François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
born
Sept. 4, 1768, Saint-Malo, France
died July 4, 1848, Paris
French author and diplomat, one of his
country’s first Romantic writers. He was
the preeminent literary figure in France
in the early 19th century and had a
profound influence on the youth of his
day.
The
youngest child of an eccentric and
impecunious noble, Chateaubriand spent
his school holidays largely with his
sister at the family estate at Combourg,
with its half-derelict medieval castle
set in ancient oak woods and wild
heaths. After leaving school, he
eventually became a cavalry officer.
At the
beginning of the French Revolution, he
refused to join the Royalists and sailed
in April 1791 for the United States, a
stay memorable chiefly for his travels
with fur traders and for his firsthand
acquaintance with Indians in the region
around Niagara Falls. After learning of
Louis XVI’s flight in June 1791,
Chateaubriand felt that he owed
obligations to the monarchy and returned
to France. Penniless, he married an
heiress of 17 and took her to Paris,
which he found too expensive; he then
left her and joined the Royalist Army.
Wounded at the siege of Thionville, he
was discharged.
He went
to England in May 1793. Often destitute,
he supported himself by translating and
teaching. In London he began his Essai
sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”), an emotional survey of
world history in which he drew parallels
between ancient and modern revolutions
in the context of France’s own recent
upheavals.
In 1800
Chateaubriand returned to Paris, where
he worked as a freelance journalist and
continued to write his books. A fragment
of an unfinished epic appeared as Atala
(1801); immediately successful, it
combined the simplicity of a classical
idyll with the more troubled beauties of
Romanticism. Set in primitive American
surroundings, the novel tells the story
of a Christian girl who has taken a vow
to remain a virgin but who falls in love
with a Natchez Indian. Torn between love
and religion, she poisons herself to
keep from breaking her vow. The lush
Louisiana setting and passionate tale
are captured in a rich, harmonious prose
style that yields many beautiful
descriptive passages.
Shortly
after the death of his mother in 1798,
Chateaubriand reconciled his conflict
between religion and rationalism and
returned to traditional Christianity.
His apologetic treatise extolling
Christianity, Le Génie du christianisme
(1802; “The Genius of Christianity”),
won favour both with the Royalists and
with Napoleon Bonaparte, who was just
then concluding a concordat with the
papacy and restoring Roman Catholicism
as the state religion in France. In this
work, Chateaubriand tried to
rehabilitate Christianity from the
attacks made on it during the
Enlightenment by stressing its capacity
to nurture and stimulate European
culture, architecture, art, and
literature over the centuries.
Chateaubriand’s theology was weak and
his apologetics illogical, but his
assertion of Christianity’s moral
superiority on the basis of its poetic
and artistic appeal proved an
inexhaustible sourcebook for Romantic
writers. The renewed appreciation of
Gothic architecture sparked by the book
is the most prominent example of this.
Napoleon rewarded Chateaubriand for his
treatise by appointing him first
secretary to the embassy at Rome in
1803. But in 1804, when Napoleon stunned
France with the unfair trial and hasty
execution of the Duke d’Enghien on a
flimsy pretext of conspiracy,
Chateaubriand resigned his post in
protest. The most important of the books
he published during the following years
is the novel René (first published
separately in 1805), which tells the
story of a sister who enters a convent
rather than surrender to her passion for
her brother. In this thinly veiled
autobiographical work Chateaubriand
began the Romantic vogue for
world-weary, melancholy heroes suffering
from vague, unsatisfied yearnings in
what came to be known as the mal du
siècle (“the malady of the age”). On the
basis of Les Martyrs (1809), a prose
epic about early Christian martyrs in
Rome, and Itinéraire de Paris à
Jérusalem (1811), an account of his
recent travels throughout the
Mediterranean, Chateaubriand was elected
to the French Academy in 1811.
With
the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy
in 1814, Chateaubriand’s hopes of a
political career revived. In 1815 he was
made a viscount and a member of the
House of Peers. His extravagant
lifestyle eventually caused him
financial difficulties, however, and he
found his only pleasure in his liaison
with Mme Récamier, who illumined the
rest of his life. He began Mémoires
d’outre-tombe (1849–50), his memoir from
“beyond the tomb,” written for
posthumous publication and perhaps his
most lasting monument. This memoir,
which Chateaubriand began writing as
early as 1810, is as much a history of
his thoughts and sensations as it is a
conventional narrative of his life from
childhood into old age. The vivid
picture it draws of contemporary French
history, of the spirit of the Romantic
epoch, and of Chateaubriand’s own
travels is complemented by many
self-revealing passages in which the
author recounts his unstinting
appreciation of women, his sensitivity
to nature, and his lifelong tendency
toward melancholy. Chateaubriand’s
memoirs have proved to be his most
enduring work.
After
six months as ambassador to Berlin in
1821, Chateaubriand became ambassador to
London in 1822. He represented France at
the Congress of Verona in 1822 and
served as minister of foreign affairs
under the ultra-Royalist premier Joseph,
Count de Villèle, until 1824. In this
capacity he brought France into the war
with Spain in 1823 to restore that
country’s Bourbon king Ferdinand VII.
The campaign was a success, but its high
cost diminished the prestige
Chateaubriand won by it. He passed the
rest of his life privately, except for a
year as ambassador to Rome (1828–29).
