In Lessons of Travel, I have set out to explore the roles and mechanisms of a relatively underappreciated corpus of texts – discourses relating to educational travel in eighteenth-century France. I hypothesise that their importance stems from an initial clash between, on the one hand, a widespread and accepted notion that contact with other lands and other cultures is desirable and beneficial, and, on the other, the perceived insufficiency of the best-known form of this contact, the young gentleman's Grand Tour. What is true for most artes apodemicae in general is especially true here: the call for a ‘different’ form of travel is the raison d’être of this corpus. I explored a range of answers – including cases where the answer is the apparent elimination of any and all forms of educational travel in existence at that time.

Was this specific corpus of eighteenth-century French ars apodemica a drive for, and a form of, reform? In some cases, it could be – including in fields that are not necessarily restricted to educational travel, nor indeed to education generally. Abbe Pluche's chapter on travel contains little that could be directly implemented when it comes to travelling practices. But this discussion of travel within a pedagogical best-seller calls for the respect of all active contributions to society, hinting that members of the tiers état could sometimes bring a more valuable contribution than some elements of the nobility. Such ideas could have had repercussions well beyond the field of travel itself – indeed, their influence was probably felt much more strongly in fields outside travel. Rousseau's ideas on travel in Émile affected the ways in which subsequent generations travelled (inspiring for example the rise of travels on foot) as well as their vision of education – including, importantly, a restrictive vision of women's education and female mobility. Discourses on the elimination of privilege in travel, starting with the marquis de Pezay's ‘destruction’ of Grand Tour ideology and reaching their fullness in the programmes and practices of collective travel during the republican era, are certainly markers of social reform.