A Romantic Road to Utopia: Balzac and Ballanche in the Grande Chartreuse

The fashionable literary promenade being an activity in which neither the choice of destination nor the mode of travel are innocent, the production of a voyage account is equally predetermined. The important thing about literary travel was being there, belonging to the group of traveller-scribes whose reflections defined them as an elite collective, a “happy few”. Literary excursions of the Romantic period provide just such a manifestation, if not amplification, of this phenomenon. For French Romantic travellers, the “Course à la Grande Chartreuse” was one of the highly frequented Alpine itineraries of that period, its spiritual and aesthetic dimensions dutifully recorded by pilgrims and tourists of all categories. Ballanche and Balzac were two of the many writers who travelled to the site, and both reacted to the awe-inspiring spectacle they witnessed by producing what they deemed to be their finest works, and both in the utopian genre. The utopian visions they outlined, in La Ville des Expiations and Le Médecin de campagne , respectively, demonstrated that their choice of destination was no more innocent than that of their predecessors. Upon their return, they devoted their talents to creating in and through their writings the modes of harmonious and uplifting social co-existence they had sensed or experienced at La Grande Chartreuse. However, in creating and presiding over their utopian spaces, they also revealed themselves as poet-prophets, reflecting the collective aspirations of their Romantic peers who believed social progress was within reach.