CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOIS RENÉ AUGUSTE (1768–1848)

CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOIS RENÉ AUGUSTE (1768–1848)

François René Auguste, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, an inaugural member of the Romantic movement in literature, was born at St Malo in Brittany on 14 September 1768. Raised at his family’s medieval chateau, he attended grammar school at Rennes and finished his education at Dol College. Unsure of the direction to take in life after years of preparation for the priesthood, he joined the army in August 1786. Disillusioned by the aims of a military life, he embarked for the USA on 7 April 1791 in an attempt to discover the North-west Passage. This trip would become fodder for much of his work and inspired his idyllic portrayals of nature. He had only been in the USA for several months when he heard of the arrest of King Louis XVI at Varennes, and he returned to France on 2 January 1792 to fight for King Louis XVI and the royalist army. This return resulted in marriage, and his joining the army of Conde. Wounded in battle in Thionville,

he escaped to England for 8 years, a period marked by scepticism and disillusionment, and works such as Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes considerées dans leurs rapports avec la révolution française, published in 1797. His tone changed after the death of his mother in 1798, and the nineteenth-century Chateaubriand began to emerge. His exile in England was a period of misery for Chateaubriand, and when he was able to return to France, it was only under an altered name.

His contributions to the Western canon included Le Génie du christianisme (1802), which centred around Chateaubriand’s argument that conceptual reasoning was no longer sufficient in an age of power play and argumentation. Although somewhat exaggerated in tone, Chateaubriand may have single-handedly helped revive an interest in religion since the publication of Le Génie du christianisme coincided with the re-emergence of Roman Catholicism in France. This work attracted Napoleon, who appointed Chateaubriand secretary to the Rome embassy in 1802, the beginning of a life in politics for Chateaubriand. However, on 21 March 1804, he resigned from the diplomatic service in order to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. His travels became the inspiration for his 1811 work, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris, en allant par la Grèce, et revenant par l’Egypte, la Barbarie, et l’Espagne . After its publication in 1811, Chateaubriand’s political career occupied centre-stage. He became the French ambassador to Berlin, a delegate at the Congress of Verona, and Minister of Foreign Affairs. In 1815, he had been honoured as a peer of the realm, a post that he relinquished in 1830, unwilling to dedicate himself to Louis Philippe. This event essentially marked the retirement of Chateaubriand, and he dedicated the remainder of his life to his ‘raison d’être’, his Mémoirs d’outre tombe, published posthumously in pamphlet form from 1849 to 1859. His political life, however, can be succinctly divided into three eras, specifically the royalist period when he was an officer fighting in the names of King Louis XVI and Napoleon, a loyalty that lasted until 1824, when his political career took a marked turn towards liberalism, which lasted until he relinquished his post as peer of the realm in 1830, and the political leaning towards ideal republicanism that lasted until his death in 1848.

Entries A-Z 107 Chateaubriand can be credited with facilitating the transition from the classical school

to the Romantic style, and it was a characteristic he did not take lightly. Not surprisingly, his influences included George Washington, Napoleon, Pius VII and Burke, each of whom influenced Chateaubriand’s work ethic: ‘freedom is preserved only by work, because work produces strength…the strength of the body is maintained by physical exercise; once labour is lacking, strength disappears’ (Mémoirs, p. 373). This inspired much of Chateaubriand’s work, as well as his life. His urge to explore the exotic had led him to the USA in 1791, and the writing of Atala, the ‘painting of two lovers who walk and talk in solitude; all lies in the picture of the turmoil and love in the midst of the calm of the wilderness’ (Preface to Atala). Keeping in mind that Chateaubriand believed that thoughts made the man, he created Chactas, the Indian protagonist, who was unable to assimilate to the civilized world, and Atala, the white female, who was torn between her desire for Chactas and her desire for home. Yet this was also a tale of brotherhood, a work representing the state of nature and the problems of populating it. In Atala, Chateaubriand invested his two protagonists, ‘les deux sauvages dans le désert’, with great wisdom, essentially elevating them to the status of priests. The mythic elements of the story make this story a rite of passage, and the inclusion of the Catholic priest, Father Aubry, serves as the catalyst for the introduction of republican values based primarily on natural religion.

Chateaubriand imbues Chactas with a sense of quiet superiority; he refers to a man like other men, yet a man who had become a respected patriarch. ‘Il y avait parmi ces Sauvages un vieillard nommé Chactas’, one who had lived a fulfilled life. The narrator, in both the Prologue and Epilogue, attempts to determine ‘la sagesse des temps’, or essentially the purpose of life, with the themes of death, war and exile occurring in a reoccurring movement in the text. The narrator reveals the paradox of the tale—those who speak of reason may not be reasonable in the end, yet even he could not determine what led to the harmony the ‘old men’ felt; ‘je ne sais quelle mystérieuse harmonie’.

The introspective tone and egotism so expressive of the ‘mal du siècle’ found in many of the writings in Le Génie du Christianisme, is also found in Rene, also published separately in 1807. Self-titled, this work is the tale of a man imprisoned in himself; it is the tale of a man on a mission to find true happiness. It is the ultimate tale of ennui, the story of a man so self-absorbed that he ignores his wife and children, as well as the world around him. His mental anguish mirrored his incapacity to deal with the end of the ancien régime, and only in nature, or physical exile, could the answers be found. This was a tale in which man’s suffering was central to the story line, but in which religion and faith remained victorious. Father Souel, the Catholic priest, supported Rene through his toughest times, an event that perhaps mirrored the French Catholic revival in early nineteenth-century France.

Centred around the search for self-expression, and the momentous scene of the main character, Rene, sitting on the edge of a volcano, ‘un jeune home plein de passions, assis sur la bounce d’un volcan’, René expresses the Romantic attitude towards life and self. The volcano is the symbolic expression of the internal struggle characteristic of Romanticism, and suggests symbolic interpretations such as creativity, fear and fire. The eruption of the volcano can be interpreted as the crisis of the conscious mind. René’s climb up the summit of Mount Etna occurs as he nears the end of his journey for meaning in life, a journey that was a direct result of his father’s death, and just before the isolation

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 108

of his return to France, where he contemplates suicide. The volcano has been seen as a ‘waking dream’ by Mircea Eliade, in which René distanced himself from the outer, ‘physical’ world and allowed his inner thoughts to emerge after years of submission. There was no specific explanation provided for why René needed to climb Mount Etna; it appears that he is drawn instinctively to Etna. The narrator notes, ‘un jour, j’étais monté au sommet de l’Etna’ (199), which corresponds to his emotional turmoil; the appearance of the volcano, ‘un volcan qui brûle au milieu d’une île’ represents what some critics have referred to as Rene’s ‘psychological geography’. The symbolism of the fire, and, in

a sense, the Promethean myth, explains the courage that such creativity requires, as well as the ability to ‘open’ oneself to the unknown, as Rene did in his self-explorative narrative at the entrance to the volcano. Yet, this also invokes the symbolism of fear, specifically the fact the sensitive and creative Rene was very conscious of how alone he is in the world. Rene’s journey is one that exemplifies the Romantic quest for insight into the inner world of the self.

Chateaubriand popularized the notion of the individual with the publication of René. Yet, he also highlighted the role of space in his Mémoires d’outre tombe, his description of Combourg, his family home, and a patriarchal tale of the father’s dominance, and the mother’s passive resistance. The concept of ‘space’, another example of Romanticism, defines René’s personal voyage to determine what was important to him in life. Therefore, Combourg occupied the focal point in the text, particularly with the pervasive presence and image of the negative father, referred to by Chateaubriand in non-specific terms as ‘Monsieur mon pére’, He refers to his father in cold terms, using words such as ‘rigidity’, ‘austerity’, ‘coldness’ and ‘introversion’. His mother, on the other hand, to whom he refers as ‘ma mére’, is described using words such as ‘imagination’, ‘elegance’ or ‘lively humor’. Her only expression of resistance, however, was her sighs (her ‘soupirs’ ), only a passive attempt to deflect her husband’s negativity. There was a certain rivalry between father and son, despite his cruelty, which Chateaubriand refers to as violent (‘cette maniére violente de me traiter’) yet, due to his mother’s faith in the power of God, he begins to challenge his father. In order to achieve—and discover—his own identity, François-René is forced to leave Combourg, making the Mémoires a powerful expression of the relationship between space and time, and the exploration of the concept of Self.

Similar to other nineteenth-century authors and thinkers, Chateaubriand felt the torment of religious conflict. Despite his moral difficulties, Chateaubriand maintained his belief in Christianity, although that belief wavered during his period in the USA. It took the death of his mother in 1798 to reconcile him to his faith, which had been his mother’s dying wish. He explained this abandonment of his faith in his ‘Essai sur les revolutions’, and again in the preface to the first edition of Le Génie du christianisme, in which he wrote, ‘I wept…and I believed.’ Yet, his constant doubting of his faith would also be a theme throughout his life, although, despite his scepticism, he remained true to Christianity. In the latter work, subtitled ‘Beauties of the Christian Religion’ in the first edition, Chateaubriand wrote:

Though we have not employed the arguments usually advanced by the apologists of Christianity, we have arrived by a different chain of reasoning at the same conclusion: Christianity is perfect; men are

Entries A-Z 109 imperfect. Now, a perfect consequence cannot spring from an imperfect

principle. Christianity, therefore, is not the work of men. It is with this work that Chateaubriand is credited with reinvigorating Christianity in

France.

His writing was an attempt to justify the events of the two centuries in which he lived. In altering between royalist and republican notions politically, and writing in the Romantic style, Chateaubriand was a man caught between two centuries, a turmoil revealed in his writing. He noted:

I have found myself caught between two ages, as in the conflux of two rivers, and I have plunged into their waters, turning regretfully from the old bank upon which I was born, yet swimming hopefully towards the unknown shore at which the new generations are to land.

(Mémoires xxiv) Nevertheless, Chateaubriand’s contribution to the concept of ‘self’ in works from Le

Génie du christianisme to Mémoires d’outre tombe demonstrates his niche in nineteenth- century thought.