François-René de Chateaubriand
François-René de Chateaubriand | |
---|---|
Paul de Noailles | |
Personal details | |
Born | France | 4 September 1768
Spouse |
Céleste Buisson de la Vigne
(m. 1792; died 1847) |
Relations |
|
Profession | Writer, translator, diplomat |
Awards | |
Military service | |
Allegiance | Kingdom of France |
Branch/service | Armée des Émigrés |
Years of service | 1792 |
Rank | Captain |
Battles/wars | |
Writing career | |
Period | 19th century |
Genre | Novel, memoir, essay |
Subject | Religion, exoticism, existentialism |
Literary movement | Romanticism Conservatism |
Years active | 1793–1848 |
Notable works | |
Signature | |
This article is part of Conservatism in France |
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
Historian Peter Gay says that Chateaubriand saw himself as the greatest lover, the greatest writer, and the greatest philosopher of his age. Gay states that Chateaubriand "dominated the literary scene in France in the first half of the nineteenth century".[2]
Biography
Early years and exile
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Born in Saint-Malo on 4 September 1768, the last of ten children, Chateaubriand grew up at his family's castle (the château de Combourg) in Combourg, Brittany. His father, René de Chateaubriand, was a sea captain turned ship-owner and slave trader. His mother's maiden name was Apolline de Bedée. Chateaubriand's father was a morose, uncommunicative man, and the young Chateaubriand grew up in an atmosphere of gloomy solitude, only broken by long walks in the Breton countryside and an intense friendship with his sister Lucile. His youthful solitude and wild desire produced a suicide attempt with a hunting rifle, although the weapon failed to discharge.
English agriculturist and pioneering travel writer Arthur Young visited Comburg in 1788 and he described the immediate environs of the "romantic" Chateau de Combourg thusly:
"SEPTEMBER 1st. To Combourg, the country has a savage aspect; husbandry not much further advanced, at least in skill, than among the
Hurons, which appears incredible amidst inclosures; the people almost as wild as their country, and their town of Combourg one of the most brutal filthy places that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so broken, as to impede all passengers, but ease none - yet here is a chateau, and inhabited; who is this Mons. de Chateaubriant, the owner, that has nerves strung for a residence amidst such filth and poverty? Below this hideous heap of wretchedness is a fine lake..."[3]
Chateaubriand was educated in
Journey to America
In Voyage en Amérique, published in 1826, Chateaubriand writes that he arrived in Philadelphia on 10 July 1791. He visited New York, Boston and Lexington, before leaving by boat on the Hudson River to reach Albany.[6] He then followed the Mohawk Trail up the Niagara Falls where he broke his arm and spent a month in recovery in the company of a Native American tribe. Chateaubriand then describes Native American tribes' customs, as well as zoological, political and economic consideration. He then says that a raid along the Ohio River, the Mississippi River, Louisiana and Florida took him back to Philadelphia, where he embarked on the Molly in November to go back to France.[6]
This experience provided the setting for his exotic novels
Return to France
Chateaubriand returned to France in 1792 and subsequently joined the army of Royalist émigrés in Koblenz under the leadership of Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince of Condé. Under strong pressure from his family, he married a young aristocratic woman, also from Saint-Malo, whom he had never previously met, Céleste Buisson de la Vigne (in later life, Chateaubriand was notoriously unfaithful to her, having a series of love affairs). His military career came to an end when he was wounded at the Siege of Thionville, a major clash between Royalist troops (of which Chateaubriand was a member) and the French Revolutionary Army. Half-dead, he was taken to Jersey and exiled to England, leaving his wife behind.[citation needed]
Exile in London
Chateaubriand spent most of his exile in extreme poverty in London, scraping a living offering French lessons and doing translation work, but a stay in (Bungay) Suffolk[8] proved to be more idyllic. He stayed at The Music House, 34 Bridge Street, a fact recorded in a plaque on the property.[9] Here Chateaubriand fell in love with a young English woman, Charlotte Ives, the daughter of his host, but the romance ended when he was forced to reveal he was already married. During his time in Britain, Chateaubriand also became familiar with English literature. This reading, particularly of John Milton's Paradise Lost (which he later translated into French prose), had a deep influence on his own literary work.
His exile forced Chateaubriand to examine the causes of the French Revolution, which had cost the lives of many of his family and friends; these reflections inspired his first work, Essai sur les Révolutions (1797). An attempt in 18th-century style to explain the French Revolution, it predated his subsequent, romantic style of writing and was largely ignored. A major turning point in Chateaubriand's life was his conversion back to the Catholic faith of his childhood around 1798.
Consulate and Empire
Chateaubriand took advantage of the amnesty issued to émigrés to return to France in May 1800 (under the
James McMillan argues that a Europe-wide Catholic Revival emerged from the change in the cultural climate from intellectually-oriented classicism to emotionally-based Romanticism. He concludes that Chateaubriand's book:
did more than any other single work to restore the credibility and prestige of Christianity in intellectual circles and launched a fashionable rediscovery of the Middle Ages and their Christian civilisation. The revival was by no means confined to an intellectual elite, however, but was evident in the real, though uneven, rechristianisation of the French countryside.[10]
Appointed secretary of the legation to the
Chateaubriand used his new-found wealth in 1806 to visit Greece,
On his return to France at the end of 1806, he published a severe criticism of Napoleon, comparing him to
Under the Restoration
Chateaubriand became a major figure in politics as well as literature. At first he was a strong Royalist in the period up to 1824. His liberal phase lasted from 1824 to 1830. After that he was much less active. After the fall of Napoleon, Chateaubriand rallied to the
After Napoleon's final defeat in the
Chateaubriand sided again with the Court after the murder of the
Consequently, he moved towards the liberal opposition, both as a Peer and as a contributor to
In 1830, he donated a monument to the French painter Nicolas Poussin in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina in Rome.
July Monarchy
In 1830, after the
His Études historiques was an introduction to a projected History of France. He became a harsh critic of the "bourgeois king" Louis-Philippe and the
Chateaubriand, along with other Catholic traditionalists such as Ballanche or, on the other side of the political divide, the socialist and republican Pierre Leroux, was one of the few men of his time who attempted to conciliate the three terms of Liberté, égalité and fraternité, going beyond the antagonism between liberals and socialists as to what interpretation to give the seemingly contradictory terms.[16] Chateaubriand thus gave a Christian interpretation of the revolutionary motto, stating in the 1841 conclusion to his Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe:
Far from being at its term, the religion of the Liberator is now only just entering its third phase, the political period, liberty, equality, fraternity.[16][17]
In his final years, he lived as a recluse in an apartment at 120
Chateaubriand died in Paris on 4 July 1848, aged 79, in the midst of the
Influence
His descriptions of Nature and his analysis of emotion made him the model for a generation of Romantic writers, not only in France but also abroad. For example, Lord Byron was deeply impressed by René. The young Victor Hugo scribbled in a notebook, "To be Chateaubriand or nothing." Even his enemies found it hard to avoid his influence. Stendhal, who despised him for political reasons, made use of his psychological analyses in his own book De l'amour.
Chateaubriand was the first to define the vague des passions ("intimations of passion") that later became a commonplace of Romanticism: "One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world" (Génie du Christianisme). His political thought and actions seem to offer numerous contradictions: he wanted to be the friend both of legitimist royalty and of republicans, alternately defending whichever of the two seemed more in danger: "I am a Bourbonist out of honour, a monarchist out of reason, and a republican out of taste and temperament". He was the first of a series of French men of letters (Lamartine, Victor Hugo, André Malraux, Paul Claudel) who tried to mix political and literary careers.
"We are convinced that the great writers have told their own story in their works", wrote Chateaubriand in Génie du christianisme. "One only truly describes one's own heart by attributing it to another, and the greater part of genius is composed of memories". This is certainly true of Chateaubriand himself. All his works have strong autobiographical elements, overt or disguised.
The year 1800 was the first to produce a book bearing the imprint of the new era, a work small in size, but great in significance and mighty in the impression it made. Atala took the French public by storm in a way which no book had done since the days of
Paul and Virginia. It was a romance of the plains and mysterious forests of North America, with a strong, strange aroma of the untilled soil from which it sprang; it glowed with rich foreign colouring, and with the fiercer glow of consuming passion.[19]
Chateaubriand was a food enthusiast;
Honors and memberships
In 1806, Chateaubriand was invested as a
Chateaubriand was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1816.[22]
A French school in Rome (Italy) is named after him.
The cut of meat, a Chateaubriand, is named after him.
Works
- 1797: Essai sur les révolutions.
- 1801: Atala, ou Les Amours de Deux Sauvages dans le Desert.
- 1802: René.
- 1802: Génie du christianisme.
- 1809: Les Martyrs.
- 1811: Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem. English translation by Frederic Shoberl, 1814. Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, and Barbary, during the years 1806 and 1807.
- 1814: "On Buonaparte and the Bourbons", in Blum, Christopher Olaf, editor and translator, 2004. Critics of the Enlightenment. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books. 3–42.
- 1820: Mémoires sur la vie et la mort du duc de Berry.
- 1826: Les Natchez.
- 1826: Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage.
- 1827: Voyage en Amérique.
- 1831: Études historiques.
- 1833: Mémoires sur la captivité de Madame la duchesse de Berry.
- 1844: La Vie de Rancé.
- 1848–50: Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe.
- "Progress," in Menczer, Béla, 1962. Catholic Political Thought, 1789–1848, University of Notre Dame Press.
Digitized works
- [Opere]. 1.
- Génie du Cristianisme.
- [Opere]. 2.
- Itinéraire de Paris a Jérusalem et de Jérusalem a Paris.
- Martyrs.
- Voyage en Amérique.
- Mélanges politiques.
- Polémique.
- Études historiques.
- Analyse raisonnée de l'histoire de la France.
- Paradise lost.
- Congrès de Verone.
- Mémoires d'outre-tombe. 1.
- Mémoires d'outre-tombe. 2.
- Mémoires d'outre-tombe. 3.
- Mémoires d'outre-tombe. 4.
- Mémoires d'outre-tombe. 5.
- Mémoires d'outre-tombe. 6.
- Dernières années de Chateaubriand.
See also
- Chateaubriand steak
- Viscountcy of Chateaubriand (cr. 1817)
- List of Ambassadors of France to the United Kingdom
Notes
- ^ English pronunciation: /ʃæˌtoʊbriːˈɑːn/;[1] French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃swa ʁəne də ʃɑtobʁijɑ̃].
References
Citations
- ^ "Chateaubriand". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
- ^ Peter Gay, "The Complete Romantic," Horizon (1966) 8#2 pp 12-19.
- ^ Young, Arthur (1794). Travels During the Years 1787, 1788 & 1789; Undertaken More Particularly With a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France (Second ed.). W. Richardson, Royal Exchange, London. p. 97.
- ^ Nitze, William A. "Chateaubriand in America", The Dial, Vol. LXV, June–December 1918.
- ^ Tapié, V.-L. (1965) Chateaubriand. Seuil.
- ^ a b Chateaubriand, F-R. (1826) Voyage en Amérique
- ^ Lebègue, R. (1965) Le problème du voyage de Chateaubriand en Amérique. Journal des Savants, 1,1 from http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/jds_0021-8103_1965_num_1_1_1104
- ^ "Bungay: a new book by local author Terry Reeve". iceni Post News from the North folk & South folk. 13 September 2011. Retrieved 9 January 2020.
- ^ Secret Bungay
- ^ James McMillan, "Catholic Christianity in France from the Restoration to the separation of church and state, 1815-1905." in Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, eds., The Cambridge history of Christianity (2014) 8 217-232
- ^ Czouz-Tornare, Alain-Jacques. "Quand le Valais était français". Fondation Napoléon (in French). Retrieved 2 June 2021.
- ^ Douglas Hilt, "Chateaubriand and Napoleon" History Today (Dec 1973), Vol. 23 Issue 12, pp 831-838
- ISBN 0-399-11022-4.
- ^ Peter Fritzsche, "Chateaubriand's Ruins: Loss and Memory after the French Revolution." History and Memory 10.2 (1998): 102-117. online
- ^ Peter Fritzsche, "Specters of history: On nostalgia, exile, and modernity." American Historical Review 106.5 (2001): 1587-1618.
- ^ a b Mona Ozouf, "Liberté, égalité, fraternité", in Lieux de Mémoire (dir. Pierre Nora), tome III, Quarto Gallimard, 1997, pp.4353–4389 (in French) (abridged translation, Realms of Memory, Columbia University Press, 1996–1998 (in English))
- ^ French: "Loin d'être à son terme, la religion du Libérateur entre à peine dans sa troisième période, la période politique, liberté, égalité, fraternité.
- ^ Gribble, Francis Henry (1909). Chateaubriand and his court of women. The Centre for 19th Century French Studies - University of Toronto. London : Chapman and Hall, Ltd.
- ^ George Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, 1:The Emigrant Literature p. 7
- Chateaubriand steakarticle for discussion
- ISBN 978-0192854285.
- ^ American Antiquarian Society Members Directory
Sources
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the New International Encyclopedia(1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.
- Marc Fumaroli, Chateaubriand: poésie et terreur, Fallois, Paris: 2004.
- Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
- Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. .
- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Further reading
- Baldick, Robert (trans.) The Memoirs of Chateaubriand (Hamish Hamilton, 1961)
- Boorsch, Jean. "Chateaubriand and Napoleon." Yale French Studies 26 (1960): 55–62 online.
- Bouvier, Luke. "Death and the Scene of Inception: Autobiographical Impropriety and the Birth of Romanticism in Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe." French Forum (1998), vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 23–46. online
- Byrnes, Joseph F. "Chateaubriand and Destutt de Tracy: Defining religious and secular polarities in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century." Church History 60.3 (1991): 316-330 online.
- Counter, Andrew J. "A Nation of Foreigners: Chateaubriand and Repatriation." Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46.3 (2018): 285–306. online
- Fritzsche, Peter. "Chateaubriand's Ruins: Loss and Memory after the French Revolution." History and Memory 10.2 (1998): 102–117 online.
- Huet, Marie-Hélène. "Chateaubriand and the Politics of (Im) mortality." Diacritics 30.3 (2000): 28-39 online.
- Painter, George D. Chateaubriand: A Biography: Volume I (1768–93) The Longed-For Tempests. (1997) online review
- Rosenthal, Léon, and Marc Sandoz. "Chateaubriand, Francois-Auguste-Rene, Vicomte De 1768–1848." Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850 (2013): 168.
- Scott, Malcolm. Chateaubriand: The Paradox of Change (Peter Lang, 2015). vi + 216 pp. online review
- Thompson, Christopher W. French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval (Oxford University Press, 2012).
In French
- Ghislain de Diesbach, Chateaubriand (Paris: Perrin, 1995).
- Jean-Claude Berchet, Chateaubriand (Paris: Gallimard, 2012).
Primary sources
- de Chateaubriand, François-René. Chateaubriand's Travels in America. (University Press of Kentucky, 2015).
- Chateaubriand, François-René. The genius of Christianity (1884). online
- Chateaubriand, François-René. Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt and Barbary: during the years 1806 and 1807 (1814). online
- Chateaubriand's works were edited in 20 volumes by Sainte-Beuve, with an introductory study of his own (1859–60).
External links
- Works by François-René de Chateaubriand at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about François-René de Chateaubriand at Internet Archive
- Works by François-René de Chateaubriand at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Maison de Chateaubriand à la Vallée-aux-Loups
- (in French) Atala, René, Le Dernier Abencerage at athena.unige.ch
- (in French) Works in digital reading
- (in English) Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe at Poetry in Translation: a complete English translation of the Memoirs by A. S. Kline, with a hyper-linked in-depth index and over 600 illustrations of the people, places and events of Chateaubriand's life. Retrieved 27 August 2015.
- (in French) Complete works
- François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand in Britannica
- Chateaubriand, the author who wanted to return France to its Christian roots