François-René de Chateaubriand

Biography

Chateaubriand was born in Saint-Malo on 4 September 1768, the last of ten children, and grew up at the château de Combourg in Brittany. His father, René de Chateaubriand, was a sea captain turned ship-owner and slave trader; his mother was Apolline de Bedée. The father was morose and uncommunicative, and the young Chateaubriand lived in gloomy solitude, broken only by walks in the Breton countryside and an intense friendship with his sister Lucile.

This solitude led to a suicide attempt with a hunting rifle, which failed to discharge. He was educated in Dol, Rennes and Dinan. At seventeen he chose a military career, becoming a second lieutenant in the French Army at Navarre and rising to captain within two years. In Paris in 1788 he met Jean-François de La Harpe, André Chénier, Louis-Marcelin de Fontanes and other leading writers.

Initially sympathetic to the French Revolution, he decided to journey to North America in 1791, an idea given him by Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who also encouraged botanical studies. English travel writer Arthur Young visited Combourg in 1788, describing the area as savage and the town as brutal and filthy, with a chateau inhabited amid such poverty.

Influence

Chateaubriand's descriptions of Nature and his analysis of emotion made him the model for a generation of Romantic writers in France and abroad. Lord Byron was deeply impressed by René, and the young Victor Hugo wrote, 'To be Chateaubriand or nothing. Even his enemy Stendhal used Chateaubriand's psychological analyses in De l'amour. Chateaubriand was the first to define the vague des passions, writing in Génie du Christianisme, 'One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world.

His political thought showed contradictions: he wanted to be friend to both legitimist royalty and republicans, defending whichever seemed more in danger. He stated, '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—including Lamartine, Victor Hugo, André Malraux, and Paul Claudel—who tried to mix political and literary careers.

Works

Chateaubriand's works include Essai sur les révolutions (1797), Atala (1801), René (1802), Génie du christianisme (1802), Les Martyrs (1809), Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811), and Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe (1848–50). He also wrote political pamphlets such as 'On Buonaparte and the Bourbons' (1814) and historical studies. His autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe is now widely regarded as one of the most important works in French literature.

Did You Know?

• Chateaubriand was invested as a Knight of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem in 1806.
• He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1816.
• Chateaubriand steak is most likely named after him.