Le voyage en Orient de Gustave Flaubert : révolution ou évolutiondans l’approche de l’Orient ?

The aim of the present paper is to answer the question whether the Oriental travelogue by Gustave Flaubert, notorious for the bawdy descriptions of various sexual experience the author gains during his trip, represents a revolution or an evolution in the literary approach toward the Middle East. The paper is divided into three parts. The first describes briefly the history of the Oriental dream and the 19th‐century predilection for the voluptuous odalisques. The second discusses a few Oriental travelogues and the meeting of the dream with the reality while the last one analyses the sexualisation of the Oriental experience becoming increasingly important during the 19th century.