François-Réné Chateaubriand de

1768-1848

Notes : François-René de Chateaubriand after education at the collège de Dol (Rennes), in 1768 became sub-lieutenant in the regiment of de Navarre. In 1789 he found himself in Paris, but in 1791 embarked for America. A year later he returned to join the army and left for London, where he lived from 1793 to 1800. During this period he wrote the “Essai sur les Révolutions”, published in London, and also worked on the text of his “Génie du Christianisme”. This work, published two years after his return to France in 1800, was much appreciated by Bonaparte ; it showed how Christianity was at the same time a force for progress in history and a poetic religion capable of expressing the spiritual anguish of contemporary man. The novels “Atala” and “René”, taken from the “Génie du christianisme”, appeared to popular acclaim in 1801 and 1802 ; they portray destinies destroyed by love and death in the wilds of America, amid tribal wars and the conflicts between nature and civilization. Chateaubriand began his career in French political life by obtaining a post as secretary of the legation at Rome of cardinal Fesch, Bonaparte’s uncle. Nominated French minister to Valais (Switzerland) in January 1804, he resigned a few months later after the execution of the Duc d’Enghien, who was accused of treason by Bonaparte. The break with Bonaparte, by now proclaimed Emperor, was final, and Chateaubriand embarked on travels (1806 to 1807) in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt and Spain. On his return to France, he published in 1809 his Christian epic, the “Martyrs” (not forgetting to exact his revenge on Napoleon, who appears as the tyrant Diocletian) and in 1811 the “Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem”. The publication of the pamphlet “De Buonaparte et des Bourbons” in 1814 allowed him to re-enter politics as a supporter of Louis XVIII. Nominated minister of state and peer of France in 1815, minister plenipotentionary to Berlin in 1821, ambassador to London in 1822, mnister for foreign affairs at the end of the same year, a post he held until 1824, Chateaubriand played an important role under the restoration and enjoyed a certain popularity as a moderate monarchist. Founder of the journal “Le Conservateur” (1818), he published during this period numerous political works. The agreement to publish his collected works with Ladvocat was the occasion of the first printing of the “Essai sur les Révolutions” in France (it had already been twice republished in London in 1814 and 1824) ; there also appeared “Les aventures du dernier Abencérage” (1826), “Les Natchez” (1826) and the “Voyage en Amérique” (1827). After the July revolution, hostile to Orleanism, he devoted himself to writing his “Études historiques” (1831), and “La Vie de Rancé” (1844), and to completing the book on which he had been working since 1809, the “Mémoires d’outre-tombe”, qui appeared posthumously in La Presse between 1848 and 1850. Tossed between revolution and counter-revolution, in the “Essai sur les Révolutions”, Chateaubriand establishes on all fronts a parallel between the « Greek revolutions », which gave rise to « republics », and the French Revolution, a parallel which has one sole objective, to prove in opposition to the revolutionaries that the Greek example, however glorious, could not succeed in France. But the parallel breaks down instead of being established in the course of his analysis: Chateaubriand finds himself obliged to admit, in his attempt to demonstrate that the Revolution leads inevitably to a political impasse, that the age of Greece is separated from the modern world by radical differences on both the political and the social and cultural levels ; in other words he finds himself obliged to invalidate the presupposition behind all parallels, the existence of an unchanging and universal, that is essentially an-historical human nature. In this light the new preface to the edition of the Essai in 1826 is significant – not only because Chateaubriand there replies at length to his « enemies » who accused him of having been an « atheist » in the Essai, while a few years later appearing as a fervent apologist for the Christian religion, but also because he does not hesitate to engage in self-criticism, and to admit that at the time of the Essai he had confused – just like the revolutionaries – two societies which were essentially different, and had judged « the moderns in the light of the ancients ». In so doing Chateaubriand subscribes to the historicisation of the ancient paradigm, and adheres to what a few years earlier Benjamin Constant had described as the « liberty of the moderns », that fruit of the age of Progress and of the « perfection of civilization ». The nineteenth century has arrived.

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