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 dreamy youth. His father wanted to make him a sailor, then, when that attempt failed, a churchman, according to the noble custom of the time. In 1788 the bishop of his native city issued to the young man the letters of tonsure for affiliation to the Order of Malta, which never took place. Admitted as an officer in the king's armies, he was a spectator of the first scenes of the revolution, which gave him « l'horreur des festins de cannibales » and the desire to emigrate. On 8 April 1791 he embarked for Baltimore. He travelled through the lands of the New World, where his vocation as a writer was fully revealed, but, having read in an old newspaper of the arrest at Varennes, he resolved to return to France to place his sword at the service of the king. He landed on 2 January 1792 at Le Havre. On 19 May he married a young noblewoman, Céleste Buisson de La Vigne, whom he had to leave two months later in order to escape, together with his brother, in their capacity as aristocrats, from 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 crossed to England, where he lived as an 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 feelings.
Shaken by the deep sorrow it caused his mother and by the news of her death, he wept bitterly and returned to the ancient faith: and the thought came to him of atoning for his first book with a religious work. Once political conditions in France had changed, he returned there in May 1800: he lived in hiding for some time, until, through the influence of friends, he managed to publish Atala in 1801, and, a year later, Génie du Christianisme, which made him suddenly famous. The book appeared at a favourable moment of revival of religious feeling after the denials of the Encyclopedists, the 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 Card. Fesch at the embassy in Rome. He did not, however, remain there long. He was then given the post of minister in Valais: he renounced it before taking it up, after the execution of the Duke of Enghien, becoming from that moment an opponent of Bonaparte. In order to gather documentation on the places where the action of the characters of a new book he was planning, Les Martyrs (published in 1809), was to unfold, he set out for the Holy Land by way of Greece and Turkey, returning home afterwards by way of Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Spain (1806-1807). He narrated the journey in the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811). In those years he alternated his activity as a writer with, and with growing commitment, the political campaign of opposition to Bonaparte, which earned him a few periods of mild exile. Appointed in 1811 a member of the French Academy, he refused to deliver his admission speech because the Emperor had touched up its text. A few days after the capitulation of Paris, in 1814, he published the celebrated pamphlet De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, which Louis XVIII declared more helpful to the Bourbon cause than an army of a hundred thousand men.
In the eventful vicissitudes of the restored monarchy, C. was almost always in opposition, becoming the leader and centre of pure legitimism. That was the most ardent period of his political struggles. The favour granted, for reasons of contingent politics, 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 yearned his definitive ruin. His was an idealistic conception of government, without bargaining, based on morality and loyalism, 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 of the legitimists, at another the most advanced in liberal tendencies. His pen and his oratory fought in turn the governments of Louis XVIII and of Charles X and made the monarchy tremble. Power in pure hands; the Charter for honest people: such was his program, which, ideally, sought to reconcile absolutism with liberty (La Monarchie selon la Charte, 1816). Despite this, he held offices and honors: ambassador to Sweden (where 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 VIII; revealing in his conduct of government concrete and positive qualities of statesman and diplomat and an infallible foreknowledge of the new times. Once the legitimate monarchy fell, he declared himself in solidarity with it and an opponent of the Orléans. On 7 Aug. 1830, in the Chamber of Peers, he delivered a vehement speech to affirm his own fidelity to the Bourbons, who «for the third and last time were setting out toward exile». He renounced dignities and offices, thereby also renouncing, out of fidelity of spirit to the monarchy he had fought so much, his only resources.
He returns to his labor as a writer. With the Aventures du dernier Abencérage (1826) and the Voyage en Amérique, printed the same year, he has put an end to his narrative and fantastic works. Now he writes the Etudes historiques and publishes De la Restauration et de la Monarchie élective, which were followed in the last period 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 writes the last lines of the Mémoires d'outre-tombe and, in 1844, the Vie de Rancé.
Old and ill, but always most lucid in spirit, he assists his former sovereigns, exiled, with counsel and judgment, especially in the thorny affair of the duchess of Berry; he visits them in Prague and, in Nov. 1843, pays homage in London «to his king» who had come of age. On 9 Febr. 1847 his wife dies, with whom in his later years he had devoted himself to the work of the Infirmerie for the assistance of priests persecuted by the revolution. On the evening of 24 Febr. 1848 he learned of the fall of Louis Philippe. He died as that Christian which, despite his many failings and repeated infidelities, he always wished to affirm himself to be and to be. He was buried on a rock of the Breton coast facing the Atlantic.
To F.-R. de C. is owed that renewal of human feeling which, opposing the dead schemas of classicist rhetoric, stands at the origin of modern literature. A genius of overflowing richness, he had a melancholy nature, a boundless imagination, a spirit of independence, pride of race, vanity and fickleness of feeling, awareness of his own worth, a certain taste for gesture and pose; and yet, at the bottom of all the trials and experiences of a full and most agitated life, he always found boredom and felt alone despite the friendships and the devotion with which he was always surrounded. His René fixes his nature in poetic strokes. The moral malady of which the tale is a document was later called le mal du siècle: superabundance of life and, at the same time, secret languor; unbridled imagination and weariness with everything. It would, however, be wrong to insist on too close an identity between the character and his author, who felt the strongest annoyance (when the Renés multiplied in the following decades) at the influence he had exerted and showed on his own account, with his most active life, his prodigious study and his fidelity to the Catholic cause, the strong dominion imposed by will over the morbid tendencies of his nature.
The concept of ideal beauty, of classicist origin, which was the canon of his work as a writer, was transformed into a new and fertile principle of poetry through the application he made of it to the feelings of great hearts, to eminent characters, to magnanimous actions, relocated within the framework of Christian feeling and Christian history, almost ignored by classicism. Moral delicacy, the heroism of difficult virtues, the passion of hearts in which faith shines, entered with him, royally, as motives and source 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 he posed in the Essai sur les révolutions — reworked, in the years thereafter, in another spirit — he understood that only the old religion responded to the anxieties of his heart and of his intellect, he set out to lead souls back to the faith by the seduction of its beauty and the proof of the work of civilization inspired and promoted by it. He wished to demonstrate that the Christian religion is, of all, the most human, the most poetic, the most favorable to liberty, to the arts, to letters: that to it the world owes everything, from agriculture to the abstract sciences, from houses of charity to the great temples. The Génie is the apology of a poet, who addresses himself predominantly to 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 a constant demonstrative rigor and an argument convincing in every thesis, which are not in its nature; yet, even in this respect, the very strong premise of the writer would suffice to give it validity, showing, in the analysis of the great literary works, how much moral refinement Christianity has introduced into souls. The Génie concludes the old dispute of the ancients and the moderns in favor of the latter with the revelation of the poetic richness of religion and the rediscovery of nature.
Les Martyrs was to confirm the thesis of the Génie by example, demonstrating how the Christian marvelous can vie with the pagan marvelous and indeed give greater prominence of truth to characters and passions. The prose epic, through too close an adherence to classicist structural schemas and the external figuration of supernatural intervention in the deeds of men and the feelings of hearts, has in part 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 conflict of feelings are not equal in vividness. Nevertheless, Eudore, Cymodocée, Démodocus, Velléda, Hiérselès are among the most beautiful and lofty figures of the literature of all times, and the incomparable scenes that succeed one another in the poem, the evocation of the past, of places, of rites, of customs, of the persecutions and Christian heroisms of the 3rd century, the beauty of the prose and the profusion of documents make of the Martyrs a poetic work that stands on a level with the Gerusalemme liberata, Paradise Lost, Athalie.
Three tales, Les Natchez, Atala, René, destined at first to form part of the Génie, then published separately, take their place within the natural setting of the regions (in part wild) of the New World that the poet visited, and the luxuriant scenery serves as backdrop to 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 he seeks oblivion and consolation in the melancholy and tragic love of Céluta and in the evocation of the sorrowful destiny of Atala: he dies killed by a rival.
The Mémoires d'outre-tombe, a work among the most exalted of the human intellect, are the posthumous monument that Chateaubriand erected for himself. A historical epoch of extraordinary upheavals and one of its eminent actors are evoked there in one of the most beautiful prose works ever written. Even as a historical and documentary source, the Mémoires are a first-rate work, despite the author's often evident tendency toward prose and the embellishing transpositions of memory poetics and the real and deliberate deformations of reality that are found in certain facts. The work is divided into four parts: from birth to the return from exile (1800); the literary career (up to 1814); the political career (up to 1830); the last years. It was, by the author's wish, and as the title indicates, published after his death.