Grand Tour et escroquerie: réalités et stigmates dans l’écriture de Charles de Brosses

Abstract

Lettres familières écrites d’Italie, published posthumously in 1799, analyse every aspect of the Italian peninsula visited by Charles de Brosses in 1739-40. Art and culture, salons and religion, gambling and antiquities do not prevent the author from noting Italians’ deeds and misdeeds, differentiating their attitudes and severity according to the city in which they occur. In Rome, the illustrious traveller’s true destination, the action of the papal police is limited by the power of the high prelates, whose condescension allows the real criminals to go unpunished. In Naples, the well-known art of «getting by» persists, concealing daily deception and swindling. Elsewhere, customs and money changers confirm the image of a swindling country that helps to affirm the cliché of a very charming, ambiguous and sometimes dangerous region. This study examines de Brosses’s account of big and small crimes, through a linguistic analysis of a few emblematic passages in order to highlight an 18th-century French scholar’s prejudices.