Vicomte François René de Chateaubriand

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Viscount de Chateaubriand, detail of an oil painting by Girodet-Trioson; in the National Museum of … (credit: Cliché Musées Nationaux, Paris)

(born Sept. 4, 1768, Saint-Malo, France — died July 4, 1848, Paris) French author and statesman. A cavalry officer at the start of the French Revolution, he refused to join the Royalists and instead sailed to the U.S., where he traveled with fur traders. On Louis XVI's fall he returned to join the Royalist army. Atala (1801), part of an unfinished epic, drew on his travels in the U.S. The Genius of Christianity (1802), which asserted the value of Christianity on the basis of its poetic and artistic appeal, influenced many Romantic writers and brought him briefly into favour with Napoleon. With the 1814 Restoration he became a major political figure. Other works include the novel René (1805) and his memoirs (6 vol., 1849 – 50), perhaps his most lasting monument. He was the preeminent French writer of his day.

For more information on François-Auguste- René viscount of Chateaubriand, visit Britannica.com.

François René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), one of the first French romantic writers, was a master stylist. Through the poetic prose of his voluminous work he was able to evoke exotic places and to transform and idealize his own life and times.

René de Chateaubriand was born in Brittany on Sept. 4, 1768, the son of an insignificant provincial nobleman. He grew up first on the Atlantic coast at Saint-Mâlo, later in the gloomy family château of Combourg. As one of 10 children, he was largely neglected and spent his days roaming the woods with his devoted sister Lucille, who first encouraged him to write poetry; by night he slept fitfully, isolated by a whim of his father in a haunted tower.

Chateaubriand attended the nearby College of Dol for 4 years. After acquiring a good classical background, he was sent to the Jesuit college at Rennes for more thorough preparation in mathematics. Following this he studied first for a naval career, later for the priesthood; Chateaubriand then joined the army, only to soon weary of military life.

Leaving the army, Chateaubriand went to Paris, where his brother introduced him at court and his first verses were published in 1789, the year of the fall of the Bastille. Though Chateaubriand was Catholic and royalist, he hated despotism and soon professed sympathy for the ideals of the French Revolution. But the revolutionary violence appalled him, and in 1791 he went to America in search of true liberty, of simplicity, and of the wilderness, where he expected to find American Indians living pure and simple lives. He dressed like a trapper and explored the Great Lakes and the regions around the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The exotic color of his later works derives from diaries he kept at this time. Several American epics were the fruit of this journey.

Chateaubriand returned to France in January 1792, and in March he married Céleste Buisson de la Vigne, a sharp-tongued and witty young heiress. He joined the French émigré army in the Rhineland, was wounded, and dragged himself half dead to France. In 1793, the year of the Terror, he escaped to London. At first he was miserably poor and almost starved to death; at this time, while a resident in the home of a British pastor, he was involved in a pathetic love affair with Charlotte Ives, the pastor's daughter.

Literary Career

Chateaubriand's first book, Essai sur la Révolution (Essay on the Revolution), was written in London and published in 1797. From the viewpoints of the Philosopher and the historian he examined ancient revolutions, compared them to the crisis in France, and attacked the conservative factions. The book shocked the monarchists in London, grieved and stunned his own family, but brought him new friends among French moderates.

One such friend, Louis de Fontanes, a neoclassic poet, was convinced that France was returning to Catholicism. His ideas struck a responding chord in Chateaubriand. Soon after, the death of his mother made Chateaubriand's religious conversion complete: "I wept and I believed." Le Génie du Christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) struck like a flash of lightning when the French public was groping in the dark. This work, which established Chateaubriand as a major figure, defends Christianity not by appeal to reason but rather by appeal to the heart and the imagination. The cameo-like novels, Atala and René, intended merely as illustrations of the author's theses, are the works of Chateaubriand most widely read today.

Napoleon was pleased by this brilliant defense of Catholicism, and he named Chateaubriand secretary to the ambassador of Rome in 1803. When Napoleon had the Duke of Enghien assassinated, Chateaubriand had the courage to resign in protest from his new post in Valais.

Chateaubriand rejoined his wife after 12 years of virtual separation, but he discovered that her mocking gaiety had grown more biting as the years had passed. She was especially acerbic on the subject of his many mistresses, among them Madame de Beaumont, Madame de Custine, Madame de Noailles, and the celebrated Madame de Recamier, who had once refused the advances of Napoleon. These women used their influence to support Chateaubriand in politics and to spread his literary fame.

Chateaubriand and his wife retired to the secluded Valley of Wolves in the region of Sceaux outside Paris. Here he finished Les Martyrs (The Martyr), began his autobiography, Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Memoirs), and wrote in its entirety L'Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem (1812; The Journey from Paris to Jerusalem), the story of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Political Career

Under Louis XVIII, Chateaubriand became minister of state without portfolio. This minor post displeased him, and he managed to be appointed minister to Berlin in 1821. He became ambassador to London in 1822, represented France at the Congress of Verona, and as minister of foreign affairs helped in 1823 to bring about the war with Spain. He was dismissed in 1824. He then engaged in bitter opposition to Louis XVIII but at the King's death and the advent of Charles X rallied back to the monarchy. He became ambassador to Rome in 1827 but resigned in 1829. In 1830 he refused to support the government of Louis Philippe (the "Bourgeois King").

Final Works

In 1831 Chateaubriand published his Études historiques (Historical Studies) and in the same year went back to his memoirs with greater seriousness. Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe manifest his desire to link his personal history with that of France. He constantly dramatizes his life, enlarging upon his role in events to the point of comparing himself to Napoleon. The book combines features of the confession ("to explain my inexplicable heart") and the historical essay. It is a masterpiece not only as an example of the genre but also as an expression of the 19th-century spiritual quest and its permanent malaise, the mal du siècle.

Chateaubriand's influence was immense; he dominated the literature of his time, to which he taught a fluid prose, intimately molded to the emotions. His Génie du christianisme imprinted a Christian character on the romantic movement; his exotic novels are both the source and the example of the mal du siècle.

Chateaubriand died in Paris on July 4, 1848, and was buried, according to his wish, opposite Saint-Mâlo, where he had played as a boy, on the isle of the Grand-Bé.

Further Reading

The best source of information on Chateaubriand is his own memoirs, Mémoires d'outre-tombe; the 1961 translation by Robert Baldick is handsome, exact, and highly readable. Two useful biographies are Joan Evans, Chateaubriand: A Biography (1939), and André Maurois, Chateaubriand: Poet, Statesman, Lover (trans. 1940). See also F. C. Green, French Novelists from the Revolution to Proust (1931), and Friedrich Sieburg, Chateaubriand (trans. 1961).

Additional Sources

Conner, Tom, Chateaubriand's Memoires d'outre-tombe: a portrait of the artist as exile, New York: P. Lang, 1995.

Painter, George Duncan, Chateaubriand: A biography, London: Chatto and Windus, 1977.

Painter, George Duncan, The longed-for tempests: (1768-93), New York: Knopf: distributed by Random House, 1978, 1977.

Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de (1768-1848). Born in Saint-Malo of an old Breton noble family whose declining fortunes his father somewhat restored, Chateaubriand spent his youth there or with his grandmother, or particularly at Combourg, a medieval château acquired by his father which provided rich material for his Romantic imagination. Destined for the army, he was presented at court in 1787 but also frequented literary circles with Fontanes, La Harpe, Ginguené, and particularly Malesherbes. Partly at the latter's prompting, after witnessing the beginnings of the Revolution, Chateaubriand set forth for North America (June 1791-January 1792), visiting Philadelphia, New York, Niagara Falls, and venturing west as far as Ohio. Recent scholarship has established that the itinerary he claimed, often considered fantastic, was quite accurately described. Chateaubriand was to put his American sojourn to considerable literary profit, writing a prose epic, Les Natchez (published 1826), of the amorous and other adventures of the Frenchman René among the Indians and in the French and Indian wars.

After his return to France he joined the army of the émigré princes, was wounded at the Battle of Thionville, and made his way from there to Jersey and then England, only returning to France in 1800. In England, his life was difficult, but he wrote extensively and in 1797 published his Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes dans leurs rapports avec la révolution française, a deeply pessimistic book equating all revolutions, announcing the end of Christianity, combining political theory and personal outpourings. Back in France, he achieved fame with the publication of Atala (1801), originally a part of Les Natchez, and then of Le Génie du christianisme (1802), which happily coincided with Napoleon's efforts to restore Catholicism. The chapter on the prototypical Romantic hero René was much appreciated. According to Le Génie, man's desire for the absolute is infinite, and only religion can satisfy that desire. Christianity satisfies the imagination and the emotions, inspires beautiful works of art, contributes to civilization and progress. The aesthetic, positivistic aspect of his apologetics—Christianity is true because it is good and beautiful—was to have widespread influence.

An appreciative Napoleon sent him to Rome, but he there tangled with Cardinal Fesch. In 1804, indignant at the assassination of the duc d'Enghien, he resigned and became increasingly hostile towards the Napoleonic regime. He moved to La Vallée aux Loups, a country home to the south of Paris where he redesigned both house and garden. In 1806 he embarked on a lengthy trip to the Orient (Constantinople, Jerusalem, Egypt, Carthage, finally Spain) which led to his Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811). Like much travel literature of the period, the book is something of a compendium and a rewriting, but many of the descriptive passages are rich. He also produced Les Martyrs ou le Triomphe de la religion chrétienne (1809), another prose epic about the triumph of Christianity over paganism. The Christian hero loves a pagan maid, she becomes converted, they are separated, then reunited, then martyred. He also regularly wrote political journalism for the Mercure de France, and had a series of amorous engagements with often notable women (his marriage, made hastily in 1792, was not a happy one) including Delphine de Sabran, contesse de Custine and mother of Astolphe de Custine, Claire de Kersaint, duchesse de Duras, and, especially from 1817 until his death, Juliette Récamier.

He was elected to the Académie Française in 1811, but not allowed to read his anti-Napoleon discours de réception. In 1814 he published De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, a virulent attack against Napoleon then in exile on Elba (Chateaubriand had written it before his fall from power); Louis XVIII said the volume ‘was worth an army’. He accompanied Louis XVIII to Ghent during the Hundred Days. Under the second Bourbon Restoration he had a highly chequered political career, largely because he sought to combine loyalty to legitimacy with the defence of political liberties, especially the liberty of the press; also, his political ambitions were not always accompanied by the necessary competence and skills. His De la monarchie selon la Charte (1816), a defence of Louis XVIII's policies but with a conclusion sharply critical of some governmental actions, led to his fall from favour and one of many serious financial crises, forcing him to sell La Vallée aux Loups. He soon returned to partial favour, served as ambassador to Berlin and to London, was present at the Congress of Verona, and was minister of foreign affairs at the time of the 1823 intervention in Spain. His relations with Charles X were quite strained, but he was appointed ambassador to Rome in 1828.

After the July Revolution, Chateaubriand, who in many ways had prepared its advent, chose to resign from the Chambre des Pairs out of loyalty to the elder branch of the Bourbons, and began writing his Histoire de France (1831). In 1832 his support of the duchesse de Berry in her effort to foment a civil war and restore the Bourbons led to two weeks' imprisonment, but he was acquitted. His voyages and efforts to reconcile Charles X with his quixotic daughter-in-law were quite unsuccessful. In 1838 he and his wife moved from their home in the rue d'Enfer (next to an infirmary she had directed and supported by the sale of chocolate) to the Hôtel de Clermont-Tonnerre, in the rue du Bac and near L'Abbaye-aux-Bois where Madame Récamier lived and where Chateaubriand went daily; it was one of the most prestigious literary salons of the time. At the behest of his spiritual director, he wrote a Vie de Rancé (1849); the work is also a meditation by Chateaubriand on his own life. In 1847 he finished his Mémoires d'outre-tombe, perhaps his most appreciated work today. He was buried, as he had carefully planned, in the Romantic island setting of the Grand Bé, in the Atlantic near Saint-Malo.

Considered by the Romantics and many since as their founding father, with his melancholy vision and his interest in the exotic, the passions, the imagination, Chateaubriand was also a perceptive observer of and important participant in the political scene of his days, and possessed real merit as an apologist of the Christian faith and as an historian and essayist. His combination of acuity, at times bordering on cynicism, revery, and sensibility produced writings which have been greatly appreciated by writers as different as Hugo, de Gaulle and Barthes.

[Frank Paul Bowman]

Bibliography

• J.-P. Richard, Paysage de Chateaubriand (1967)
• P. Clarac, A la recherche de Chateaubriand (1975)
• G. Painter, Chateaubriand (1979)

Quotes:

"Let us not disdain glory too much; nothing is finer, except virtue. The height of happiness would be to unite both in this life."

"Aristocracy has three successive ages. First superiority s, then privileges and finally vanities. Having passed from the first, it degenerates in the second and dies in the third."

"Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite; and this rare conjuncture, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant."

"Without taste genius is only a sublime kind of folly. That sure touch which the lyre gives back the right note and nothing more, is even a rarer gift than the creative faculty itself."