CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOIS-RENÉ de. — Writer and diplomat. Born at St-Malo on 4 September 1768, into a family of minor but ancient nobility.
His father, a sea captain and shipowner, having made a fortune, bought back the ancestral castle of Combourg, where the future author of the Mémoires d’outre-tombe spent his melancholy and dream-filled youth. His father wanted him to become a sailor, then, when that attempt failed, an ecclesiastic, in keeping with the noble custom of the time. In 1788 the bishop of his native city issued the young man letters of tonsure for affiliation with the Order of Malta, which never took place. Admitted as an officer into the king’s armies, he witnessed the first scenes of the Revolution, which inspired in him « l'horreur des festins de cannibales » and the desire to leave the country. On 8 April 1791 he embarked for Baltimore. He travelled through the lands of the New World, where his vocation as a writer fully revealed itself; but, having read in an old newspaper of the arrest at Varennes, he resolved to return to France to place his sword at the king’s service. He landed at Le Havre on 2 January 1792. On 19 May he married a young noblewoman, Céleste Buisson de La Vigne, whom two months later he had to leave in order, together with his brother, to escape, as aristocrats, the revolutionaries’ search. He fled to Belgium, enlisted in the army of the émigrés, and was wounded in a military engagement. On 17 May 1793 he went to England, where he lived in exile for seven years of poverty, study, and work.
The Essai sur les révolutions, published in 1797, made his name, but at the same time revealed the change that had taken place in his religious sentiments.
Shaken by his mother’s profound distress and by the news of her death, he wept bitterly and returned to his former faith; the thought then came to him of atoning for his first book with a religious work. As political conditions in France changed, he returned there in May 1800: he lived in hiding for some time, until, through the influence of friends, he succeeded in publishing Atala in 1801 and, one year later, Génie du Christianisme, which suddenly made him famous. The book appeared at a favorable moment of renewed religious sentiment, following the denials of the Encyclopedists, Rousseauian deism, and the sacrilegious horrors of the sans-culottes. Napoleon, in view of the Concordat, was greatly pleased by it and appointed the young writer secretary to Cardinal Fesch at the embassy in Rome. He did not, however, remain there long. He was subsequently offered the post of minister in Valais; he resigned before taking it up, following the execution of the Duke d’Enghien, and from that moment became an opponent of Bonaparte. In order to familiarize himself with the places where the action involving the characters of a new book he was planning, Les Martyrs (published in 1809), was to take place, he set out for the Holy Land through Greece and Turkey, then returning to his homeland by way of Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Spain (1806–1807). He recounted the journey in the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811). During those years he alternated his activity as a writer with an increasingly committed political campaign of opposition to Bonaparte, which earned him several periods of mild exile. Appointed a member of the French Academy in 1811, he refused to deliver his admission speech because the Emperor had revised its text. A few days after the capitulation of Paris, in 1814, he published the celebrated work De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, which Louis XVIII declared more beneficial to the Bourbon cause than an army of one hundred thousand men.
During the eventful fortunes of the restored monarchy, C. was almost always in opposition, becoming the leader and focal point of pure legitimism. This was the most fervent period of his political struggles. The favor granted, for reasons of contingent policy, by the sovereigns returned to the throne to regicidal terrorists, and then to the old remnants of Coblenz and Ghent, made him an opponent of the monarchy whose restoration he had prepared and for which he longed
He returned to his work as a writer. With the Aventures du dernier Abancérage (1826) and the Voyage en Amérique, printed in the same year, he brought his narrative and imaginative works to an end. He now wrote the Etudes 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 Lost Paradise, an Essai sur la littérature anglaise, and 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 and, in 1844, the Vie de Rancé.
Old and ill, but always remarkably lucid in mind, he assisted his exiled former sovereigns 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,” who had come of age. On 9 February 1847 his wife died; in their later years, the two had devoted themselves to the work of the Infirmerie, providing assistance to 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 whom, despite his many failings and repeated infidelities, he had always wished to affirm himself to be. He was buried on a rock on the Breton coast facing the Atlantic.
To F.-R. de C. is owed that renewal of human sensibility which, opposing the dead formulas of classicist rhetoric, stands at the origin of modern literature. A genius of overflowing richness, he possessed a melancholy nature, limitless imagination, a spirit of independence, racial pride, vanity and volatility of feeling, an awareness of his own worth, and a certain taste for gesture and pose; yet, at the bottom of all the trials and experiences of a full and agitated life, he always found boredom and felt himself alone, despite the friendships and devotion by which he was constantly surrounded. His René fixes his nature in poetic features. The moral malady of which the tale is a document was later called le mal du siècle: an excess of life and, at the same time, a secret languor; unrestrained imagination and weariness of everything. It would nevertheless be mistaken to insist on too close an identity between the character and his author, who felt an intense aversion, when Renés multiplied in the following decades, to the influence he had exerted, and who himself demonstrated, through his extremely active life, his prodigious labour, and his fidelity to the Catholic cause, the strong mastery that his will imposed upon the morbid tendencies of his nature.
The concept of the ideal beautiful, of classicist origin and the canon of his work as a writer, was transformed into a new and fruitful principle of poetry through the application he made of it to the feelings of great hearts, eminent characters, and magnanimous actions, restored to the framework of Christian sensibility and Christian history, which classicism had almost ignored. Moral delicacy, the heroism of difficult virtues, and the passion of hearts in which faith shines entered literature with him, royally, as motives and sources of poetry; and with them came that feeling for nature towards which the eighteenth century had already turned with delight.
When, after the question posed in the Essai sur les révolutions—reworked in later years in a different spirit—he understood that only the old religion answered the anxieties of his heart and intellect, he resolved to lead souls back to faith through the seduction of its beauty and the evidence of the civilising work inspired and advanced by II. He wished to demonstrate that the Christian religion is, of all religions, the most human, the most poetic, and the most favourable to liberty, the arts, and literature; that the world owes everything to it, from agriculture to the abstract sciences, from charitable shelters to great temples. The Génie is the apology of a poet who speaks principally to the hearts, after minds had been led astray by the inhuman and sacrilegious excesses of a reason deified as a pitiless idol. One must not demand from a work of this kind constant demonstrative rigour or an argument convincing on every thesis, since these do not belong to its nature; nevertheless, even in this respect, the writer’s forceful premise would suffice to give it validity: in his analysis of great literary works, he shows how much moral refinement Christianity has introduced into souls. The Génie concludes the old dispute between the ancients and the moderns in favour of the latter, through the revelation of religion’s poetic richness and the rediscovery of nature.
Les Martyrs were intended, by example, to confirm the thesis of the Génie, demonstrating how Christian marvels can compete with paganising marvels and indeed lend greater veracity to characters and passions. The prose epic, through its excessive adherence to classicist structural patterns and its external representation of supernatural intervention in human events and the feelings of hearts, partly betrayed its intentions: more plastic than analytical, more historical than psychological, it is almost wholly exhausted in the evocative and descriptive magic to which the movements of souls and the conflict of feelings do not correspond in equal vividness. Nevertheless, Eudore, Cymodocée, Démodocus, Velléda, and Hiérselès are among the most beautiful and lofty figures in the literature of all times; and the incomparable tableaux that succeed one another in the poem—the evocation of the past, places, rites, customs, persecutions, and Christian heroism of the third century—the beauty of the prose, and the probity of the documents make Les Martyrs a poetic work equal in stature to the Gerusalemme liberata, Paradiso perduto, and Athalie.
Three tales, Les Notches, Atala, and René, initially intended to form part of the Génie and later published separately, are set within the natural landscape of the regions—partly wild—of the New World that the poet visited, and the luxuriant scenery serves as a backdrop to the “romantic malady” of René. A passionate soul and possessed of a mad imagination, he fled into exile after the shattering revelation of an almost incestuous tenderness, but in vain sought oblivion and consolation in Céluta’s melancholy and tragic love and in the evocation of Atala’s painful destiny: he dies, killed by a rival.
I Mémoires d'outre-tombe, opera tra le più esaltanti dell'ingegno umano, sono il monumento postumo che lo C. si eresse. Un'epoca storica di straordinari rivolgimenti e uno dei suoi eminenti attori vi sono evocati in una delle più belle prose che mai siano state scritte. Anche come valore storico e documentario i Mémoires sono un'opera di primo ordine, nonostante la tendenza alla prosa spesso palese nell'autore, le trasposizioni abbellitrici della memoria
poetica e le reali e volontarie deformazioni della realtà che in certi fatti si riscontrano. L'opera è divisa in quattro parti: dalla nascita al ritorno dall'esilio (1800); la carriera letteraria (fino al 1814); la carriera politica (fino al 1830); gli ultimi anni. Fu, per volere dell'autore, e come il titolo indica, pubblicata dopo la morte di lui.