Victora Duruy’a reminiscencje z podróży po Francji, Niemczech i Austrii na łamach warszawskiego tygodnika „Wędrowiec”

Victor Duruy is a well‑known figure of French science. A professor of history at renowned Parisian schools, the minister of education of Emperor Napoleon III and a reformer of secondary education. In 1860, at the invitation of the hospodar of Wallachia, Prince Bibesco went on a journey from Paris to Bucharest. At the request of Edouard Charton, editor‑in ‑chief of the magazine “Le Tour du monde” (Around the World), his peregrinations were published in this journal in 1861 and continued in 1862 and 1863. The accounts were translated into Polish and published in the Warsaw weekly ‘Wędrowiec‘. He was an attentive observer of the everyday life of inhabitants. He was interested in everything that was happening around him, even how people dressed , whether they wore traditional costumes, and what fashion was like in big cities. There are no thrilling adventures, no chilling descriptions. This is the usual journey of a distinguished scientist who mostly describes what he saw. The article presents the journey of Victor Duruy in France, Germany and Austria in detail. Duruy described in detail the historical events of the regions visited, their monuments, as well as their residents. His descriptions will interest both historians, art historians, geographers, ethnographers, and sociologists. In France, he visited Champagne, Lorraine, Alsace in Germany, Baden‑Württemberg and Bavaria in Austria, upper Austria, with its capital city Linz, and Vienna. He travelled by train and steamer, he was not satisfied with either of these means of transport, he strongly criticized them. He did not prefer technical novelties, he preferred to move by stagecoach and sail a river on a sailing ship. He didn’t like most of the monuments in Germany or Austria. He admired only the passing landscapes. Accurately – as befits a historian, he describes all kinds of skirmishes between the French and the German. His reflections are sometimes not fair, it is probably related to the memories of many wars between these countries. “Wędrowiec” does not contain all his accounts, the latest describes the imperial city of Vienna. A full account of the trip from Paris to Bucharest was posted in a French magazine. The articles in both, the French magazine and the one published in Warsaw, contain a lot of black and white woodcuts by Dieudonné Auguste Lancelot.