François-René de Chateaubriand

• Born: 1768
• Birthplace: Saint-Malo, France
• Died: 1848
• Place of death: Paris, France

French politician, diplomat, and writer

The founder of French Romanticism, Chateaubriand popularized the melancholy hero and deeply influenced many other nineteenth and twentieth century writers and was the first writer to appreciate the literary potential of the American frontier.

Area of achievement Literature

Early Life

François-August-René de Chateaubriand (shah-TOH-bree-ahn) was the youngest of ten children of René-Auguste de Chateaubriand. His father had become rich as a shipowner and merchant sailor; with his wealth, he had purchased the château of Combourg. There the young Chateaubriand spent a lonely childhood, wandering the woods with his sister Lucile, four years his senior, who early recognized and fostered her brother’s genius. Already as an adolescent he revealed himself as a dreamer. He later recalled that when he spoke with Lucile about the world, “it was the world that we carried within us,” that of the imagination.

Chateaubriand’s father initially intended for him to pursue a naval career. To this end the youth attended the College of Dol, near Combourg, and then the Jesuit college of Rennes. Having rejected the sea, Chateaubriand next went to the College of Dinan to study for the priesthood but soon abandoned this field as well. An older brother, Jean-Baptiste, who was living in Paris and moving in court circles, then secured for him a military commission; Chateaubriand was to remark that both he and Napoleon I began their careers as sublieutenants. He was also to observe that he spent fifteen years as a soldier before devoting fifteen to writing and another fifteen to politics.

Actually, Chateaubriand’s military career was considerably briefer. When his father died in September, 1786, Chateaubriand left the army, returned to Combourg, and, in 1789, joined his brother at the French capital. An unintentional witness to the fall of the Bastille and the increasingly violent French Revolution that ensued, in July, 1791, Chateaubriand sailed to America, hoping to find true liberty, fraternity, and equality. On the banks of the Ohio, Chateaubriand chanced upon a newspaper report of the flight of Louis XVI. He hastened back to France to fight for the monarchy. Lacking funds sufficient to join the émigré army, he married the rich and acerbic Céleste Buisson de la Vigne. Wounded and left for dead at the siege of Thionville, he managed to escape to England, where he made a living as a tutor and translator.

Life’s Work

In the evenings, Chateaubriand also began to produce original works. Among the earliest of these is his “Lettre sur l’art du dessin dans les paysages” (1795; letter on the art of landscape painting), a significant contribution to the Romantic movement. From the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, artistic theory emphasized the importance of learning technique through imitation of past masterpieces. Chateaubriand recognized the importance of technical skill, but he argued that the painter must first immerse himself in nature and respond to it emotionally, then attempt to recapture these feelings in his work. The artist should faithfully record what he has observed—Chateaubriand had studied botany before going to the United States so that he would recognize and understand what he was seeing—but landscape painting should seek not photographic realism but rather the ideal. One sees here a number of concepts that recur in writings on Romantic literary theory.

Just as Chateaubriand’s observations on landscape painting challenged the neoclassical aesthetic, so his Essai sur les révolutions (1797; An Historical, Political, Moral Essay on Revolutions, 1815) rejected the political attitude of the Enlightenment. Intended as the first volume of a detailed study of revolutions, it devotes relatively little attention to the one then engulfing Europe. However, it does comment on events in France, denying the idea of progress and perfectibility, seeing the French Revolution as only one of an ongoing series of upheavals that left people no freer or happier than they were before.

The next year Chateaubriand apparently began to change his mind about religion, though he would never allow his devotion to Catholicism to interfere with his pleasures. He began work on Le Génie du Christianisme (1799, 1800, 1802; The Genius of Christianity, 1802), a spirited defense of traditional belief. Again he was rejecting the views of the eighteenth century philosophers, and, by couching his arguments in aesthetic and emotional terms, he was allying himself once more with the Romantics.

Some portions of this work were published in England, but Chateaubriand was still revising the manuscript when he returned to France in May, 1800. Seeking literary fame and needing money, he detached from The Genius of Christianity a novella intended to illustrate how religion improves literature; this piece he published separately in 1801. Atala (English translation, 1802), the first work by a European to use the American wilderness and the Indian as central features, told of the love of Atala for the Indian Chactas. Unwilling to betray the vow of chastity made to her dying mother, and unable to overcome her passion for her lover, Atala poisons herself. Here, as in René (1802; English translation, 1813), Chateaubriand portrayed the melancholy Byronic hero well before George Gordon, Lord Byron, himself, did so. The dreamlike landscapes that mirror the inhabitants’ moods and at the same time seem to control their actions, the emphasis on emotion, the descriptions that use the senses (as when each blade of grass emits a different note) are devices that would influence succeeding generations of writers.

The popularity of Atala was matched, if not surpassed, by that of its parent work when it appeared in France the next year. The timing of its publication could not have been more fortunate for the author: On April 8, 1802, Napoleon concluded the Concordat, restoring Catholicism as the official religion of France; The Genius of Christianity appeared six days later.

Encouraged by the book’s success and by recommendations from Chateaubriand’s current mistress, Pauline de Beaumont, Napoleon appointed the author to the post of secretary to the French embassy in Rome (1803). Chateaubriand soon sought, and obtained, another assignment, that of chargé d’affaires to the puppet state of Valais. However, before he could settle his affairs in Paris, he learned of Napoleon’s kidnapping and execution of the Bourbon Duc d’Enghien, an act meant to warn the Royalists against any attempted coup. Chateaubriand resigned his office and broke with the French ruler.

Using Royalist funds, Chateaubriand bought the newspaper Mercure de France and, on July 4, 1807, published a harsh attack on the dictator. Napoleon retaliated by forcing him to sell the paper, though at a profit sufficient to allow Chateaubriand to acquire a country house outside Paris, where he completed Les Martyres (1809; The Martyrs, 1812), another tale of doomed love. The heroine, Cymodocéa, is modeled on Natalie de Noailles, who had succeeded Pauline de Beaumont as Chateaubriand’s mistress. Throughout his life, he would attract France’s most beautiful and clever women, earning for himself the title “the enchanter.” Short, stocky, broad-shouldered, and pale, he had a leonine head that compensated for any physical flaw, flashing gray eyes, and wild brown hair that gave him an aura of romance.

Set in the reign of Diocletian, The Martyrs presents a thinly veiled attack on Napoleon by comparing the French emperor to the Roman. Having arrested the pope and, therefore, having been excommunicated, Napoleon chose to ignore the criticism and sought to renew his friendship with the leading French Catholic author of the day. He arranged Chateaubriand’s appointment to the prestigious Académie Française, but the latter’s acceptance speech, so harsh that Napoleon censored it, showed that reconciliation was impossible.

In 1814, Chateaubriand wrote an even sterner indictment of the French ruler. “What have you done, not with a hundred thousand, but with five million Frenchmen… our relatives, our friends, our brothers?” he asked in De Buonaparte et des Bourbons (1814; On Buonaparte and the Bourbons, 1814). Again Chateaubriand’s timing was perfect: The piece appeared on the day the allied troops entered Paris, and the newly crowned Louis XVIII claimed that the publication was worth 100,000 soldiers.

Chateaubriand’s relationship with the Bourbons was uneasy. On June 4, 1814, Louis issued a charter that reaffirmed individual rights and sought to establish a constitutional monarchy along English lines, with ministerial responsibility to the legislative majority rather than to the king. Within two years, though, Chateaubriand was disillusioned. In his memoirs he was to write, “Descending from Bonaparte and the empire to those who followed them, is like falling from… the summit of a mountain into an abyss.” While supporting the freedoms won since 1789, Chateaubriand claimed that the king’s ministers did not share the views of the majority of Frenchmen and were thus betraying the Charter of 1814.

On February 13, 1820, the Duc de Berry, son of the future Charles X, was assassinated at the opera. In his newspaper Le Conservateur, Chateaubriand wrote,

The hand that struck the blow does not bear the greatest guilt; they that have murdered the Duc de Berry are those that have been introducing democratic laws into the monarchy for the last four years.

The government of Elie Decazes fell, and its successor named Chateaubriand minister of state and envoy to Berlin. He did not remain in Prussia long before returning to Paris to devote himself to Juliette Récamier, Claire de Duras, and Delphine de Custine.

In January, 1822, Chateaubriand again went abroad, this time as ambassador to the Court of St. James, where his chef, Montmireil, immortalized his name among many who never would read René or Atala by naming a thickly cut beefsteak for the diplomat. Chateaubriand left London in September to represent France at the Congress of Verona, and on December 28, 1822, he was named minister of foreign affairs. He was to claim that in this office he succeeded in doing what Napoleon had not—conquering Spain. A popular revolution had dethroned Ferdinand VII, and Chateaubriand persuaded France to intervene and restore the king to his throne.

In June, 1824, Chateaubriand was himself deposed, losing his ministerial position, though in 1827 he returned to a government post as ambassador to Rome. When Charles X named the conservative Jules de Polignac as chief minister, Chateaubriand resigned. As Chateaubriand feared, Polignac proved to be the downfall of the Bourbon monarchy; in 1830, the Orléans Louis-Philippe assumed the throne after a short revolution. Despite his treatment by the Bourbons, Chateaubriand refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new king, preferring to renounce his titles of peer and minister of state together with the salary they carried.

By then, Chateaubriand no longer needed this stipend, for he had been paid 550,000 francs for the rights to the collected works, and he received another 156,000 francs and a life pension for his memoirs, which appeared posthumously. Chateaubriand’s last years were dedicated to the completion of this autobiography and to Juliette Récamier, who was with him when he died in Paris on July 4, 1848. At his request, he was buried in a simple tomb on the rock of Grand Bé off the coast of Saint-Malo.

Significance

In 1831, when the Gothic church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois faced demolition, Chateaubriand played an important role in its preservation, though he remarked that too many such buildings were appearing in the literature of the day. That writers were filling their pages with descriptions of Gothic cathedrals was, however, in large part attributable to Chateaubriand himself. Théophile Gautier claimed that The Genius of Christianity restored the popularity of Gothic architecture, just as Les Natchez (1826; The Natchez, 1827) unlocked the natural sublime and René invented the modern melancholy hero. Chateaubriand was an idol to a generation of French Romantics—the young Alphonse de Lamartine waited outside Chateaubriand’s house for two days to catch a glimpse of the man—and later authors such as Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire were equally influenced by his works.

The first writer to appreciate the literary potential of the American frontier, Chateaubriand placed within that setting the brooding hero that Byron would popularize a decade later. The poet of sadness, night, suffering, and ennui, he gave the world the character who searches for a self he will never find. He also taught the French how to read their own classics. He was among the first to recognize the tragic sense that underlies much of Molière’s comedy and the sadness and dreamlike qualities of Jean de La Fontaine, Blaise Pascal, and Jean Racine.

Honoré de Balzac wanted to be a literary Napoleon; Chateaubriand hoped to be a political Napoleon as well. He lacked the talent and temperament necessary to rival his fellow sublieutenant in the field or in the cabinet, but in the study he reigned supreme. As Bonaparte remarked, “Chateaubriand has received the sacred fire from Nature; his works bear witness to it. His style is not that of Racine but that of the prophet.”

Bibliography

Bales, Richard. Persuasion in the French Personal Novel: Studies of Chateaubriand, Constant, Balzac, Nerval, and Fromentin. Birmingham, Ala.: Summa, 1997. Bales analyzes René and several other nineteenth century French romantic novels in which characters persuade themselves (and their readers) that their private failures are public successes.

Evans, Joan. Chateaubriand: A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1939. Relies primarily on Chateaubriand’s autobiography but corrects and supplements this work with other accounts. Readable, with many fine vignettes but little analysis.

Hilt, Douglas. “Chateaubriand and Napolean.” History Today 23 (December, 1973): 831-837. Traces Chateaubriand’s political career under Napoleon and the author’s subsequent portrayal of Napoleon in his memoirs.

Maurois, André. Chateaubriand: Poet, Statesman, Lover. Translated by Vera Fraser. New York: Harper & Row, 1938. Drawing heavily on Chateaubriand’s own writing, Maurois artfully weaves his subject’s own words into a readable narrative.

Painter, George D. Chateaubriand: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 1977. First volume of an apparently unfinished three-volume biography. It offers an extensively detailed account of Chateaubriand’s life from 1768 to 1793. Painter has not written the other two volumes, but when he does it will be the definitive biography.

Porter, Charles Allan. Chateaubriand: Composition, Imagination, and Poetry. Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1978. A stylistic analysis of Chateaubriand’s major works. Like many of Chateaubriand’s contemporaries, Porter sees discontinuities of time and space in the prose. Porter finds in these disjunctions a modern attempt to engage the reader in the creative process.

Schor, Naomi. One Hundred Years of Melancholy. New York: Clarendon Press, 1996. A 17-page reprint of a lecture delivered by Schor, a professor of French at Harvard University. Schor analyzed the sense of melancholy in Chateaubriand’s book Mémoires d’outre-tombe.

Sieburg, Friedrich. Chateaubriand. Translated by Violet M. MacDonald. Winchester, Mass.: Allen & Unwin, 1961. Concentrates on biography rather than literary analysis. Argues that “Chateaubriand’s ambition and his desire for action were… forever undermining the foundations of his existence” and that his life is a tissue of contradictions.

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