built on the edge of eternity.” As Diodorus Siculus remarked, the pyramid builders “give little thought to the furnishings of their palaces, but with regard to their burial they display every zeal,” unlike modern men who “prefer to believe that all the monuments had a material purpose,” never imagining “that nations might possess a moral purpose of a far superior order, which the laws of antiquity served.” “Why complain that a pharaoh sought to render that lesson eternal?” And do not such monuments, “an essential part of the glory of all human society,” not bear “glorious witness to [a nation’s] genius”? Cheops was no vain fool but “a monarch possessed of a magnanimous spirit.” “The idea of vanquishing time by means of a tomb, of forcing the sea of generations, customs, laws, ages to break against the foot of a coffin, could never have arisen from a common mind. If it is merely pride, at least it is magnificent pride.”
No such great-souled monarch rules modern Egypt. Chateaubriand had an audience with the Pasha’s adolescent son, who was “seated on a carpet in a dilapidated room, surrounded by a dozen obliging servants who hastened to obey his every whim. I have never seen a more hideous spectacle”: the future master of the Egyptians, nurtured “on a diet of the most extravagant flattery” by servants who “degraded the soul of a child destined to lead men.” “Although I may have delighted in Egypt,” with its natural beauty, its noble monuments, its excellent wine, the capital, Alexandria, “seemed the saddest and most desolate place on earth.”
Christmas Day of 1806 brought him in the waters off Malta, but off Tunis, where they arrived a few days later, the sea roiled for eighteen days, and they nearly ran aground on the island of Lampedusa. Two British warships sank in that storm, but “Providence saved us,” as the wind changed and carried them into the open sea. Eventually, they reached the Kerkennah Islands, where they remained at anchor past New Year’s Day. “Under how many stars, and with what varied fortunes, had I witnessed the birth of years, the years that pass so swiftly or last so long!” From the New Year’s days of childhood, “when I received parental blessings and gifts, my heart beating with joy,” to this “foreign vessel, in sight of a barbarous land, this day arrived for me without witnesses, without pleasure, without the embrace of a family without those tender wishes of happiness for her son that a mother utters with such sincerity. This day, born in the womb of storm winds, brought to my brow only worries, regrets and white hair.” He and the crew nonetheless marked the occasion by slaughtering some chickens and offering a toast to France. “We were not far from the island of the Lotus Eaters, where Ulysses’ companions forgot their homeland: I know no fruit delightful enough to make me forget mine.”
Safely in Tunisia at last, Chateaubriand enjoyed the hospitality of a French family; “the ashes of Dido, and the ruins of Carthage, were regaled with the sounds of a French violin.” The regime of ancient Carthage has not won the favor of later generations. If one wonders why “no one thinks of the eighty thousand Carthaginians slaughtered on the plains of Sicily,” in alliance with the Persians, “while the whole world speaks of those three hundred Spartans who died obeying the sacred laws of their country,” one might consider that “it is the greatness of the cause, not the means, which leads to true fame, and honor has been in all ages the most enduring feature of glory.” And even if Hannibal is “the greatest general of antiquity,” as Chateaubriand judges him to be, “he is not the one we love most.” “He had neither Alexander’s heroism nor Caesar’s universal talent; but he surpassed both as a master of war.” Animated “solely by hatred,” crossing the Pyrenees, Gaul, and the Alps, he crushed Roman forces in four consecutive battles. With unquestionable “superiority of mind and strength of character,” he nonetheless “lacked the noblest qualities of the spirit: cold, cruel, heartless, born to overthrow and not to found empires, he was much inferior in magnanimity to his rival,” Scipio Africanus. With Scipio “begins that Roman urbanity, which ornamented the minds of Cicero, Pompey, and Caesar, and which in those illustrious citizens replaced the rusticity of Cato and Fabricius.” Driving the Carthaginian forces south, through Spain, Scipio defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE. “Hannibal had been away from his homeland for thirty-six years; he left as a child, and had returned at an advanced age,” nearly a stranger to his country. “Blind with envy,” his fellow citizens sent him into exile. “When services rendered are so exceptional they exceed the bounds of understanding, they reap only ingratitude.” He “had the misfortune to be greater than the people amongst whom he was born.” Bounced out of the prime minister’s office in 1946, discarded by French voters in 1969, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle number among the more recent examples of these phenomena. As for Scipio, Chateaubriand accepts the possibility that he died by an assassin’s hand.
As for France, Saint Louis arrived with his troops in 1270, his Crusaders admiring “the beauty of the country covered with olive trees.” “The chaplain of a king of France took possession of the site of Hannibal’s city with these words: ‘I proclaim the rule here of our Lord Jesus Chris, and Louis, King of France, his servant.’ This same place had heard declarations in Gaetulian, Tyrian, Latin, Vandal, Gree and Arabic, and ever the same sentiments in varying language.” After the French army drove out the Saracens, “the great ladies of France established themselves in the ruins of Dido’s palace.”
The occupation didn’t last. The Muslims had machines that could raise the hot sand of the surrounding deserts into the wind blowing toward the French, “an ingenious and terrible design, worthy of the wilderness that gave rise to the idea, and show[ing] to what point mankind can take its genius for destruction.” Struck by a disease that had already carried away a beloved son, Louis left a testament to his eldest son and heir. “If God send thee adversity, receive it in patience, and give thanks to Our Lord, and thin that thou hast deserved it, and that He will turn it to good. If He give thee prosperity, thank heaven with humility; that through pride or otherwise thou mayest not be the worse for that which should make thee better. For one should not war against God with His own gifts.” And “study how thy people and thy subjects may live in peace and honesty under thee.” Chateaubriand remarks, “Happy are those who can glory in that, and say: ‘The man who wrote these instructions was my ancestral king.'” And “the ambassadors of the Emperor of Constantinople were present at the scene: they could tell all Greece of a death which Socrates would have admired.”
“I have nothing more to say to my readers; it is time for them to return with me to my homeland.” “I have written enough if my name should live on; too much if it is fated to die.”
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