Posts com a Tag ‘Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour (T)’

Englishmen have always travelled. According to French Abbé Le Blanc, they travelled more than other people of Europe because `they look upon their isle as a sort of prison; and the first use they make of their liberty is to get out of it’.(1) For young elite males who travelled to France and Italy for up to five years, the Grand Tour was, most historians agree, ‘intended to provide the final education and polish’.(2) There is, however, less agreement about what that ‘education’ entailed. Most scholarly investigations have focused on the fashioning of Grand Tourists’ taste and connoisseurship, or on their learning to develop ‘social ease through exposure to different places and peoples.’(3) Stephen Conway’s suggestion that the Tour was ‘essentially a European education’ is compelling, given that eighteenth-century English aristocracy cultivated a ‘cosmopolitan cultural style’.(4)  The Tour, he argues, encouraged a ‘specifically European outlook’, which included polish and refinement, appreciation of classical art and architecture, theatre and music as well as continental cuisine, wine and fashion.(5) Above all, elite youth went on the Grand Tour to perfect their French since it was spoken at all European courts and was the language of diplomacy.(6) No English gentleman could be considered accomplished if he did not speak French. All this education was ultimately meant to shape an individual who would be ‘resolutely British’ and understand classical civilization’s supposed commitment to public spirit’.(7)