Following Xavier Marmier's Track . Writing Scandinavia around 1900 Sur les traces de Xavier Marmier. Écrire la Scandinavie au tournant du XXe siècle En Fr

Résumé En

This article aims to illustrate the difficulties experienced by travelers visiting and describing Scandinavia at the turn of the last century, some fifty years after the author of Les Fiancés du Spitzberg.Their travel reports afford a more prominent place for chronology, fellow passengers and cultural references to contemporary France than Lettres sur le Nord. On the didactic aspect, they often ignore northern litterature, prefering, with great hyperbole, nature to culture. They focus on sciences, and answer to Xavier Marmier’s conservatism by positivism.Regarding the journey itself, Marmier’s itineraries attract and repel his successors, who try both to see the places described by the member of the Académie Française and to reach an untouched North.Only Charles Rabot seems to find his way in this North travelled by Xavier Marmier, inventing a new way of writing Scandinavia, instructive, popularized, and largely read in his time, as was Marmier’s one a half-century earlier.