The Path to Rome

The Path to Rome

Author	Hilaire Belloc
Language	English
Genre	Travelogue carnivalesque
Publisher	George Allen
Publication date	1902
Publication place	United Kingdom
Pages	448

The Path to Rome is a 1902 travelogue by the French-English author and historian Hilaire Belloc. Belloc recounts his pilgrimage from Toul in northeastern France to Rome after encountering an extraordinary statue of Saint Mary in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, where he was born. The work contains his account of events in short vignettes, his thoughts on his travels, and asides about the history and geography of places he visits. Belloc also illustrates landmarks, noteworthy geographical features, and explanatory maps to frame his journey and explain his decisions to the audience. It also contains songs for which Belloc provides sheet music and lyrics.

The book is mostly written in a stream-of-consciousness style, containing several conversations between Belloc and an imagined reader (who is invariably combative and confused). The genre has been described as a carnivalesque within the tradition of literary modernism, though it foreshadows the later postmodernist style with its employment of complex literary structures, such as metalepsis, embedded narratives, and defamiliarisation. Although the book is written primarily in English, several passages and pieces of dialogue are in other languages, and language mix-ups and comments about the contemporary linguistic landscape figure prominently.

The Path to Rome was Belloc's most financially successful work and established him as a serious author. It is considered among the best in his literary canon and the quintessential example of his travel literature. Contemporary reviews were positive, focusing on Belloc's authenticity, shrewd observations, and sense of humour. Retrospectives have similarly praised the book, with much of the acclaim centering on Belloc's complex narrative structure and the focus on the minutiae of everyday life in the towns he visited. Critics have often compared it positively with the works of François Rabelais and Laurence Sterne. Belloc himself had a warm affection for the work; he later recounted that it was "the only book I ever wrote for love".

Background

Hilaire Belloc was a French-English author and historian later remembered in part for his ardent defences of the Catholic faith. Born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, in 1870 to a French father and an English mother, Belloc's family moved to England shortly after his birth, eventually settling in Sussex. As a young man, he served in the French Army and then attended Balliol College of the University of Oxford, attaining British citizenship in 1902. He was an accomplished foot-traveller, once marching from Philadelphia to California – some 2,800 miles (4,500 km) – to court Elodie Hogan, whom he later married.

After a trip to La Celle-Saint-Cloud he later outlined in the book, Belloc wrote a letter to the American journalist Maria Lansdale on New Year's Eve 1900 that he was planning a pilgrimage from his old garrison at Toul to Rome the following Easter. He told her he planned to write "whatever occurs to me to write [...] décousu  and written anyhow of its essence". Shortly before the book was written, Belloc was working to complete his biography of Maximilien Robespierre and expressed that he was anxious to finish it to begin working on The Path to Rome.

Belloc's mother – the poet and feminist campaigner Bessie Rayner Parkes – tried desperately to convince him against going. At the time, Belloc and his wife had three young children and were struggling financially, but his journalistic work at The Daily News had earned him as much as £14 (equivalent to £1,490 in 2025) a week. His mother felt that an extended absence from his job as a journalist would hurt him professionally. Belloc rejoined that the work was impermanent and a strong publishing record outside journalism would be more lucrative in the long run, as a successful book would increase the value of his journalistic work. Still, Belloc did not have the money to complete the pilgrimage on his own and he reportedly had to beg his sister Marie for some of the funds. Finances became a regular worry for Belloc during his travels, as evidenced by letters home to his wife, though he was able to calm her worry by reminding her that he was owed £65 (equivalent to £6,910 in 2025) for his Robespierre manuscript, seven guineas (equivalent to £800 in 2025) by The Daily News, and another £12 10s (equivalent to £1,330 in 2025) for his lectures at the University of London.

At the beginning of June 1901, Belloc departed for Paris and bought clothes for his journey; he finished all but six pages of his biography of Robespierre on the evening of 5 June. The following day, he departed for Toul and sent his wife a postcard.

Summary

At the beginning of the book, Belloc recounts a trip he took some months before his pilgrimage to the Paris suburb of La Celle-Saint-Cloud, where he was born. While there, he went the local Catholic church to say his prayers and noticed a statue of Saint Mary behind the altar. The statue was "so extraordinary and so different from all I had seen before, so much the spirit of my valley" that he vowed to take a pilgrimage to Rome. He made five vows to sanctify his journey: to travel entirely on foot, to sleep in the wild ("sleep rough"), to cover thirty miles (48 km) per day, to attend a Mass every morning, and to reach Rome in time for the High Mass at Saint Peter's Basilica for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June. Belloc recounts that he broke each of his vows one by one except for the last.

A few months later, Belloc begins his pilgrimage in Toul, which he chose as the starting point because he had served in the French Army there as an artilleryman. Upon reaching the first town after Toul, Flavigny, he realises he has broken his first vow by missing Mass. During his time in France, Belloc expresses profound admiration for the locals and is overconfident in his own ability to cross a great distance. Between Thayon and Épinal, he overexerts himself, injuring his foot and both knees, and realises he will not be able to maintain his vow of thirty miles a day. When he arrives in Épinal, he is given a balm by the local apothecary which makes the pain almost instantly disappear, though it becomes less effective throughout the journey. Belloc arrives in Belfort and discovers open-fermented wine, which he lauds. After buying some for the road, he travels some distance only to have his bottle come loose from his sack and shatter on the ground. Shortly thereafter, Belloc enters Switzerland.

Belloc does not realise he has entered Switzerland until he asks a group of travelling merchants. After passing through mountainous terrain, Belloc is fatigued, but a waggoner passing by asks if he needs a ride. Belloc is tempted to get into the cart, but he holds to his vow and clings onto the wagon and walks alongside it to Undervelier. As Belloc pushes deeper into Switzerland, the linguistic landscape begins shifting and he finds it increasingly difficult to communicate with the locals, all the while the pains in his foot and knees remain bothersome. He recruits a guide to help him over the Nufenen Pass, a dangerous part of the Swiss Alps, but a midsummer blizzard makes it impossible. After finding another way around, he eventually arrives at the border town of Chiasso, is questioned by border guards, and marches into Italy.

In Como, Belloc estimates he is about twenty-five miles (40 km) from Milan with only one franc and eighty centimes (equivalent to £17.65 in 2021) left. Belloc sees a sign of divine mercy and resolves to take a train to Milan. At the station, the ticket costs him exactly one franc and eighty centimes. In Calestano, Belloc is harassed by law enforcement and detained, but is able to convince the mayor to release him. He is greeted by a celebrating crowd and soon races through Tuscany.

As he passes through the Gate of the Poplar of the Old Wall of the Vatican in Rome, he realises Mass is ending. He asks a priest when the following Mass will be held; the priest tells him that he has but twenty minutes to wait, which pleases Belloc. Belloc tells the audience that he will not tell them anything further about Rome itself, but ends with a poem about his journey.

Structure and style

The Path to Rome is written in a stream-of-consciousness style; it has no chapters or dates to orient its audience. It contains dozens of illustrations, musical notation for songs, and verse poetry interspersed throughout. Throughout the book, Belloc interacts with an imagined reader, Lector, who is often combative, bored, and confused. The American literary critic and Catholic nun Maria Frassati Jakupcak has described it as having "the narrative pace [of] Belloc's wandering feet". Belloc himself remarked of its style in a letter to E. S. P. Haynes: "This Path to Rome is a jolly book to write. No research, no bother, no style, no anything. I just write straight ahead as fast as I can and stick in all that comes into my head."

The Path to Rome is typically described as a travelogue, though others reject this appellation and prefer to describe its narrative style and focal tendencies as something of a "self-portrait"; that is, what Belloc chooses to discuss tells the audience more about himself than what he is describing. The British journalist and historian A. N. Wilson, for example, writes that Belloc's ten-page description of Flavigny, a "comparatively obscure town", being longer than his description of the entirety of Tuscany typifies this self-portrait appraisal of the work. The British-American Catholic biographer Joseph Pearce has described the book thus:

The Path to Rome is both a travelogue and a farrago, which is to say that it is, at one and the same time, a linear narrative connected to a journey and a seemingly random dispersal of anecdotal thoughts and musings. It is animated, therefore, by the tension between the forward momentum maintained by the author's account of his pilgrimage and the inertial force of the tangential interruptions and digressions.

Frassati Jakupcak describes the literary genre and style as a carnivalesque containing avant-garde and modernist narratives. Elements of the later postmodern movement are also present, particularly the use of travel narratives to express more complex emotions like solitude and turmoil in familiar circumstances. Describing the book as "self-consciously Rabelaisian", she relates Belloc's role as the narrator to "the quintessential carnival fool". According to Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of carnivalesque literature, The Path to Rome matches all of the genre-defining elements: verbal abuse, "comic verbal compositions", and the inversion of the traditional separation between the audience and the author.