Archives for March 2020

François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2018.

 

He fascinated three writers I know well: Tocqueville, de Gaulle, and Malraux. Tocqueville was his nephew and junior contemporary; quite apart from Chateaubriand’s stature as France’s literary lion (and sometime cabinet minister), Chateaubriand did impressionistically what Tocqueville would do systematically: consider the transition from the aristocratic civil societies of medieval and early modern Europe to the democratic civil societies that were to replace them. Born in 1768 to an aristocratic family in Brittany, under France’s Old Regime, he supported the republican revolution of 1789 but soon left for the United States, where he might see what a recently established republic looked like, and where he could meet less-than-perfect facsimiles of Rousseau’s “noble savages.” Famously, the young aristocrat Tocqueville would follow some of his uncle’s steps, making his own voyage to America, some fifty years later. De Gaulle read the Memoirs soon after his first retirement from public life in 1946, having already written on the ever-cycling French regimes of Chateaubriand’s lifetime in his France and Her Army. France at Chateaubriand’s birth was ruled by the Bourbon Dynasty, which held on until the founding of the First Republic in 1789. Although the Republic ended formally in 1804, when Napoleon Bonaparte had himself named emperor, as Napoleon I, in fact it saw several regime changes: Robespierre’s Reign of Terror in 1793; the triumvirate of rulers constituting the Directory, two years later; and the elevation of Bonaparte to the position of First Consul in 1799. In his solitude at the family home at Colombey-les-Deux Églises, de Gaulle was meditating on how French republicanism might be stabilized; some twelve years later, he would found a republic ballasted by a strong executive—designed not so much for a Bonaparte as for a Washington, whom Chateaubriand claimed to have met.

In the introduction to this translation, historian Anka Muhlstein quotes Chateaubriand as describing himself as “Bourboniste by honor, royalist by reason, and republican by inclination.” The simple facts of his life show why this was so. He left France for America shortly after the Revolution (which he supported, as a man of liberty, by inclination), searching in vain for the Northwest Passage. There was none to be discovered, but he witnessed something more valuable: the young republic under its new constitution. But the execution of Louis XVI brought him back to France, where he fought with the royalist army under the Prince of Condé and was severely wounded during the Royalists’ unsuccessful siege at Thionville. Liberty was one thing, the irrationality of regicide another. After his recovery (which he turned to good account by reading Paradise Lost, that account of civil war), he fled to England, returning during the Consulate regime of 1799-1804. By then, he had returned to the Catholicism of his youth, and his publication of The Genius of Christianity in 1802 not only turned many French intellectuals away from the Enlightenment (whose charms had worn thin) and back to the Church. Already cultivating French Catholics, having signed the Concordat with Pius VII the previous year, Napoleon deemed Chateaubriand useful for the continuation of that strategy. Not for long: After Napoleon more or less caused his cousin, the duc d’Enghien, to be executed for alleged treason, Chateaubriand left France again; having read both the Roman historians and Racine, he had gone so far as to liken Napoleon to Nero, making himself unwelcome. The 1815 Bourbon Restoration regime brought him back to Paris, where his political career reached its highest mark. Louis XVIII made him Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1824, but a rival soon had him fired, and he moved into the opposition. He thus honored the Bourbons in return for the honors the king had bestowed on him. The year 1830 brought the July Revolution and the regime of the Orléanist Monarchy; he retired to private life, having little use for the ‘Citizen King’ whose bourgeois ways grated on Chateaubriand’s unfailingly aristocratic sensibilities. As he lay dying in 1848, the February Revolution brought in Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as president of the short-lived Second Republic, which would end in 1851 with the crowning of Louis as Napoleon III, founder of the Second Empire. All of this would have engaged de Gaulle’s sympathies, intent as he was on founding a French republic that would endure and return to greatness by (among other things) resisting the by then well-established embourgeoisement of the French. (“True happiness is cheap; if costly, it is not the real thing at all,” Chateaubriand had written.) De Gaulle too had lived through several ‘lives,’ several ways of life or regimes.

As for Malraux, what is his own ‘anti-memoir,’ The Mirror of Limbo, if not a reprise of Chateaubriand’s kind of autobiography, mixing indisputable fact with invention, wide-ranging travel with a sensibility that is unmistakably French; refusing to concede anything to le quotidien, fleeing ennui (one is tempted to say, at all costs); and searching not for the base in men but for the nobility Chateaubriand saw threatened by murderous rule by terror, Napoleonic tyranny, and bourgeois money-grubbing? Malraux had seen human dignity threatened first by fascist tyranny, then by the Stalinist tyranny which controlled the French Communist Party. He fought the first in Spain, then in France itself, the second at de Gaulle’s side, after the Second World War. Malraux also would have seen in Memoirs from Beyond the Grave a man as obsessed as he with the questions the fact of death poses to life, whether in the hazards of adventure, on the battlefields of revolution and war, or in the unanticipatedly peaceful demise disease imposes. And (no small thing) they shared a love of cats. Chateaubriand told a friend he loved the cat “for his independence and almost ingrate character;” for his solitary way of life, consisting of “obey[ing] when he feels like it”; for “the indifference with which he descends from salons to his native gutters”; for his wise habit of going “to sleep to get a better view.” His wife, the translator tells us, went so far as to nickname him “Le Chat.” As for Malraux, in Les Temps des Limbes cats symbolize the spirit of the farfelu —Malraux’s word for the unaccountable, the whimsical, all that escapes human control or comprehension.

Beyond the grave: Chateaubriand intended his book to be published many years after his death, although his eager publisher saw it into print by 1851. More than that, however, he understood himself to have witnessed the death of himself in life many times, as the aristocratic way of life of his childhood perished, to be followed by the multiple ways of life, imposed by politics and by his own circumstances. Memories from beyond the grave suggest life beyond it; and indeed, “My cradle has something of the grave, my grave something of the cradle.” He accentuates this point by noting not only when and where remembered events occurred, but when and where he wrote about them. So, for example, in recounting his childhood in Saint-Malo and Cambourg, he remarks that he is writing at a country home in La Vallée-aux-Loups or in the town of Dieppe, having been ordered out of Paris by Bonaparte in 1812. As he looks back at a part of his life now interred, he remarks the cradle to which he has currently been laid—not always lovingly, if one restricts one’s view to human intentions.

By the time he made his last revisions to the Memoirs, he had survived many such lives—again the precursor of Malraux, who chose an Indian proverb for the frontispiece of his own book: “The elephant is the wisest of all the animals, the only one who remembers his former lives. He remains motionless for long periods of time, meditating thereon.” For his frontispiece Chateaubriand invoked Job, lamenting the necessity of fleeing terrors inflicted by God. These choices also show the differences between the two men: Chateaubriand, fully engaged in the Bible, at times courting the reader’s pity; Malraux, fully engaged in what he called tragic humanism, at times courting the reader’s admiration. Given both Catholic and Rousseauian influences, Chateaubriand writes much on his personal as well as his public life, beginning with his family; he often sits in the Confessional. Malraux, who rejected confessional biography, offers lightly fictionalized accounts of his grandfather and father; one would scarcely know he was married three times and had children. Hence the title of the first volume, Antimémoires, and his rhetorical question, “Why should I care about that which matters only to me?”

Alex Andriesse has translated the first twelve books the Mémoires, with the final twelve reserved for the next volume. This volume brings Chateaubriand to the turn of the nineteenth century. The first three chapters recount his childhood. He writes them from internal exile in The Valley of the Wolves, wondering how it looked in 1694, when Voltaire was born in a village there—”this hillside where, in 1807, the author of The Genius of Christianity would come to reside.” A place which, like the rest of France, now (in 1811), “the man who gives France power over the world today only to trample her underfoot, this man whose genius I admire and whose despotism I abhor,” who “encircles me with his tyranny as with a second solitude,” has left him with the freedom to remember the past: “I remain free in everything that preceded his glory.” “These pages shall be a funerary shrine raised to the light of my memories.” Those great materialists, Voltaire (linked to Chateaubriand by a coincidence of place) and Napoleon (linked to Chateaubriand by a coincidence of time, having been born only twenty days before him) serve as Chateaubriand’s arch-rivals—the one in thought, the other in politics.

“I was born a gentleman,” by which he means an aristocrat. “I have retained that very firm love of liberty which belongs principally to the aristocracy whose last hour has struck,” as Tocqueville would acknowledge. “Aristocracy has three successive ages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity. Once through with the first, it degenerates into the second, and dies out in the last.” He was born into an aristocratic family which retained marks of the first age, some of the advantages of the second, and not a little of the third. He intends “to give some account of my father’s ruling passion, a passion which formed the core drama of my youth”: “his passion for the family name.” As befitted the condition of European aristocracy in the 1770s, Father’s “usual state of being was a profound sadness that deepened with age and a silence broken only by fits of anger”—haughty with his neighboring peers, “harsh with his vassals in Combourg,” “taciturn, despotic, and menacing at home.” “To see him was to fear him.”

A woman of “great wit and a prodigious imagination,” his mother’s passions for literature and history (Fénelon, Racine, Madame de Sévigné, Xenophon’s Cyrus) complemented her “elegant manners and lively disposition,” in contrast with “my father’s rigidity and calm.” “Loving society as much as he loved solitude, as exuberant and animated as he was expressionless and cold, she possessed no taste not antagonistic to the tastes of her husband,” but remained devoted to him “compensat[ing] herself with a sort of noisy sadness interspersed with sighs.” To her “I owe the consolation of my life, since it was through her that I took my faith: I gathered the Christian truths that came from her lips.” “In the realm of devotion, my mother was an angel.”

Such a model, too, was his native city of Saint-Malo. “As early as the reign of Henri IV [it] distinguished itself by its devotion and loyalty to France,” surviving English naval bombardments and supporting the Bourbon monarchs throughout their many wars. The loyalty that is patriotism extended as well to religion. A Catholic priest has testified, “The sun has never shone upon a place more steadfast and unwavering in its loyalty to the true faith than Brittany.” But loyalty may not find its just reward. Recalling the mastiffs that once served as the nighttime guardians of the town, only to be incarcerated and killed when they “snap[ped] unthinkingly at the legs of a gentleman,” Chateaubriand thinks of himself and aphorizes: “Dogs, like men, are punished for their loyalty.”

By this family, in this place, “I was abandoned to an idle childhood,” with “the town urchins” as “my closest friends.” Hence his republican inclinations. Many of these boys were sons of Breton sailors, men for whom “religion and danger were continually face to face.” “No sooner was I born than I heard talk of death,” as church bells tolled, calling “Christians to pray for the soul of one of their drowned neighbors.” “Nearly every year a boat sank before my very eyes,” and “I scampered along the beaches [as] the sea rolled the corpses of foreign sailors at my feet.” When once he lamented how these men had died far from their homes, his mother told him, as Monica told Augustine, “Nothing is far from God.”

“My education had been entrusted to Providence, and Providence did not spare me her lessons.” It was an education that owed nothing to ‘Voltaire,’ the Enlightenment; “it was adopted by my parents for no fixed reason and as a natural result of their temperaments,” not their ideas, let alone an rationalist, ideational system which they surely did not have. “What is certain that it made my ideas less similar to those of other men,” that “it imprinted my feelings with a melancholy stamp” born of “habitual suffering [during] the years of weakness, recklessness, and joy.” “The truth is that no system of education is in itself preferable to any other system” because “God does well whatever He does.” He calls his first time at school an “internment.”

The family left Saint-Malo for Combourg a few years later, and Chateaubriand was enrolled at the Collège de Dol, his mother having “never given up her desire that I be given a classical education.” His republican inclination came out on its playing fields, “I made no effort to lead others, but neither would I be led: I was unfit to be a tyrant or a slave, and so I have remained.” Soon an accomplished schoolboy Latinist, he became tormented upon reading an unexpurgated text of Horace’s poetry, “suspecting that there were secrets incomprehensible to a boy my age, an existence different from mine, pleasures beyond my childish games, charms of an unknown nature in a sex that I knew only through my mother and my sisters.” At the same time, Catholicism taught him that such as-yet incomprehensible sins were damnable. Virgil’s Dido and Eucharis only added to his ambivalence. “If I have since depicted, with some veracity, the workings of the human heart commingled with Christian synderesis, I am convinced that I owe my successes to chance, which introduced me to those two inimical dominions at one and the same time.” Add to these perceptions and sentiments the moral virtue of his aristocratic lineage; at school, too, “my sense of honor was born,” that “exaltation of the soul that keeps the heart incorruptible in a world of corruption.”

He sought refuge in Catholicism, solemnized in his first communion, the “religious ceremony [which] among young Christians took the place of the taking of the toga virilis practiced among the Romans.” And after the confession that followed “I no longer looked the same to my teachers and my schoolmates. I walked with a light step, my head held high, my face radiant, in all the triumph of repentance.” This religious spirit merged with honor: “I understood then the courage of the martyrs. At that moment, I could have borne witness to Christ on the rack or in the face of a lion.”

He considered joining the navy, and as he saw a French squadron returning to port, “Nothing has ever given me a loftier idea of the human spirit.” “No doubt I would have enjoyed naval service if my independent spirit had not rendered me unfit for service of any kind,” given “my deep inability to obey.” He returned home to the unexpectedly mild disappointment of his father and to the joy of his mother and his favorite sister, Lucile. He next determined on a life in the Church, attending the Collège de Dinon, where he added Hebrew to Latin and Greek to his collection of languages. But he would eventually decide against taking the cloth.

Sexual passion, guilt, and spiritual exaltation, mixed together in a household ruled by a father tormented by the condition of a dying aristocracy, brought him to a spiritual crisis. “I had no fixed time for either rising or for breakfasting: I was reputed to be studying until noon, but most of the time I did nothing.” His only companion, his sister Lucile, joined him in translating “the saddest and loveliest passages of Job and Lucretius.” “Lucile’s thoughts were indistinguishable from feelings; and they emerged with difficulty from her soul: but once she had succeeded in expressing them, there was nothing more sublime.” “On the moors of Caledonia,” she “would have been one of Walter Scott’s mystic women, gifted with second sight,” but in Combourg “she was merely a recluse favored with beauty, genius, and misfortune.” And she was afflicted “with Rousseau’s mania, though without his pride: she believed that everyone was conspiring against her.”

“I was a mystery to myself.” Unable to approach real women, “I composed myself a woman from all the women I had ever seen” in fact or in fiction. “All-ignorant and all-knowing, simultaneously virgin and lover, innocent Eve and fallen Eve, my enchantress nourished my madness with a mixture of mystery and passion.” “Pygmalion was less in love with his statue” than he with his fantasy, “my sylph,” which he made himself worthy of winning also in fantasy, playing the lyre like Apollo, triumphing in battle like Mars. “On emerging from these dreams and finding myself again a poor dark little Breton, without fame, or beauty, or talents, a young man who would draw nobody’s gaze, who would go unnoticed, whom no woman would ever love, despair took hold of me.” “This delirium lasted two whole years, during which my spiritual faculties reached the highest pitch of exaltation” and then, “struck by my folly… I would wallow in my desolation.” At one point, as “the last glimmer of reason fled from me,” he attempted to shoot himself. The gun didn’t fire.

At last his body gave out. The family doctor “examined me attentively, ordered the appropriate remedies, and declared it absolutely necessary that I be torn away from my current mode of life.” His elder brother could have obtained a church position for him, but his “sense of honor”—which, like Socrates’ daimon, has always given to know “at once what to avoid”—told him that he was too weak to acquire virtues and “too frank” to “conceal my vices.” He proposed “a harebrained scheme”: he would go to Canada to “clear forests,” or perhaps to Asia to serve in the army of an Indian prince. Father’s patience evaporated: “You must renounce your follies” and join the army. “I am old and sick. I am not long for this world. Conduct yourself as a good man should, and never dishonor your name”—which was to say, his name. Father had his own sylph: The dream to see “his name reestablished and the fortune of his house renewed,” which would soon be exposed as “yet another chimera of that time,” destroyed by the Revolution. As for the son, “It was in the woods of Combourg that I became what I am, that I began to feel the first onslaught of that ennui which I have dragged with me through all my days, and that sadness which has been both my torment and my bliss.”

In Books IV and V Chateaubriand recounts his experiences during the first years of the Revolution. He writes these chapters in 1821, in Berlin, where he was serving as Louis XVIII’s ambassador. “Another man has appeared to me”—six years after the final defeat of Napoleon—”a political man: I do not much care for him.” He scoffs at the late Frederick the Great’s philosophic pretensions. “I made a study of the false Julian in his false Athens,” whose esteem for Voltaire and the Enlightenment, with their contempt for religion, registers only “an ostentatious belief in nothingness.” At Frederick’s summer palace, Sans Souci, “only one thing held my attention: the hands of a clock stopped at the minute that Frederick expired.” But in reality “the hours never suspend their flight; it is not man who stops time, but time that stops man.” “Down in the crypt of the Protestant church, immediately beneath the pulpit of the defrocked schismatic,” Martin Luther, “I saw the tomb of the sophist of the crown.” Like Hegel, whose language about ‘the spirit of the epoch’ sometimes gets into the Mémoires (albeit without any of the rationalist dialectic) Chateaubriand evidently judges the Reformation to have prepared the ground for the Enlightenment. Unlike Hegel, he regards this as neither necessary nor proper.

“With my father’s death, the first act of my life came to a close,” almost simultaneously with the Old Regime. “There is a new world, a new era.” “Henceforth I would be masterless and enjoy my own fortune; but such liberty frightened me. What would I do with it?” After the inheritance was divided, his family “disbanded like birds flying from the paternal nest”—a sign of the patriarchic and aristocratic family enfeebled. Now a cavalry captain, still painfully awkward in any social situation, he was alarmed when his brother inveigled an invitation for him to be presented at Court to Louis XVI. “I had to set off for Versailles more dead than alive.” “He has seen nothing who has not seen the pomp of Versailles, even after the dismissal of the King’s old entourage: the spirit of Louis XIV was still there.” “One must remember the former prestige of royalty to understand the importance of a presentation in those days,” as the “debutant” was scrutinized with cautious curiosity: Might he become “a favorite of the King?” “He was respected for the future servitude with which he might be honored.” The fact that this king was “six years from the scaffold,” the irony that his painfully self-conscious guest would someday be present at the exhumation of the remains of both king and queen, leads Chateaubriand not only to the traditional reflection on “the vanity of human destinies” but also to the thought that Louis XVI “might have answered his judges as Christ answered” his own judges: “Many good works I have shown you: for which of these works do you stone me?”

Telling his brother that he intended to return to his regiment in Brittany, “I felt, in a confused way, that I was superior to what I had seen. I came away with an unconquerable disgust for the Court, and this disgust, or rather this contempt, which I have never been able to conceal, will prevent me from succeeding, or it will bring about my downfall at the high point of my career.” It would be interesting to know if this prediction was written in 1821, or when Chateaubriand revised this portion of the manuscript in 1846, when his political career was long finished. But such grasping after facts is the wrong way to read the Memoirs. Chateaubriand has already announced his disdain for Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism. He wants to capture the spirit of himself, of his contemporaries, of his many lives and his country’s many ways of life, over time. He has no aspiration to be an annalist.

His own spirit began to change. Despite his contempt for the Court, and “despite my natural tastes, something in me was rebelling against obscurity and imploring me to emerge from the shadows.” “The instinct of genius and beauty were pushing Lucile toward a wider stage,” too. By 1789 he was back in Paris, where he met some of the leading men of letters of those days, whom he sketches in ascending order of talent, descending order of virtue. The first was Jena-Baptiste-Claude Delisle de Sales, a kindly old man, “very cordially mediocre,” who had “amassed a fine library of his own works, which he lent out to strangers and which no one in Paris ever read.” De Sales made an annual intellectual pilgrimage to Germany, where “he would replenish his ideas.” “On the pedestal of his marble bust, he had with his own two hands traced the following inscription, borrowed from a bust of Buffon: GOD, MAN, NATURE, HE HAS EXPLAINED THEM ALL.” Chateaubriand rather doubts that, but “Might it not be that, so long as we live, we are under the sway of an illusion similar to that of Delisle de Sales? I would wager that some author who is reading this sentence believes himself a writer of genius and is in fact nothing but a cretin.” Thus does the Viscount invite us all to self-reflection.

Fellow Breton Pierre-Louis Ginguené was working on a multi-volume history of Italian literature and had already published “a stylish enough piece of verse” titled La Confession de Zulmé, which had garnered him a minor government appointment. “His origins were humble, but the more he attached himself to well-known men, the more arrogant he became.” When the Revolution began, he had “advance knowledge” of a massacre to take place at a Carmelite convent and cynically took no action to prevent it, eying preferment under the new regime—which he in fact received. “Tumbling from mediocrity into importance, from importance into foolishness, and from foolishness to ridiculousness, he ended his days as a distinguished literary critic.”

“But without question, the most bilious man of letters I knew in Paris at that time was Nicolas Chamfort,” ever-resentful of his common birth and keening to see the monarchy’s ruin. “No one can deny that he had wit and talent, but wit and talent of the kind that does not teach posterity.” (In this Chateaubriand’s judgment failed him, as Chamfort remains in the French literary pantheon for his Maximes et pensées.) No armchair revolutionary,
Chamfort numbered among those who stormed the Bastille. During the Terror, “furious to find inequalities of rank persisting in this world of sorrows and tears, condemned to be no more than a vilain in the feudality of the executioners, he tried to kill himself to escape from the magnificos of crime. He failed.” (This isn’t quite right, either; Chamford lingered for some time but did die of complications from his horrific self-inflicted gunshot wounds.) Never one to be tempted by pity for irresponsible men, Chateaubriand prefers to be the one who finishes off Chamfort, garroting him with a mordant Christian aphorism of his own: “Death laughs at those who summon it and confuse it with nothingness.”

“When I reread most of the eighteenth-century writers today, I am puzzled by both the ruckus they raised and by my former admiration of them.” He now finds “something exhausted, passé, pallid, lifeless, and cold in these writers who were the delight of my youth,” even the greatest among them. There was something false in their “mania for Hellenizing and Latinizing our language,” a tendency Rabelais had already seen and mocked. “Our revolutionaries, great Greeks by nature, have obliged our shopkeepers and our peasants to learn hectares, hectoliters, kilometer, millimeters, and decagrams.” The Enlightenment universalized a brittle and spurious classicism; what began in pretension ended led to terror and ended in tyranny.

“In those days, everything was deranged in minds and in morals: it was a symptom of the revolution to come.” (In his sermons one priest “steered clear of the name of Jesus Christ and spoke only of the ‘Christian Legislator'”—indeed an example of Rousseau in the wrong place.) In a passage that de Gaulle might have written had Chateaubriand not gotten there first, the Viscount observes, “The height of fashion was to be American in town, English at Court, and Prussian in the army: to be anything, in other words, except French.” Blunt-spoken and honest, the redoubtable Old-Regime attorney and statesman Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes became one of Chateaubriand’s few confidants in Paris, sharing his assessments of the time and characters there. As fellow liberal monarchists (Malesherbes took his bearings from Fénelon and Montesquieu), “we understood each other’s politics.” Although “his natural virtues were a bit tainted by affectation… as a result of the philosophy that he had mingled with them,” he was “full of knowledge, probity and courage,” if often too “hot-headed and passionate.” (After gallantly defending Louis XVI at his trial by the Robespierre regime, Malesherbes would be guillotined for his trouble, along with several of his family. His line would survive; his great-grandson was Alexis de Tocqueville.)

“The fundamentally generous sentiments” of the early revolutionaries “appealed to my independent character, and the natural antipathy I felt for the Court only strengthened those leanings”—so much so that “The Revolution would have caught me up in its flow if it had not started with crimes. When I saw the first head carried at the end of a pike, I recoiled. In my eyes, murder will never be an object of admiration or an argument for freedom: I know of nothing more servile, more despicable, more cowardly, more narrow-minded than a terrorist.” With that, Chateaubriand draws a line that would only widen as the subsequent centuries have worn on.

The Revolution proceeded in the provinces, too, and Chateaubriand saw the preparations for it during his visits to Brittany in the years 1787 and 1788. It was then and there when “my political education began.” In fact (Tocqueville would pick up this argument), “the transformations that had been developing for two centuries were coming to term” throughout the country. “France had gone from a feudal monarchy to a monarchy of the Estates-General, from a monarchy of the Estates-General to a parliamentary monarchy, from a parliamentary monarchy to an absolute monarchy, now tending, through the struggle between the magistracy and the royal power, toward representative monarchy.” Centralization and democratization came gradually, with reforms—each of which “seemed to be an isolated accident.” “We could not see these facts together” at the time, but (donning his Hegelian hat) “in all historical periods there is a presiding spirit,” a spirit that militates against efforts to counteract the trend. As both Catholics and Hegelians know, “Every opinion dies powerless or mad if it lacks an assembly to lend it strength and willpower, to give it hands and a tongue. It is and will always be through bodies, legal or illegal, that revolutions arise and continue to arise.” In the French Revolution that set of institutions consisted of the Parisian and provincial parliaments. They “had their own reason for vengeance,” as “absolute monarchy had robbed them of the authority that they had usurped from the Estates-General.” In calling for the restoration of the Estates-General “they didn’t dare admit that they wanted political and legislative power for themselves,” and succeeded in “the resurrection of a body whose inheritance they had reaped, a body that, on returning to life, would instantly reduce them to their own special function: the administration of justice.” Chateaubriand takes this as a lesson in human fallibility. Along with the reformist king, the parliaments “were, without knowing it, instruments of a social revolution.” Further, many of the provincial estates-general were dominated by the Third Estate, the bourgeoisie. Without serious representation of Church or aristocracy, such bodies ensured that “The great kingdom of France, aristocratic in its parties and its provinces, was democratic as a whole.” “There is a whole new history of France to be written about this, or, rather, the history of France remains unwritten.” Tocqueville would write part of it in his The Old Regime and the Revolution. Chateaubriand anticipates the younger man’s critique of centralized bureaucracy: the monarchic Old Regime “bequeathed us centralization, a vigorous type of administration which I look on as an evil, but which was perhaps the only system that could replace the local administrations once these had been destroyed and ignorant anarchy led men around by the nose.”

In Brittany, the meeting of the Estates did see all three social orders represented, but they first met separately—”raging in their three private storms, which turned into a collective hurricane when the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Third Estate convened,” with “talent, vanity, and ambition” all on full display. The problem in Brittany in the years leading up to the Revolution was the unequal burden of the hearth tax, “levied on each commoner’s fire” but not on aristocrats. This injustice became especially onerous in wartime, when the monarchy’s appetite for revenues increased with its expenses. By 1789 the meeting of the Estates was actually put under siege by the people, causing the aristocrats to boycott the proceedings. “Later, they would go in great numbers to join the Army of Princes, to be decimated with Condé or Charette in the Vendée Wars.” But “in these great social transformations, individual resistance, however honorable for those who resist, is powerless against the facts.” “Pass on now, reader: wade the river of blood that separates forever the old world, which you are leaving, from the new world at whose beginning you will die.”

Chateaubriand didn’t return to Paris until late in 1789, after the Clergy and Nobility had been incorporated into the Third Estate in the newly-formed National Assembly. There would be no more balanced, mixed regime for France. “The closer we came to the capital, the more disorderly things became,” and in the city itself “the streets were glutted with crowds.” The Queen was still presenting herself and her children in public at Versailles; Chateaubriand saw her there. “Casting her eyes on me with a smile, she made me the same harming curtsy as she had on the day of my presentation. I will never forget those eyes, which were so soon to be extinguished,” nor that smile, the memory of which “allowed me to recognize the jaw of this daughter of kings when the unfortunate woman’s head was discovered in the exhumations of 1815,” a memento mori of the Old Regime,

He also saw the taking of the Bastille. At the time, “everyone admired what he should have condemned”—the rage, the violence—”and no one looked to the future to see what was in store for the people, the changes in manners, ideas, and political power,” a regime change “in which the taking of the Bastille was only the prelude to an era, a sort of bloodstained jubilee.” The monarchy vainly attempted to halt the change with concessions, but “no party ever believes in converting their opponent: neither liberty capitulating nor power abasing itself ever obtains mercy from its enemies.” Louis XVI could not save his head by adorning it with a tricolor ribbon. For himself, when Chateaubriand saw revolutionaries carrying pikes with the heads of two of Louis’ civil servants, “the idea of leaving France for some distant country began to take root in my mind.”

Such “cannibal feasts” notwithstanding, “the greatest blows against the old constitution of the State were struck by gentlemen. Patricians started the Revolution, and plebeians finished it. As the old France once owed the French nobility its glory, so the new France owes it its liberty, if there is any such thing as liberty in France.” From the safety of well-protected balcony, Chateaubriand had shouted to the ignobly savage pike-bearers, “Is this what you take liberty to be?” He would say that to each of the successive rulers of each succeeding French regime, for the remainder of his life, and to several others, from beyond his grave.

The supreme example of such revolutionary aristocrats was Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, compte de Mirabeau. “Mixed up in world events by the chaos and coincidences of his life, in contact with fugitives of justice, rapists, and adventurers, Mirabeau, the tribune of the aristocracy, the deputy of democracy, had something of Gracchus and Don Juan, of Catiline and Guzmán d’Alfarache, of Cardinal de Richelieu and Cardinal de Retz, of the Regency rake and the Revolutionary savage; he had, moreover, something of ‘Mirabeau,’ an exiled Florentine family that carried with them a memory of those fortified palaces and great factions celebrated by Dante: a naturalized French family in which the Republican spirit of the Italian Middle Ages and the feudal spirit of our Middle Ages were to be united in a succession of extraordinary men.” “Nature seemed to have molded his head either for imperium or for the gallows, chiseled his arms to annul a nation or abduct a woman.” At the rostrum of the National Assembly, “he called to mind Milton’s Chaos, impassive and formless, standing at the center of his own confusion,” a mass of “deep, burning, tempestuous passions.” In this, an aristocratic revolutionary’s soul mirrored, and was mirrored by, the souls of the ‘plebeian’ revolutionaries: “Cynicism of manners, by annihilating the moral sense, brings society back to a kind of barbarism, but these social barbarians, prone to destruction like the Goths, have no power to create like the Goths. The barbarians of old were enormous children of virgin nature; the new ones are the monstrous abortions of nature depraved.”

But quite the charmer: Chateaubriand enjoyed his company, to a point. “Mirabeau talked a great deal, especially about himself,” a habit no memoirist can honestly condemn. “This son of lions was himself a lion with a chimera’s head; this man so practical when it came to facts was all romance, poetry, and enthusiasm when it came to language and imagination.” He even had a lover named Sophie. “Like me, he had been treated severely by his father, who, like mine, had stood by the inflexible tradition of absolute paternal authority.” “Generous, given to friendship, and quick to pardon offenses,” he had an aristocrat’s (that is to say a lion’s) share of lovers; his youth had been packed with scandals and narrow escapes. He wanted to save the monarchy, but to redesign it to make it palatable to the new democratic society. “Loathing” the masses, he seduced them as if they were yet another woman, and won them, as he had so many others. At the same time, “though a traitor to his order,” the aristocracy, “he maintained its sympathy through caste affinities and common interests.” In his attempts to play one side against another (he made contacts with the royal court and, we now know, the court of the Austrian Emperor, as well), “he founded a school”: “By freeing themselves from moral shackles, men dreamed that they were transforming into statesmen. But these imitations produced only perverse dwarfs.” Astonishingly, Mirabeau died not on the gallows but in bed, a victim, perhaps symbolically, of heart failure. After their dinner, Mirabeau “looked me in the face with eyes full of arrogance, depravity, and genius, and, putting his hand on my shoulder, he said to me, ‘They will never forgive me my superiority!’ I still feel the impression of that hand, as if Satan had touched me with his fiery claw.”

“Among so many reputations, so many actors, so many events, so many ruins, only three men remain” in the public memory from the Revolution. Each was “attached to one of the great Revolutionary epochs: Mirabeau for aristocracy, Robespierre for democracy, Bonaparte for despotism. The monarchy has nothing: France has paid dearly for those three reputations that Virtue can never acknowledge.” Chateaubriand first noticed Robespierre at the Assembly, “a common-looking deputy” who “read a long and boring report to which no one listened.” By the time Robespierre’s real nature showed itself, Chateaubriand had left the country. But he saw clearly enough the conditions for his rise. In revolutions, “the human race on holiday strolls down the street, rid of its masters and restored for a moment to its natural state; it feels no need of a civic bridle until it shoulders the yoke of the new tyrants, which license breeds.” In passages like this, later readers will feel as if in the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s account of the February Revolution.

Resigning his military commission, Chateaubriand’s plan of leaving France for the United States, which he had begun to discuss with Malesherbes, began to coalesce. “I needed only a practical purpose for my journey,” as so many grant applicants have realized before and since. “I proposed to discover the Northwest Passage,” a plan “not out of keeping with my poetic nature.” Consulting again with Malesherbes, he consulted the older man’s maps and charts, read travelers’ narratives, and discussed “the precautions to be taken against the severe climate, the attacks of wild beasts, and the dwindling of provisions.” “If I were younger,” his friend told him, “I would go with you an spare myself the sight of all the crimes, betrayals, and insanities of Paris. But at my age a man must die wherever he happens to be.” Armed with a letter of introduction to George Washington by the Marquis de la Rouërie, who had fought in the American revolutionary war, he embarked from Saint-Malo, in order to be able to say farewell to his mother. By this time, he’d “gone from being a Christian zealot to a freethinker, which is to say a very vacant thinker indeed. This change in my religious convictions came from the reading of philosophical books,” paradoxically fitting himself better for adventurous action than serious thought. Philosophy, he later concluded, limits the intelligence by making it think “it can see everything because it keeps its eyes open; a superior intelligence consents to close its eyes, for it perceives that everything is within.” He is perhaps thinking more of Enlightenment philosophy than philosophy itself, but at any rate if one’s sets out for adventure it’s better to have open eyes than closed. “Finally, one other thing brought about the change in my thinking, and that was the bottomless despair I carried with me in the depths of my heart.” The sentiment that had induced him to attempt suicide lingered on, and he sensed that, as before, only by tearing himself away from a way of life lived in untenable circumstances could he combat it. He took his family physician’s advice while no longer needing that estimable man to advise him.

Chateaubriand finds a fundamental difference between American and French republicanism. America was still dominated by the pervasive domination of nature, unlike ancient France, with its complex civil society and longstanding literary culture. He writes on America from London in 1822, where he serves as the French ambassador in service of Louis XVIII. Not quite thirty years ago he had also stayed in William Pitt’s London, “an obscure and humble traveler,” “poor, sick, and unknown.” He prefers his former obscurity to his present public life, in the predictable course of which is the object of flattery. “Do you think you can make me take this masquerade seriously? Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that my nature has changed because I’ve changed my clothes?” No, rather, “Come back, you lovely days of indigence and solitude!” His only refuge in the city now is Kensington Gardens; there, “in perpetual solitude, the birds build their nests in peace.” Writing about his American journey here, where he disembarked for America as a young man, he can at least recreate his old privacy in the privacy of his mind.

“The flight of birds had guided [Columbus] to America”—nature bringing man to nature. He “must have experienced the kind of feeling that scripture ascribes to the Creator when, having drawn up the earth out of nothingness, he saw that his work was good.” In his own human way, “Columbus also created a world,” at least in the sense that he discovered one that gave men new evidence of the glory of God. And since the arrival of Columbus “this new world had shaken off” the “old monarchical dominion”; Americans having founded “a republic of a hitherto unimaginable type heralding a change in the human spirit.” France had contributed to “these world-altering events,” as “these seas and these shores… owed their independence partly to French blood and to the French flag.” Now, the United States was “sending back to France the Revolution that France had supported with her guns; and my own future, the virgin muse that I had come to give over to the passions of a new nature,” would awaken in America, where he would set his first successful writings, the novellas Atala and René.

The American capital city, and American cities generally, disappointed. “Philadelphia has a monotonous look,” lacking the “great works of architecture” of Europe. Chateaubriand blames the Reformation, the Protestant movement still “young in years,” which “sacrifices nothing to the imagination.” “They eye is saddened to behold such an even level” of “the mass of walls and roofs” in “the Protestant cities of the United States” with their democratic civil society. Nonetheless, “At that time in my life, I greatly admired Republics, although I did not believe them possible at the stage of world history that we [French] had reached: I understood Liberty as the ancients did, as the daughter of a nascent society’s ways; but I knew nothing of Liberty as the daughter of enlightenment and an old civilization.” But “Liberty of the kind that the representative republic has proved to be a reality,” thanks to Mr. Madison and his colleagues. “God grant that it may be durable!” He very reasonably suspects that only God, and not Americans themselves, can make it so. “Will Americans preserve their form of government? Will the States not sunder?” A Virginia representative “has already argued for the ancient theory of liberty which accepted slavery, and which was the result of paganism, against a representative from Massachusetts who defended the cause of modern liberty without slavery, which Christianity has wrought.” Thus both the regime of the United States at its union have been thrown into question. Moreover, the Western states, “so far from the Atlantic,” might “prefer their own regime.” These things being so, is “the federal bond strong enough to preserve the union and compel each state to stand ranked around it”? And if it were, and if in acting so to preserve the union “the power of the presidency were increased, would despotism not be close behind”?

If the federal union did dissolve, that would leave the existing sovereign states, however many there might be, in a condition of mutual enmity. Even absent foreign alliances and interventions, might this not result in the decline of republicanism itself within those states, or even a new empire in North America, as one state came to dominate all the others? Chateaubriand speculated that Kentucky “would seem destined to be the conquering State,” a far-fetched notion then, and laughable now, but the basic idea wasn’t silly, when he conceived it in 1822.

Geopolitically, the rise of the Latin American republics, “troubled as these democracies are,” might lead to war. “When the United States had nothing near them except the colonies of a transatlantic kingdom, serious warfare was unlikely. But today, isn’t a rivalry to be feared?” If war comes, might this not precipitate the rise of an American Napoleon?

And what if the Union does hold? “I have spoken of the danger of war, but I must also recall the dangers of prolonged peace.” With continued increase of population and wealth, decadence might follow, and with it the inability to resist foreign attack. “China and India, asleep in their muslins, have been constantly subject to foreign domination.” “What best suits the complexion of a free society is a state of peace tempered by war or a state of war tempered by peace.” With their “mercantile spirit” filling their souls, Americans may decline into luxury followed by bankruptcy.

“What’s more, it is difficult to create a homeland from States which have no community rooted in religion or material interests, which have arisen from different sources at different times, and which survive on different soils and under different suns.” What have Frenchmen in Louisiana, Spaniards in Florida, Germans in New York, and Englishmen along the Atlantic seaboard—”all of whom are reputed to be Americans”—really have in common? “How many centuries will it take to render these elements homogeneous!”

Finally, “the enormous imbalance of wealth is a more serious threat to the spirit of equality than any other.” “A chrysogeneous aristocracy, with a passionate love of distinctions and titles, is ready to emerge.” Whether Yankee merchants or Southern planters, “these plebeian nobles aspire to be a caste despite the progress of enlightenment that has made them equal and free.” Secretly, Americans love titles, ancestries, coats-of-arms—some so much that they migrate to Europe. And this happens in reverse: “A cadet from Gascony, landing with no more than a cloak and an umbrella on these republican shores, as long as he remembers to refer to himself by the title of ‘marquis,’ is guaranteed to be well received on every steamboat.” At the same time, the new, American aristocracy lacks the family sentiments of the old, European aristocracy, and so do the middle and lower classes. “Family feeling scarcely exists” in America. “As soon as a child is in a condition to work, he must fly on his own two wings like a fledgling bird,” “emancipated into premature orphanhood” and forming “bands of nomads who clear the lands, dig canals, and exercise her industry everywhere, but without ever attaching themselves to the soil.” Especially in the towns, this results in “a cold hard egotism.”

The American Founders united, and Abraham Lincoln reunited, this huge and heterogeneous country on the moral foundation of natural right, as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Although Chateaubriand regards America as the land of nature, in contrast to the highly conventional life of old Europe, he doesn’t have natural right in mind. Rather, he asks, “Could the Americans be suffering, without knowing it, from the law of a climate where vegetable nature seems to have thrived at the expense of sentient beings?” Could the vast forests of North America not have nurtured a cold people, a people lacking in moral sentiments? And as for the doctrine of natural right, “one might wonder whether the American has not become too quickly accustomed to philosophical liberty, as the Russian has become accustomed to civilized despotism.”

In his account of America, Chateaubriand clearly provides the nucleus of Tocqueville’s argument in Democracy in America. He differs from Tocqueville in one crucial respect. Beneath it all, Chateaubriand simply does not accept natural right as a valid claim. He makes this clear in recounting one of his conversations with Malesherbes. His friend justified resistance to the Jacobin regime on the grounds that “a government ceases to exist when, instead of guaranteeing the fundamental laws of society, it transgresses the laws of equality and the rules of justice. It is then licit to defend oneself however one can, by whatever means best serve to overthrow tyranny and reestablish the rights of each and all.” Chateaubriand doubts this. “The principles of natural rights, first put forth by the greatest polemicists, developed so eloquently by such a man as M. de Malesberbes, and supported by so many historical examples, were striking; but I remained unconvinced.” By returning to France and fighting in the royalist army, “in truth, I merely yielded to the impulse of any era, on a point of honor”—on the principle of aristocracy, not on the principles of natural rights. It is, one must remark, unusual to see the likes of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau described as mere polemicists.

“In sum, the United States give the impression of being a colony, not a mother country: they have no past, and their mores are not a result of their laws.” No “permanent society” exists, or is “practicable among them.” “Man is never truly settled when the household gods are wanderers.” Thus “the American seems to have inherited from Columbus the mission to discover new worlds rather than create them.” He admires George Washington (“there is virtue in the gaze of a great man”), but of course Washington was formed within settled, socially hierarchic Virginia when it was part of the British Empire; he doubts that men of Washington’s type can arise under the American regime, now that its civil-social moeurs have democratized, even as society’s actual structure has not. He could not anticipate a new type—a Lincoln, or even a Roosevelt—who might also defend the regime and the Union or, in the case of FDR, transform it from a democratic republic into a mixed regime while still defending it against tyranny.

What Chateaubriand does see clearly is the difference between the two great generals, Washington and Napoleon. First, “Washington does not belong, like Bonaparte, to that race which surpasses ordinary human stature. There is nothing astonishing about him,” he concludes having dined with him (or at least claiming to have dined). The “theater” of his action is not “vast,” ranging from Spain to Russia, Egypt to Vienna. “He overturns no thrones only to rebuild others from their ruins.” Second, he was cautious and responsible, “charged with the liberty of future generations” and fearing “to compromise it.” He was no egoist, preferring to carry “the destiny of his country” not his own. “From this profound humility,” Washington accomplished far more. “Look around the forests where Washington’s sword once gleamed, and what do you find? Tombstones? No: a world! Washington left the United States as a trophy on his battlefield.”

“Bonaparte had nothing in common with this serious American.” With his Europe-wide wars, “the only thing he wants to create is his reputation; he is burdened by nothing but his own lot.” He treats his glory “as if it were his fleeting youth,” in the while “smother[ing] liberty of others and ending by “losing his own liberty on his last battleground.” While Washington won independence for his country, Bonaparte robbed his country of its own. When he died, “what [did] the citizens have to mourn?” “Washington’s Republic survives; Bonaparte’s Empire is destroyed. Washington and Bonaparte both issued from the womb of democracy: they were both children of Liberty; but while the first was faithful, the second betrayed her.” Washington’s glory “is the patrimony of civilization.” Bonaparte “might have enriched the common domain,” acting as he did “on the most intelligent, the most courageous, and the most brilliant nation on earth.” But he lacked Washington’s magnanimity; “men were nothing in his eyes but a means to power,” and “no sympathy linked their happiness with his.” If Washington founded a modern Israel, a light unto the nations, Bonaparte reprised the Egyptian pharaohs, who “placed their funereal pyramids not among the flowering fields” of a Promised Land “but “amid the barren sands: Bonaparte built the monument to his fame in their image.”

Pressing on with his journey, Chateaubriand first traveled north to Niagara Falls and Canada, then south through Pittsburgh, down the Ohio River, and into Kentucky. (He turned south after a sensible fur trader explained that if he went much further “I would arrive in icy regions where I would die of cold and hunger.”) His first encounter with American Indians was a comic disappointment, as he stumbled upon a lean-to shack where about twenty of the “savages” were gyrating to the tune of a fiddle played by a French dancing instructor. “Was it not a devastating thing for a disciple of Rousseau, to be introduced to savage life by a forest ball organized for the Iroquois by a former scullion in the army of General Rochambeau? I wanted very much to laugh, but I felt cruelly humiliated.” The Iroquois had once been more serious—”a race that seemed destined to conquer the other Indian races, if outsiders had not come to drain his blood and quash his spirit.” The “last virtue left to the savages in the midst of European civilization” is hospitality; he dined well when with them. “From them, one knows well what hospitality must have been in ancient days, when the hearth was as sacred as the altar.” They maintained the continuity of their families, too, by conferring the oldest name of the family on the newborn, always through the maternal line,” as a sign of honor.” “This connects the two extremities of life, and the beginning and the end of the family; it conveys a kind of immortality to one’s ancestors and supposes that they are present among their descendants.” They bury their dead on tribal lands, which then become sacred ground: “take the bones of their fathers from these savages and you take their history, their laws, and even their gods; you rob these men, and their future generations, of the proof that they ever existed or that they were ever annihilated.” Such customs recall those of the Greeks and Romans described by Chateaubriand’s contemporary, Fustel de Coulanges, in The Ancient City.

Chateaubriand relates all this with sympathy, but without sentimentality. He knows that the Cherokee and the Iroquois fought each other over hunting grounds in present-day Kentucky for more than two centuries, making it “a land of blood.” He knows that “at the start of the War of American Independence, the savages were still eating their prisoners, or at least the ones who were killed: an English captain, dipping a ladle into an Indian stewpot, once drew out a hand.” And while there was indeed something “great and noble” about the Indian when he was “naked or dressed in skins,” had only other Indians to kill, “in our day, European rags attest to his wretchedness without covering his nakedness: he has become a beggar at the counting-house door and no longer a savage in his forest.” Europeans “have robbed the New World’s flowers only of those treasures that the natives did not know how to use, and they have made of these treasures only to enrich the soil from which they harvested them”—as John Locke had argued, a century before Chateaubriand arrived there. Indeed, his main regret is that France no longer possesses these lands. “We are now excluded from the new universe, where the human race is starting over again,” “disinherited from the conquests made by our courage and our genius.” “Thinking of Canada and Louisiana, looking over the old maps of the former French colonies in America, I must ask myself how my country’s government could have let go of these colonies”—by his calculation some two-thirds of the continent—”which would today be an inexhaustible source of prosperity.” Without identifying the seller in words, he silently points to Napoleon, whose evanescent conquests were useless, financed in part by his sale of Louisiana to the United States.

Learning that Louis XVI had been arrested and was to be put on trial, he cut short his travels and returned to France to fight with fellow loyalist troops against the forces of the regime of The Terror. But not before he was married to a friend of Lucile, who arranged things to repair the “gaping hole in my inheritance” left by his journey to America. “If the public man in me is unshakable, the private man is at the mercy of whosoever wants to sway him, and in order to avoid the quarrel of an hour, I would sell myself into slavery for a century.” (It wasn’t really that bad. Mme. Chateaubriand never read his books and produced no children, but she supported him loyally. “When the two of us appear before God, it is I who will be condemned.”)

In Paris he visited a couple of his old literary acquaintances, including the poet Ange-François de Sainte-Ange, upon whom he inflicts one of his choicer merciless epigrams: “He made a concerted effort not to be stupid, but he could never quite prevent himself.” He saves his moral indignation for the ruling terrorists: “The sang of nature, peace, pity, beneficence, candor, and domestic virtues, and meanwhile these blessed philanthropists sent their neighbors to have their necks sliced, with extreme sensibility, for the greater happiness of the human race.” The people on the streets “no longer seemed tumultuous, curious, reckless; they were outright menacing,” and Chateaubriand “sensed the approach of a plebeian tyranny,” worse than the tyranny of the Roman emperors. “For the sovereign people are everywhere, and when they become tyrants, tyranny is everywhere; it is the universal presence of a universal Tiberius.”

This might not have happened had the National Assembly survived. But in September of the previous year, 1791, it had had been dissolved, replaced by the Legislative Assembly, which consisted of an entirely different group of delegates. When the king vetoed their decrees against the aristocratic émigrés and the priests, the political fevers mounted; the solons ordered the purchase of guillotines a few months later, while the radical Jacobin and Cordelier parties formed, eager to use the new invention. He recalls Jean-Paul Marat (“the fetus-faced Swiss”), Camille Desmoulins (who “consented to become a Spartan only so long as the recipe for the black broth was left to Méot, the restauranteur), Georges Jacques Danton (“the face of a gendarme crossed with that of a slippery and ruthless attorney), and Fabre D’Églantine (“a man of remarkable weakness”). It was Danton who spoke the coda for the ideological tyrants of the next two centuries: “None of these priests or nobles is guilty, but they must die because they are out of place: they are impeding the progress of events and waylaying the future.” The French proved themselves superior to the Germans, the Russians, and the Chinese, however, as other revolutionaries eventually sent most of these personages to the guillotine, too.

With his brother, Chateaubriand joined royalist forces in Brussels. Among the aristocrats gathered there, some outranked others in the aristocratic pecking order. The “High Emigration,” as he calls them, paraded their newly-purchased uniforms “with all the rigor of their frivolity,” hoping to make a favorable impression on Belgian girls. “These brilliant knights were preparing for success on the battlefield by success in love; just the reverse of the old chivalry.” “They looked down disdainfully on all us little gentlemen from the provinces and poor officers turned soldiers.” He received more respect from Frederick William, the King of Prussia, who saw him on the parade grounds, greeted him, and upon hearing that the young French gentleman had returned from America to fight for his king, told him “Monsieur, one can always recognize the sentiments of the French nobility.” Along with Christian principles, such sentiments are in fact Chateaubriand’s moral framework, not natural right. “People now [as he writes this in 1822] condemn the émigrés and say we were nothing but ‘a pack of tigers who clawed at their mother’s breast’; but in the epoch of which I am speaking, a man held fast to the old examples, and honor counted just as much as country. In 1792, loyalty to oaths was still seen as a duty; today, it has become so rare it is regarded as a virtue.” European aristocrats were just that—European, not only national, respecting one another, fighting against but sometime with one another, intermarrying. And what is more, at least in Chateaubriand’s mind “the true heroes” of the royalist troops were “the plebeian soldiers, who had no personal interests clouding their sacrifice.” They too took their oath to the crown as duty, standing on it and not on rights.

The passing of the aristocratic society has had another effect. “The old men of earlier eras were less miserable and isolated than they are today.” Their friends may have died, “but few other things changed around them.” “Strangers to youth, they were no strangers to society.” In a democratic society, by contrast, an old man sees not only his cohort dying, “he has seen ideas dying.” “Principles, manners, tastes, pleasures, pains, and feelings: nothing anymore resembles what he once knew. He finishes his day among a different species of the human race.” And “you Frenchmen of the Nineteenth Century,” you will not be exempt. “You shall grow old in your turn, and you shall be accused, as we have been accused, of holding to superannuated ideas.” You too will become strangers in your homeland.

Nor will nature console you, in your old age. “The birds, the flowers the beautiful evenings at the end of April, the beautiful nights that begin with the dusk’s first nightingale an end with the dawn’s first swallow, these things that make you need and crave happiness—you snuff them out. You still feel their charm, but they are no longer for you.” They are for the young. “The freshening grace of nature, which reminds you of your past joys, makes your miseries uglier. You are nothing but a stain upon the earth. You spoil nature’s harmony and sweetness with your presence, your words, and even with the feelings that you dare express. You may love, but you can no longer be loved.” For Chateaubriand, nature is no more a source of solace for the old than it is a source of right for mankind.

The royalist troops with whom Chateaubriand fought well, even as he himself doubted that they could win the war. They might have won the siege at Thionville; it was illness that ruined their chances, when dysentery and then smallpox struck the troops. Escaping into the forest, he collapsed, was discovered unconscious by some friendly wagon-drivers, and eventually received medical assistance thanks to his brother, who went looking for him. During his four months of convalescence on the Isle of Jersey (a lovely place, “subject to English dominion since the death of Robert, Duc de Normandie”), Louis XVI was executed. “At least the émigrés then excited general sympathy. Our cause seemed to be the cause of European order; and a misfortune honored, as ours was, is a rare thing.”

Moving to Somerset after his convalescence, and then to London, he held on financially by doing translation work and writing his first substantial work, the Essai historique sur les revolutions, for M. Pelletier, an editor “who made a great deal of money and then ate it all up”; “while not exactly a vicious man,” Pelletier “was gnawed at by a verminous horde of little defects of which he could not be cleansed,” “a libertine and a rogue” who “drank in champagne whatever was paid to him in sugar.” Eventually, he stopped commissioning work for the young émigré, having become “bored by prolonged charity.” “Famous for a moment,” the Essai “was soon forgotten.” It “offers a compendium of my existence, as a poet, a moralist, a polemicist, and a political thinker.”

A kind uncle came to Chateaubriand’s aid, enabling him to settle for a while into London’s small colony of French exiles, “artists in misery seated on the ruins of France.” “I owed the softening of my hard lot at this time to study: Cicero was right to recommend the camaraderie of letters as a balm for the sorrow of life.” He needed it: newspapers reported a day when the same French scaffold claimed the lives of Malesherbes, Malesherbes’ daughter, granddaughter and grandson-in-law, and Chateaubriand’s brother. His wife and his sister Lucile were in prison, “accused of the crime of my emigration.” They, and his mother, were spared the guillotine only when the French regime ousted and executed Robespierre in July 1794, ending the Reign of Terror.

While in England, Chateaubriand, his health still fragile, was taken in by a generous couple with a beautiful young daughter, whom he allowed to fall in love with him. After several months, her mother asked him to marry the girl, and Chateaubriand confessed that he was already married. He left the household the next day, properly ashamed. Writing in London more than two decades later, he asks “What had brought about my latest misfortune? My obstinate silence. To make sense of this, it is necessary to examine my character.”

“At no time has it been possible for me to overcome the spirit of restraint and inward solitude that prevents me from discussing what moves me.” Easily bored himself, he prefers not to bore others by talking about himself. “I am sincere and truthful, but I am lacking in openness of heart. My soul tends constantly to close up,” except when writing; “I have never let on about my whole life except in these Memoirs.” The human mind abhorring a vacuum, “I have become for others a sort of fantastic being with no relation to my reality,” a creature of their imagination. “In my inward and theoretical life, I am the man of dreams; in my outward and practical life, I am the man of realities”—easily understood as a public man, impenetrable at his core. No stranger to arguments in the forum, he detests them in personal relations: “as you wish has always relieved me of the boredom of persuading anyone or of trying to assert a truth” in private conversation. “I do not make a virtue of my invincible and quite involuntary circumspection,” offering it only as an explanation of his conduct. “If I had not been subject to this odious mental oddity, any misunderstanding would have been impossible, and I would not have seemed as though I had intentionally abused the most generous hospitality.” In the end he told the truth, but this “does not excuse me: real harm had been done.”

Since then, the girl, Charlotte Ives, has replaced the imaginary Muse of his youth. “Her image sat before me as I wrote,” “a ray of light to reign over me.” He recalls that she visited him when he served as French ambassador to London in the 1820s, asking him to procure a favor from the British Prime Minister Canning. Now married to British admiral Samuel Sutton, she wished him to intercede on behalf of her eldest son, for whom she seeks a post in India. “‘I would be very grateful, and I would love to owe my first child’s happiness to you.’ She lingered on these last words.” Suspicious minds will be relieved to know that the Sutton children were born years after Chateaubriand left the Sutton home; the lady seems only to have meant to suggest what might have been, had he stayed.

Among the London émigrés Chateaubriand found Louis-Marcelin Fontanes, a poet, editor, and monarchist—”the last writer of the classical school in the elder line.” Born after Rousseau, his tastes connected him with Fénelon. “He was unable to reestablish the classical school, which was coming to an end with the language of Racine.” As in many respects the founder of “the so-called Romantic school” in France—the literary revolution that accompanied the social and political one—Chateaubriand might have been disparaged by the older man. “If anything in the world was sure to be antipathetic to M. Fontanes, it was my style of writing.” But not so; Fontanes was better than that. “My friend, instead of being revolted by my barbarity, became its passionate defender.” The “established critical rules” of French classicism simply did not apply to Chateaubriand’s writings, “but he sensed that he was entering a new world; he beheld a new nature; he comprehended a language that he did not speak.” For his own part, Chateaubriand says, “I owe him whatever is correct in my style,” as “he taught me to respect the ear, and he prevented me from falling prey to the extravagant inventions and uneven executions of my disciples.” “We often dined in some solitary tavern in Chelsea, by the Thames, talking for hours about Milton and Shakespeare. They had seen what we were seeing; they had sat like us on the bank of this river: for us a foreign river, for them a native stream.”

In summer of 1798 Chateaubriand received word that his mother had died. The Essai, pervaded with skepticism if not atheism, had given her pain, and her sister wrote to him, “If you know how many tears your errant ways have caused our honorable mother to weep, and how deplorable they appear to anyone of a thoughtful mind, to anyone who lays claim, not only to piety, but to reason; if you knew this, it would perhaps persuade you to open your eyes and make you renounce writing altogether.” Chateaubriand writes: “The thought of having poisoned the last days of the woman who carried me in her womb cast me into despair. I flung my copies of the Essai into the fire, for it was the instrument of my crime.” Far from giving up writing, however, “the thought came to me of expiating my first work by composing a religious work,” which would be The Genius of Christianity. By the time his sister’s letter arrived, she had joined their mother in death, having never recovered from the effects of imprisonment. “These two voices issuing from the grave, the dead serving as interpreter of the dead, made a deep impression on me. I became a Christian. I did not yield, I admit, to any great supernatural light; my conviction issued from the heart. I wept and I believed.” Chateaubriand came to Christianity the aristocratic way—not directly, through the Monarch-God, but through select human beings he loved.

But with a difference. “The memory of Charlotte,” too, “governed all my thoughts, and, to finish me off, the first desire for fame and glory inflamed my feverish imagination,” a “desire [that] came to me out of filial affection.” That is, his father’s command to bring honor to the family name now animated him, but through the memory of his mother, his sister, and his first beloved—through women. From patriarchy to devotion to the womanly: In a sense, that is the way classicism became Romanticism. And that is why The Genius of Christianity was the right book at the right time; it gave witness to Jesus Christ by way of the sensibilities of its time and place. The old form of the aristocratic spirit was disappearing. “Sweet, patriarchal, innocent, honorable family friendship, your century has passed!” “We are born and we die now one by one”—as “individualists,” Tocqueville would soon say. “The living are in a hurry to cast the dead into Eternity and free themselves from the burden of a corpse.” The “days of religion and tenderness, when the son died in the same house, in the same armchair beside the same hearth where his father and grandfather had died before him, surrounded, as they were, by tearful children and grandchildren gathered to receive one last paternal blessing” are gone and “shall never return.” But the body of Christ, as the Crusaders saw, is no corpse to be cast out or recovered, and His spirit can be renewed in men’s hearts and minds in a way that meets those hearts and minds as they are now.

“My readings correlative to The Genius of Christianity had little by little led me to a more thorough consideration of English literature,” formed as its authors were by Christian ideas and sentiments. “One stumbled across Milton and Shakespeare everywhere,” and for good reason: “The actor who took on the role of the ghost in Hamlet was the great phantom, the shade of the Middle Ages who rose over the world like a star in the night at the very moment when those ages went down among the dead: enormous centuries that Dante opened and that Shakespeare sealed.” But Milton, a man of the modern world, called to him. Literary reputations are built by the inferior writers, but if a Shakespeare is “misunderstood by men, these divinities never misunderstand one another.” “Is there anything more admirable than this society of illustrious equals, revealing themselves to one another by signs, hailing one another, and conversing in a language understood by themselves alone?”

“Shakespeare is one of five or six writers who have everything needed to nourish the mind.” With him, Chateaubriand ranks Homer, Dante, and Rabelais. “These mother-geniuses”—again, the womanly—”have birthed and brought up all the others”: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Horace, and Virgil; Petrarch and Tasso; Montaigne, La Fontaine, and Molière; Byron and Scott. “They invented the words and the names that have gone to swell the vocabularies of whole populations; their expressions have become proverbs; their imagined characters have changed into real characters with heirs and lineage.” And “they sow the ideas that yield a thousand others,” furnishing “images, subjects, and styles for every art.” “Sowing” shifts the metaphor to masculinity, and sure enough: The great writers have fathered “four or five races of men” in the “womb” of “the human spirit.” Do not imitate Ham, laughing when he encountered, “naked and asleep, in the shadow of the ark stranded in the mountains of Armenia, the solitary boatman of the abyss. Let us respect this diluvian navigator who began creation anew after heaven’s downpour. Pious children, blessed by our father, let us cover him chastely with our cloak.” Chateaubriand may not rank himself with such men, but he surely thinks of himself as a man who began creation anew after the French revolutionary flood. If he doesn’t expect to be understood by subsequent generations, he does ask for their mercy.

Not that a Shakespeare sets out to be a Shakespeare. “What can fame mean to Shakespeare? Its noise will never rise to his ear.” If he was a Christian, he now has better things to contemplate. So too, if a Deist. And “if an atheist, he sleeps a sleep without breath or reawakening, which is called death.” “Nothing is more vain than glory from the other side of the grave, unless it has given life to friendship, been useful to virtue, lent a hand to the unfortunate—unless it be granted to us to enjoy in heaven the consoling, generous, and liberating idea left by us on earth.” This is Chateaubriand’s apologia, offered to all of France’s spiritual factions.

Offered to the French, because “no one, in a living literature, can be a competent judge except of works written in his own language. It is vain to believe you possess a foreign idiom in all its depths.” The difference between the human spirit and a national spirit is style. “It has been claimed that true beauty is for all time and all countries: yes, if we are speaking of the beauties of feeling and thought, but no, not the beauties of style. Style is not, like thought, cosmopolitan: it has a native soil, sky, and sun of its own.” That is why the English and Germans “do not understand Racine, or La Fontaine, or even most of Molière.” A (perhaps excessively) simple example of what Chateaubriand means may be seen in Macbeth’s famous soliloquy beginning, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow….” Try translating it into French: “Demain, et demain, et demain….” You see the impossibility of reading the same line, expressing the same thought, the same way, with the same resonance, the same intonation. And intonation is a shade of meaning as well as an element of style.

All the more reason to return to France, his native soil. By 1797 Bonaparte was First Consul, “restoring order through despotism.” It had become safe for the exiles to return. His favorite sister, Lucile, had survived the Terror, as had his wife. “I brought back nothing from the land of exile but regrets and dreams.” By the spring of 1800 he was about to experience his first literary success, the beginning of his career as a writer. “I seem to be saying a last goodbye to my father’s house, abandoning the thoughts and illusions of my youth like sisters or sweethearts whom I leave beside the family hearth and shall never see again.” “I landed in France with the century.”