This article explores the politics of travel literature in France during an era that stretches from the end of the Ancien Régime, through the turbulence of the Revolutionary decade, and into the first years of Napoleonic Empire. It tracks the rambles and writings of a single voyager, a renowned travelling philosopher named Constantin-François Volney, from Egypt in the 1780s to the United States in the 1790s, and back to France during the Empire. In doing so, it offers reflections on continuities and transformations in travel writing as it passed from an ‘old world’ to ‘a new one’, in France as much as across the globe.