French apodemic culture goes back to the period of the rise of vernacular French as the language of officialdom and ‘high’ culture in France, in the mid-sixteenth century. In several other European territories (such as German states, Northern Europe and the Netherlands), ars apodemica was conceived and continued mostly through Latin, in part because it was tied to university culture. French apodemic texts, from the earliest examples, were almost exclusively written in the vernacular language, and numerous foreign texts were translated into French: in this, French apodemic culture is similar to the English. The relationship between language and normative discourse on travel is a reflection of the relationship between travel, language, and emerging French absolutism.

The earliest example of a French apodemica might be a text that does not feature in any of the existing bibliographies: the preface to Nicolas de Nicolay's Quatre premiers livres de navigations et pérégrinations orientales, the result of travel and missions starting in 1551. Published in 1567, this text is mostly concerned with exploration and information-gathering; the idea of education and the bettering of the self through travel is not an important theme. Between the travels of Nicolay and the publication of the resulting travelogue, another well-known French work reveals complex and indeed ambivalent attitudes towards travel: Joachim du Bellay's poem cycle, Les Regrets (The Regrets). Du Bellay was spending time in Rome on a mission he very much loathed. In sonnet XXXI, he is able to imagine someone returning from a pleasurable travel experience, but expresses his own desire to be in France rather than in Italy. Du Bellay had published, only a few years earlier, the Défense et illustration de la langue française (Defense and illustration of French language, 1549), a manifesto for vernacular French culture. For defenders of vernacular French culture such as du Bellay, in these early days of French as the language of administration and culture, the ‘lure of the foreign’ was limited at best.

This first chapter, combined with the considerations on diplomacy and travel in chapter 2, surveys the traditions and core concepts around the Grand Tour – it tackles the ‘norm’ of this practice from which we will see ‘deviations’ in chapters 3 to 6.