CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANCOIS-RENÉ DE

CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOIS-RENÉ de. -

Writer and diplomat. Born in St-Malo on 4 Sept. 1768, into a family of minor but ancient nobility.

His father, a sea captain and shipowner who had amassed a fortune, reacquired the ancestral castle of Combourg, where the future author of the *Mémoires d'outre-tombe* spent his melancholic and dreamy youth. The father wished to make him a sailor, then, after this attempt failed, an ecclesiastic in accordance with the noble custom of the time. In 1788 the bishop of his native city granted the young man letters of tonsure for admission to the Order of Malta, which never took place. Admitted as an officer in the royal armies, he witnessed the first scenes of the Revolution, which gave him “l’horreur des festins de cannibales” and the desire to emigrate. On 8 Apr. 1791 he embarked for Baltimore. He traveled through the lands of the New World, where his vocation as a writer fully revealed itself, but upon reading in an old newspaper of the arrest of Varennes, he resolved to return to France to place his sword at the service of the king. He disembarked on 2 Jan. 1792 at Le Havre. On 19 May he married a noble young woman, Céleste Buisson de La Vigne, whom he had to leave two months later to escape, with his brother, as aristocrats, the searches of the revolutionaries. He fled to Belgium, enlisted in the army of the émigrés, and was wounded in a military action. On 17 May 1793 he went to England, where he lived in exile for seven years of hardship, study, and work.

The *Essai sur les révolutions*, published in 1797, brought him renown but at the same time revealed the change that had occurred in his religious sentiments.

Deeply distressed by the grave sorrow this caused his mother and by the news of her death, he wept bitterly and returned to the ancient faith; and he conceived the idea of expiating his first book with a religious work. When political conditions in France changed, he returned in May 1800: he lived for a time in hiding until, through the influence of friends, he succeeded in publishing *Atala* in 1801, and a year later *Génie du Christianisme*, which made him suddenly famous. The book appeared at a favorable moment of resurgence in religious sentiment after the denials of the Encyclopedists, Rousseauian deism, and the sacrilegious horrors of the sans-culottes. Napoleon, in view of the Concordat, was very pleased with it and appointed the young writer secretary to Cardinal Fesch at the embassy in Rome. He did not remain there long, however. He was later given the post of minister in Valais but resigned before taking office after the execution of the Duke of Enghien, becoming from that moment an opponent of Bonaparte. To gather material on the places where the action of a new book he was planning, *Les Martyrs* (published in 1809), was to unfold, he traveled to the Holy Land via Greece and Turkey, then returned to his homeland via Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Spain (1806–1807). He recounted the journey in *Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem* (1811). In those years, he alternated his activity as a writer with an increasingly committed political campaign against Bonaparte, which earned him some periods of mild exile. In 1811 he was named a member of the French Academy but refused to deliver the admission speech because the Emperor had altered the text. A few days after the capitulation of Paris in 1814, he published the famous pamphlet *De Buonaparte et des Bourbons*, which Louis XVIII declared more beneficial to the Bourbon cause than an army of one hundred thousand men.

In the turbulent events of the restored monarchy, C. was almost always in opposition, becoming the leader and center of pure legitimism. This was the most ardent period of his political struggles. The favor shown, for reasons of contingent politics, by the restored monarchs to regicides and then to the old émigrés of Coblenz and Ghent made him an opponent of the monarchy whose restoration he had helped prepare and whose return he had longed for.

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CHATEAUBRIAND

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Its definitive ruin. His was an idealistic and uncompromising conception of government, based on morality and realism, which the sovereigns and their ministers, forced into continual compromises with the reality created by the Revolution, could not follow. At one moment the writer appeared the most ultra-legitimist, at another the most advanced in liberal tendencies. His pen and his oratory successively combated the governments of Louis XVIII and Charles X and made the monarchy tremble. Power in pure hands; the Charter for honest men: such was his programme, which, ideally, sought to reconcile absolutism with freedom (La Monarchie selon la Charte, 1816). And yet, despite this, he received offices and honours: ambassador to Sweden (whither he did not go), to Berlin, to London, to Rome; Peer and Minister of State; representative of France at the Congress of Verona; Minister of Foreign Affairs. He inspired and politically directed the war in Spain; he influenced the conclave that elected Pius VII; revealing in his governmental action concrete and positive qualities of statesman and diplomat and an infallible prescience of the new times. When the legitimate monarchy fell, he declared himself in solidarity with it and an opponent of the Orléans. On 7 August 1830, in the Chamber of Peers, he delivered a vehement speech to affirm his loyalty to the Bourbons, who “for the third and last time were setting out into exile.” He renounced his dignity and offices, thereby, out of fidelity of spirit to the monarchy he had so strenuously fought, renouncing even his sole means of support.

He returned to his labour as a writer. With the Aventures du dernier Abencérage (1826) and the Voyage en Amérique, published in the same year, he brought his narrative and fantastic works to a close. Now he wrote the Études historiques and published De la Restauration et de la Monarchie élective, followed in his later years by a Mémoire sur la captivité de Mme la duchesse de Berry, a translation of The Last Paradise, an Essai sur la littérature anglaise, some Considérations sur le génie des hommes, des temps et des révolutions. On 16 July 1841 he wrote the final lines of the Mémoires d’outre-tombe; in 1844, the Vie de Rancé.

Old and ill, yet ever lucid in mind, he assisted his former sovereigns, exiled, with counsel and judgment, especially in the thorny affair of the Duchess of Berry; he visited them in Prague and, in November 1843, paid homage in London “to his king,” now advanced in years. On 9 February 1847 his wife died, with whom in his later years he had devoted himself to the work of the Infermiere for the assistance of priests persecuted by the Revolution. On the evening of 24 February 1848 he learned of the fall of Louis-Philippe. He died as that Christian he had always wished to be, despite his many failings and repeated unfaithfulnesses. He was buried on a rock of the Breton coast facing the Atlantic.

To F.-R. de C. we owe that renewal of human sensibility which, opposing the dead schemas of classicist rhetoric, stands at the origin of modern literature. A genius of prodigious wealth, he possessed a melancholic nature, a boundless imagination, a spirit of independence, pride of race, vanity and volatility of feeling, consciousness of his own worth, a certain taste for gesture and pose; and yet, beneath all the trials and experiences of a life both full and tempestuous, he found only boredom and felt himself alone despite the friendships and devotion that always surrounded him. His René fixes these traits in poetic lines. The moral malady of which the tale is a document was later called the mal du siècle: an overflow of life and, at the same time, a secret languor; unbridled imagination and boredom with everything. Yet it would be mistaken to insist on too close an identity between the character and his author, who strongly resented (when René multiplied in the decades that followed) the influence exerted and, for his part, by his intensely active life, prodigious study, and fidelity to the Catholic cause, showed a strong mastery imposed by will upon the morbid tendencies of his nature.

The concept of ideal beauty, of classicist origin, which had been the canon of his work as a writer, was transformed into a new and fertile principle of poetry through its application to the feelings of great hearts, to eminent characters, to magnanimous actions re-placed within the framework of Christian sentiment and Christian history, almost ignored by classicism. Moral delicacy, the eroticism of difficult virtues, the passion of hearts in which faith shines resplendently entered with him, regally, as motifs and sources of poetry into literature, and with them that feeling for nature to which the eighteenth century had already turned with delight.

When, after the question posed in the Essai sur les révolutions—rewritten in later years with a different spirit—he understood that only the old religion answered the yearnings of his heart and intellect, he set himself to win souls to the faith through the seduction of its beauty and the proof of the civilizing work it had inspired and promoted. He wished to demonstrate that the Christian religion is, of all religions, the most humane, the most poetic, the most favourable to liberty, to the arts, to letters: that to it the world owes everything, from agriculture to abstract sciences, from charitable hospices to great temples. Le Génie is the apology of a poet who addresses himself chiefly to hearts after minds had been led astray by the inhuman and sacrilegious excesses of a reason worshipped as a pitiless idol. One must not demand of such a work a constant demonstrative rigour and an argumentation convincing in every thesis, which are not in its nature; yet even from this point of view it would suffice to give it validity that the writer’s strong premise shows, in the analysis of great literary works, how much moral refinement Christianity has introduced into souls. Le Génie concludes the old dispute of the Ancients and the Moderns in favour of the latter by revealing the poetic richness of religion and the rediscovery of nature.

Les Martyrs were meant to confirm the thesis of Le Génie by example, demonstrating how Christian marvels can rival pagan marvels and indeed give greater verisimilitude to characters and passions. The epic in prose, through too close adherence to classicist structural schemas and the external depiction of supernatural intervention in human affairs and the sentiments of hearts, partly betrayed its intentions: more plastic than analytic, more historical than psychological, almost entirely exhausted in the evocative and descriptive magic to which the movements of souls and the conflicts of feeling are not equal in clarity. Yet Eudore, Cymodocée, Démodocus, Velléda, Hiersclès are among the most beautiful and lofty figures in literature of all time, and the incomparable scenes that succeed one another in the poem, the evocation of the past, of places, rites, customs, persecutions, and Christian heroisms of the third century, the beauty of the prose and the richness of the documentation make of Les Martyrs a poetic work that stands on a level with Jerusalem Delivered, Paradise Lost, and Athalie.

Three tales, Les Natchez, Atala, René, originally intended to form part of Le Génie and later published separately, are set in the natural scenery (partly wild) of the regions of the New World that the poet visited: and the luxuriant backdrop serves for the “romantic malady” of René. A passionate soul and a mad imagination, he has fled into exile after the shattering revelation of an almost incestuous tenderness, but in vain seeks oblivion and consolation in the melancholy and tragic love of Céluta and in the evocation of Atala’s sorrowful fate: he dies slain by a rival.

The Mémoires d’outre-tombe, one of the most exalted works of human genius, is the posthumous monument that C. erected to himself. An historical epoch of extraordinary upheavals and one of its eminent actors are evoked in one of the most beautiful prose works ever written. Even as a historical and documentary work the Mémoires is a first-rate achievement, despite the author’s frequent tendency to embellish his prose and the transfigurations of memory.

The work is divided into four parts: from birth to return from exile (1800); the literary career (up to 1814); the political career (up to 1850); the final years. It was published, as the author wished and as the title indicates, after his death.