Between the old world and the new one. C.F. Volney and the politics of travel writing in France, 1782-1803

This article studies the different strategies implemented, in France,in accounts of voyages, from the end of the ancien regime through the revolutionary decade until the first years of the Napoleonic empire. It follows the travels and publications of a single traveller, Constantin-Francois Volney, from Egypt in the 1780s to the United States in the 1790s, up to his return to France during the Empire. It gives rise to reflections on the continuities and changes in travel accounts of an 'old world' addressed in a 'new', in France and around the world.