Les Martyrs, ou le triomphe de la religion chrétienne…

Les Martyrs represent the culmination of a long journey undertaken by Chateaubriand in 1806 in preparation for this novel, through Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine and Egypt. “Even if my work had no other merit, it would at least have the interest of a journey made to the most famous places in history.”

He would later reuse and expand upon these travel impressions more directly in Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, two years afterward. At the time of its publication in 1809, however, Les Martyrs caused a genuine sensation: with its new sensibility and its outpouring of images, ideas and feelings that broke with prevailing conformism, the work also served as a veiled instrument of dissent, a political dimension Chateaubriand himself acknowledged. Behind imperial Rome could be discerned a critique of Napoleon’s Empire, with the East ever-present, both as a real setting and as a spiritual horizon feeding into the poetics of exoticism.

The copy is complete with the errata leaf and the catalogue in volume II, as well as the six cancels that alter certain passages in the first volume (pp. 19–20, 119–120, 121–122, 123–125, 242, 381–382).

Rubbing to the spines and some defects to the head- and tailcaps, otherwise fresh internally.

A good copy.

Vicaire, II, 284–286; Carteret, I, 162: “rare et recherché en reliure du temps.”