Chateaubriand: Selected Writings
Translated by Edward Maxwell III.
Imperium Press, 2024.
Paperback, 176 pages, $8.50.
Reviewed by Thomas Banks.
François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand—nobleman, adventurer, poet, and memoirist—a sampling of whose work appears in this useful digest, has been enjoying something of a renaissance on our side of the Atlantic. His Memoires d’Outre Tombe have appeared under both the Penguin and NYRB Classics imprints in recent years; the writings from his American travels have been similarly resurrected by Kentucky University Press, and Professor Christopher Blum opened his anthology of French Counter-Enlightenment authors with one of Chateaubriand’s anti-Bonapartist pamphlets. The combination of these books will hopefully do something to summon English-speaking readers’ attention to the commanding position Chateaubriand occupies upon the map of French Romantic literature, of which our knowledge typically begins and ends with the names of Hugo and Dumas. Yet without Chateaubriand’s expansive influence neither could have been what he in fact became. Of the two, Hugo acknowledged the enormous debt he owed the older writer by the motto he adopted early in his literary apprenticeship: Être Chateaubriand ou rien, “To be Chateaubriand or nothing.”
To estimate Chateaubriand with any justice, one should try to imagine what might have been the effect had Lord Byron not died prematurely of camp-fever at Missolonghi, but rather, having returned to and reconciled with his native country, adopted the political and religious principles of Burke, sat down in his life’s autumn to write an immortal autobiography, and anticipated the coming of the Oxford Movement with a series of energetic defenses of the twin causes of Tory Monarchism and the Established Church. Such, mutatis mutandis, was the trajectory of the Frenchman’s career.
Born in 1768, he was a member of that revolutionary generation raised in the creed of Voltaire and Diderot which saw in human society the makings of a philosopher’s paradise that had only to be cleared of crowns, cassocks, and the Index of Prohibited Books to be fully realized. In his youth, Chateaubriand shared many of the liberal hopes and rationalist visions that led from the Tennis Court Oath and the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the September Massacres and the suppression of the Vendée peasantry. He saw the moderate Girondins overthrown by the radical Montagnards; the radicals, in their turn, were toppled along with their tribune Robespierre; and one faction or committee was succeeded by another committee or faction until all alike were unceremoniously cashiered by a Corsican attorney’s son who within a few years would prove more injurious to the peace of Europe than any Bourbon monarch had ever been.
His experience of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Regime that was its sequel was sufficient to turn Chateaubriand into a legitimist and a conservative. The public disaster was, for him, also a personal tragedy, as his brother and sister-in-law had been among the guillotine’s victims during the Terror. These losses, and those of his country, hardened him. Like Burke, he embraced the principle that all men are inheritors; the wise among them are those who recognize the nature of their debt. His judgment on the movement of 1789 was unsparing:
A revolution, prepared by our moral corruption and errors, breaks out amidst us. In the name of the law, we overturned religion and morality; we renounced experience and the customs of our fathers; we defiled the tombs of our ancestors, the only solid basis for any government, to found upon uncertain reason a society with neither past nor future. Wandering in our own folly, having lost all clear ideas of the just and the unjust, of good and evil, we passed through the various forms of republican government. We called the populace to deliberate in the streets of Paris. Fallen into such hands, the fatherland was soon covered with wounds. What remains of our fury and dreams? Crimes and fetters.
It might be easy to dismiss such a testimony as the embittered backwards glance of a man whose ideals were stolen from him, along with his wallet, en route to the demonstration, but this would be injudicious. Even late in life, Chateaubriand retained the sounder part of his liberalism, standing up for the rights of the press, which were severely repressed in the years of the Bourbon Restoration, and for the freedom of small nations, most notably that of Greece, to whose independence Byron had dedicated his fortune and his life’s crowning act.
His conversion to monarchism was not simply the turning inside-out of his political coat for the motive of personal advancement. The appetite for justice, combined with his colossal egoism, preserved him from this end, and from the boot-licking partisanship that is so often the damning characteristic of intellectuals who, cursed to live in an era of violent ideological divisions, go forth to find one or another tribe or party in which to sink their integrity. Chateaubriand’s mind, whether in his early liberal period or his Catholic maturity, was fundamentally a free one. The isolation which became his native element—the isolation captured definitively in the portrait by Girodet—was the penalty or the reward of that arrogant independence.
Like many great Romantic authors, from Wordsworth to Sir Walter Scott, Chateaubriand wrote too much, and the forty volumes of his collected works predictably offer abundant veins of both literary gold and tinsel. This modest selection is wide-ranging enough to give the reader a sense of the innumerable channels in which his imaginative currents moved, carrying a generation of artists along with them. Certainly he did more than any other author of his time to awaken in France a renewed interest in the Apostolic Church, both in his apologetic Génie du Christianisme and his long prose fiction Les Martyrs, an early prototype of the historical novel that Scott and Dumas would popularize. He drew attention to the landscapes, frontiers, and possibilities of the newly independent United States a generation before Tocqueville’s weighty analysis of the young country. In common with many another whose tastes were formed in the wake of Rousseau, he had an insatiable fondness for the primitive—often one senses his intelligence surrendering itself in the presence of la nature sauvage, whether in the form of an Algonquin village, an Etruscan ruin, or a dilapidated castle on the Breton coast.
What survives in his work, two hundred years after what was once merely fashionable in it has faded, is to be found in his unsentimental and severe reflections on his nation’s bloody upheavals in his youth, in his frequently gorgeous descriptions of the old and new worlds through which his travels led him, out of these emerges a poetry of reverence bound to no one time and permanently fresh. Included in the first part of this book several critical appreciations, one of which, from Jules Lemaitre, makes a fitting monument:
Chateaubriand is, since the writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, the man who has had the greatest impact on language and style; he is the man who knew how to introduce the most music, the most imagery, the most scents, the most gentle touches, if I may say so, the most delights, and who wrote the most intoxicating phrases about pleasure and death. And that is priceless.
Thomas Banks lives in North Carolina and teaches online at the House of Humane Letters. His writings have appeared in First Things, Quadrant, Touchstone, the New Oxford Review, and elsewhere.
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