Mediating Anglophobia: Political and Cultural Conflict in the French Periodical Reception of British Travel Writing (1792-1814)

Abstract

This article analyses a set of French periodical articles on British travel writing, exploring the complex and ambivalent relationship that the French press entertained with translations of British travelogues. As travel writing was a highly popular genre in this period, but also politically charged, its periodical reception in revolutionary and Napoleonic France offers a rich object of study for understanding the entanglement of political and cultural conflict. In a political climate heavily influenced by the military conflicts between France and Great Britain, and dealing with a travel book market dominated by translations from English, the French periodical travel review partakes in the overall mediation of national stereotypes. Relatively restrained in literary journals of the Directoire such as the Magasin encyclopédique and La Décade philosophique, the mediation of stereotypes turns into outright Anglophobic propaganda in the Napoleonic Journal de l’Empire.