François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.

 

Napoleon led a life parallel to Alexander the Great—the main difference being, as Chateaubriand has observed, that in modernity it is impossible to pass oneself off as a god. After his victory at Austerlitz over the allied forces of Austria and Russia, Napoleon engaged in badinage with the defeated Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II. “Were such sovereigns worth being slaughtered for?” No, but there was another Alexander, Czar Alexander I, who was worth fighting for. “After the Battle of Austerlitz, almost everything Bonaparte does is in error,” and the Russian Orthodox Christian Czar of Russia, neither a god nor a beast (no emulator of the lion or the fox) exposed those errors. “The designs of Providence were fulfilled no less surely than those of Napoleon: we can see both God and man together on the march,” the one unerring, the other not. If Hegel claimed that the arrival of Napoleon in Prussia in 1806 betokened the appearance of the Absolute Spirit, the Holy Spirit finally marched its rival right back again, a decade later. Although Napoleon reconstructed the burial vaults at the Church of Saint-Denis to house the bodies “the princes of his race,” not even he would be entombed there. “Man digs the grave, and God fills it.” To write memoirs from beyond the grave means, among other things, to write them from the vantage point of seeing how Providence worked things out. For himself, while Berlin, “this monument of philosophy, was crumbling on the banks of the Spree, I was in Jerusalem, visiting the imperishable monument of religion.”

More immediately, Austerlitz resulted in the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, Francis II renouncing the imperial throne and becoming the founding emperor of Austria-Hungary as Francis I. With Napoleon the principal emperor of western Europe, having established the Confederation of the Rhine, Prussia would be free to unite the many German states, once Napoleon was disposed of, initiating the geopolitics of twentieth-century Europe. As early as the 1840s, Chateaubriand judged that although “Germany dreamed of political unity…it lacked the political education needed to attain liberty—just as Italy lacked the military education to attain it.” Chateaubriand considered the Confederation of the Rhine “a great unfinished work, which required a good deal of time and a special knowledge of the laws and interests of the nations” to realize, “but it fell quite suddenly to pieces in the mind of the man who had conceived it” because the triumph of Austerlitz turned Napoleon from the task of political founding toward the task of mere conquest. “All that remained of this profound scheme were a military and a fiscal machine,” as “once the genius of his early vision passed, Bonaparte thought of nothing but money and soldiers”: “the tax collector and recruiting officer took the place of the great man.” Even on that level, Providence had other ideas. By barring England from his continental system, Napoleon did help to spur the industrialization of France, Germany Switzerland, and Italy,” as intended, but it also “extended English trade to the rest of the globe,” extending the already formidable British Empire, still recovering from the loss of its North American possession.

One civil accomplishment Napoleon did undertake successfully was the integration of Jews in his new ‘confederal’ empire (not so confederal, since he selected the rulers of the several nations within it). He did this by calling for the convening of a “Grand Sanhedrin,” in imitation of the Sanhedrin of ancient Israel, consisting of prominent rabbinical and lay Jewish men, charged with establishing laws governing the legal status of Jews; these laws, promulgated in 1808, consisted of a ban on polygamy, permission to intermarry with Gentiles in civil, not religious, ceremonies, and acknowledgment of Jewish-Gentile brotherhood within the nations of the new empire (including the obligation to defend national territories alongside Gentiles). Chateaubriand is having none of this, falsely claiming that the agreement “let the finances of the world go to the stalls of the Jews, and thereby produced a fateful subversion in the social economy.” In fact, the new Sanhedrin banned usurious practices by Jews in their dealings with fellow Jews and Gentiles alike. While the actual intention of new set of laws was to promote Jewish assimilation (thus setting many German Jews against Orthodox Jews in eastern Europe), settling the so-called ‘Jewish problem’ along Napoleonic lines, Chateaubriand takes it to have been a (failed) attempted preliminary to the empire’s extension into the Holy Land.

Napoleon and Alexander I met at the Tilsit conference in 1807. They agreed to divide Europe between Turkey going to Russia, along with “whatever conquests the Muscovite armies could make in Asia,” while Bonaparte was free to consolidate Italy, take Spain, Portugal, and North Africa, thereby making the Mediterranean a French mare nostrum. In the event, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain diverted troops he would need against Russia in the war he soon would undertake against the czar, whom he believed to be “a fool.” But Alexander was only playing for time, “pretend[ing] to be a conquered prince.” “The politics of the West and the politics of the East did not depart from their usual character.” 

In Italy, Rome attempted to dominate the papacy. “Perhaps it was the moral and religious power of the Holy See that Napoleon feared,” although by his bullying he only enhanced that power. “What drove Napoleon?” Chateaubriand asks, not for the first time. “It was “the evil side of his genius, his inability to remain at rest,” the same incapacity that caused him to botch the founding of the Confederation by making it a platform for new conquests. “An eternal gambler, when he wasn’t laying bets on new empires, he was chancing fantasies.” These, Chateaubriand suggests were fantasies spurred by libido dominandi. “All authority (even the authority of time and faith) not attached to him personally struck the emperor as usurpation.” He failed to “see that by persecuting Pius VII, and thus making himself guilty of pointless ingratitude”—the pope had participated in the ceremony crowning him Emperor—Napoleon “lost the advantage of passing, among Catholic populations, for the restorer of religion.” It is true, Chateaubriand concedes in proper Catholic fashion, that “Rome is always the world’s greatest prize.” Napoleon annexed the Papal States to the French Empire in 1809, a degradation of the papacy numbering among the “miserable outrages of sophomoric philosophy.” But “the lowering of the pontifical flag” and its replacement by the Tricolor “presaged glory and ruins” there, as it would do “in every corner of the world.” When the pope now excommunicated Napoleon, Napoleon had him arrested and imprisoned. “If the iniquitous invasion of Spain turned the political world against Bonaparte, the disagreeable occupation of Rome repulsed the moral world,” as Napoleon “alienated himself from both the nations and the churches, from both man and God.” Pius XII died in French custody. Chateaubriand reminds his readers that this was the pope he had met in the course of his ambassadorial duties in his brief diplomatic career under the Consulate. “May my remembrance of his torments pay the det of gratitude I owe him for the torments he blessed in Rome, in 1803,” when Chateaubriand was recovering from the loss of Madame de Beaumont.

In spring of 1809, yet another coalition, this consisting of England, Austria, and Spain, declared its opposition to Napoleon. The allies still did not fully understand the new kind of warfare Napoleon had invented, although they were learning. Chateaubriand calls it “large-scale war,” a notion “inspired by the conquests of the Republic, which had requisitioned the masses.” That is, Napoleon democratized warfare. Instead of small, aristocratic armies, anchored in castles, Napoleon, the man who could not rest, led his armies out into the enemy’s country, “uninterested in retreats” but instead concentrating his troops on a single point in the enemy’s line, breaking it. “This maneuver, which was peculiar to him, was well suited to French fury, but would never have worked with less agile and impetuous soldiers.” But the result of Napoleonic action was European reaction: “When France went to war, Europe, learned to march,” as “the masses have counterbalanced the masses.” Chateaubriand hopes that Europeans will return to “civilized warfare,” warfare “that leaves populations alone while a small number of soldiers do their duty” of defending their country instead of devastating others in “fields of carnage, which ultimately bring about no results commensurate with their calamities.” Looking ahead from the 1840s, Chateaubriand forecasts that “Europe, barring unforeseen events, will be fed up with fighting for a long time to come,” as “Napoleon killed war by blowing it out of proportion.” A long time to come turned out to be a century after Napoleon’s defeat, some seventy years after Chateaubriand wrote his memoirs. Even in the twenty-first century, such restraint seems to need relearning, once a generation that has learned it passes from the scene.

By marrying the Hapsburg Archduchess Marie Louise in 1810, Bonaparte “obtained the only thing he lacked”: a link to monarchic legitimacy. “He is now, in every sense, master of the ages—if only he had wished to settle at the summit,” from which he could survey a domain of more than 85 million persons, “half the population of Christendom.” His wrongly ordered soul prevented him from so wishing. “While he has the power to stop the world, he does not have the power to stop himself. He will go on until he has conquered the last crown, which gives meaning to all the others, the crown of misfortune.” 

For “in the depths of his heart, Napoleon had retained a secret enmity for Alexander” of Russia. Russia remained formidable, a possible rival for control of Europe. The peace he had established with the czar was “a peace that Bonaparte’s character could not endure.” “By expanding the boundaries of France, Bonaparte had collided with the Russians, as Trajan, crossing the Danube, had collided with the Goths.” He formed an alliance with Austria and Prussia, while Turkey and Sweden aligned with Russia. In his new empire, “the French no longer recognized each other in the vastness of a country delimited by no natural border.” He had deranged the spirit of the city in his own country, “blinded by his hatred for the liberty of the nations”—his “hatred of constitutional governments [being] invincible.” And he failed to learn the geopolitical lesson of the Great European Plain: “that warlike people who inhabit the plains are condemned to be conquered,” as “all the various invaders of Europe have swooped down on the plains.” If Moses and Mohammad were armed prophets, Napoleon was an “armed poet.” Nero-like, “He wanted to ascend the Kremlin to sing and sign a decree on the theaters”—an allusion, Mr. Andriesse helpfully informs us, not only to Nero’s tyrannical antics but to Napoleon’s contemporaneous reorganization of the Comédie Française.

In May 1812, Napoleon headed the Conference of Dresden, whose attendees included the nominal rulers of the states composing his empire (“they are fighting over vassalage”). There, the Emperor gathered his polyglot armies for the invasion of Russia—680,000 infantry, 176,850 cavalry. Napoleon, Chateaubriand writes, “addressed himself to Destiny,” his counterpart, Alexander, addressed himself “to Providence.” 

The Russians refused to engage in the kind of war Napoleon wanted to fight. They retreated, lengthening the French supply lines. Characteristically, “Bonaparte could not restrain himself” pushing forward. At times, he caught up with the Russians; after the Battle of Koldrina, “a murderous clash,” “French corpses were buried in haste, so that Napoleon could not measure the enormity of his losses.” September 1812 saw the Battle of Borodino, where Napoleon won a Pyrrhic victory in the bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars, seeing some 30,000 French imperial troops killed, wounded, or captured and more than 40,000 Russians taken in defense of their homeland. 

Russian Field Marshall Mikhail Kutuzov, surrounded himself with Orthodox priests and religious icons. His soldiers prayed before battle, impressing a French officer who witnessed them by their piety, which “reminded me that the greatest of our kings, Charlemagne, also prepared for the most perilous of his undertakings with religious Christians.” Many among the French troops, sons of the Revolution, mocked the Russians for doing so, but one officer recalled, “our utter annihilation,” months later, “whose glory they cannot claim, since it was the manifest work of Providence, went to prove…that they had received what they had asked for.” In the battle at hand, however, “the French troops covered themselves with glory and demonstrated their great superiority over the Russian troops,” but “cursed be victories not won in defense of the homeland, which merely serve a conqueror’s vanity!” One of Napoleon’s generals “admitted that, on that important day, he no longer saw any signs of Napoleon’s genius.” As his difficulties mounted (the Russians continued to retreat, evading any decisive battle), Napoleon struggled. “We can find no other explanation for this other than in the very nature of the man. Adversity arrived, and its first touch froze him.” Unlike a Christian, ready to sacrifice, to suffer humiliation and injury, “prosperity alone left him with his faculties intact.”

“The Russians were withdrawing in good order to Moscow.” When Bonaparte’s army entered, the city’s governor-general, Fyodor Rostopchin, ordered the evacuated capital to be burned, “a decision [that] will go down in history as a heroic decision that saved one nation’s independence and contributed to the liberation of several others.” Chateaubriand concurs with the judgment of Madame de Staël: “This religious city has perished like a martyr whose spilled blood reinvigorates the brethren who survive.” Had Bonaparte seized Moscow, he would have “wrapped the world in his despotism like a mortuary sheet.” In destroying the city before he could do that, the Russians showed that “the rights of humanity come first.” “Speaking for myself, if the earth were an explosive globe, I wouldn’t hesitate to set it on fire were it a question of delivering my country from an oppressor. However, nothing less than the supreme interests of human liberty are needed to induce a Frenchman—his head covered in mourning and his eyes full of tears—to speak of a decision that would prove fatal to so many of his countrymen,” beginning with those who choked on the smoke or were crushed by collapsing arches and buildings. Bonaparte himself could only escape ingloriously “over the coals of a neighborhood that had already been reduced to ash.”

Bonaparte railed at what he took to be the madness of Rostopchin. “He who fails to understand greatness in another will not understand what it would mean for himself, when the time for sacrifices comes.” As for the czar, “Alexander betrayed no despondency when he learned of his adversities,” instead blessing “the hand that has chosen us to be first among nations in the cause of virtue and liberty.” As always, Chateaubriand understands the way men use words. To speak of God, virtue, and liberty pleases, reassures, and consoles a people. “How superior it is to those affected phrases, sadly scrounged from pagan locutions and defined by fatalism: it was to be they had to be, destiny drags them on!—empty phraseology, which is always barren, even when it refers to the most significant acts.” A century later, Russian rulers would take up exactly such language, and Russia has systematically ruined itself, ever since.

Having conquered an empty place, Bonaparte turned to the thought of attacking St. Petersburg. “Such were the new chimeras that filled Napoleon’s head”—chimeras, since “it is not possible to subjugate a nation whose last stronghold is the North Pole.” “The man was on the brink of madness, yet his dreams were still those of a great mind.” As he drew up his new plans, he lingered at Moscow, despite the threat of the Russian winter. “By delaying these few days”—thirty-five, to be precise—he “was sentencing the 100,000 men left to him to death.” 

As he finally retreated from Moscow, the Russians counterattacked, cutting off his escape route. Passing back over one battlefield, the French saw that “the birds of the sky had not finished eating what we had sown when we passed that way again.” Kutuzov pursued, leisurely. “Just wait until the snow comes.” At Borodino, “a vast scene of butchery lay before them, with forty thousand corpses in various stages of decay.” Would they “soon be like the companions whose remains they had seen”? But Napoleon, “indifferent to the miseries of his soldiers, cared for nothing but his own interests.” One of his officers asked, “Is this the civilization we’re bringing to Russia?” Chateaubriand remarks, “When you have committed a reproachable act, Heaven imposes on you the sanction of witnesses.” With Napoleon, Chateaubriand himself is the most eloquent among them. “The Russian expedition was aa true extravagance, which all the civil and military authorities of the Empire had condemned.”

And what of the Russian dead? Who remembers them? “Who thinks of the peasants left behind in Russia? Are those rustics glad to have been at ‘the great battle beneath the walls of Moscow’? Perhaps I am the only one who, on autumn evenings, watching the birds of the north wheel high in the sky remembers that they have seen our countrymen’s graves.” Now that industrial companies have taken over that land, “with their furnaces and boilers,” the bones of the French “have been converted to animal black. That is what we are doing with the dead nowadays! These are the sacred rights of the new religion!”

Concurrent with this long retreat, a coup attempt failed in Paris, a sign of Napoleon’s waning authority. “The rights that Napoleon had founded on force were being destroyed, along with his forces, by Russia, while in the capital all it took was one man to cast them into doubt. Outside of religion, justice, and freedom, there are no rights at all”—none, that is, that can be secured. As for Napoleon himself, he took care to leave his troops behind, just after declaiming that he would never do so. After all, “Can I remain at the head of a rout?” Not if I am Napoleon. His great cavalry commander, Joachim Murat, lamented, “It is no longer possible to serve a madman. We are no longer safe with him. Not a prince in Europe believes his words or his treaties.”

The French Senate nonetheless ‘doubled down,’ providing another quarter of a million men under Napoleon’s command. But Napoleon could no longer overawe the Legitimists. Louis XVIII issued a proclamation “that would later be set down in a constitutional charter—the first hopes of liberty, which came to us from our ancient kings.” Czar Alexander addressed his own proclamation not the French but to all of Europe: “May there soon be nothing left of the bloodthirsty colossus who has threatened the continent with his endless criminality but a long-abiding memory of horror and pity!” And the pope repudiated the so-called Concordat of 1813, whereby Napoleon would have increased his power over the Church, thus “giving the signal to depose the oppressor of nations.” For his part, “Bonaparte declared that he had always wanted peace and that the world was in need of it. But this world no longer had any wish to serve him.” More, it wished to overthrow him, as England’s Duke of Wellington, “the fatal man,” opened a new front in the west of France and the “Young Germany” movement, spurred by the philosophy professor Johann Gottlieb Fichte, brought Prussian forces to bear on the side of Russia, marching to patriotic verses “full of religious feeling and sincere human nature that sang of God, loyalty, and Germany.” “The man whose life was a dithyramb in action fell only when the poets of Young Germany had sung and taken up the sword against their rival, Napoleon, the poet of arms,” who had claimed that he made his battle plans out of the dreams of his sleeping soldiers. Czar Alexander “shared their lofty sentiments, and he was in a position powerful enough to make their dreams a reality,” but eventually would allow himself “to be scared by the fearful monarchs around him,” who, unlike French Legitimists, did not want liberty, that is, constitutional monarchy. The absolutists of the Holy Alliance would deny political liberty to post-Napoleonic Europe, eventually bringing on the revolutions of 1848 in the years immediately after Chateaubriand wrote these words.

Reinforced, Napoleon careened on, losing the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 and watching as Allied forces advanced across the Rhine in December. When the French legislature dared to tell him that he should restore political liberty to the country, he replied, while closing the legislature, “Do you wish to restore the sovereignty of the people? Very well, in that case, I declare myself the people, for I claim to be where sovereignty resides, now and forever.” Chateaubriand contents himself by remarking, “Never has a despot so emphatically explained his nature.” 

Not Napoleonic ‘Destiny’ but divine Providence “had changed the fortunes of the world.” Napoleon departed for the eastern front while Pius VII, now liberated, made his triumphal return to the Vatican, “making his way amid hymns and tears, to the sound of bells and cries of ‘Long live the pope! Long live the head of the Church!'” Protestants turned out, saying, “Here is the greatest man of his age,” a living martyr. “Such is the greatness of true Christian society,” Chateaubriand writes, “where God ceaselessly mingles with men. Such is the superiority of the power of the weak, sustained by religion and adversity, over the power of the sword and the scepter.” 

Chateaubriand himself had his own, literary, card to put down. He wanted the French to rise up against Napoleon before the foreign troops could defeat and overthrow him, to restore the Bourbon monarchy with institutions “modified to suit the times”—that is, institutions ensuring political liberty rather than the absolutism of Louis XIV, which Napoleon had attempted to revive. In the struggle of rival regimes that would wrack his country for a century and a half to come, Chateaubriand opposed radical, Jacobin republicanism, Napoleonic despotism, and socialism in defense of constitutional monarchy, a regime strong enough to defend France from foreign enemies (which would soon see a united Germany at the forefront) without engaging in wars of conquest, while maintaining domestic tranquility under the rule of law and of Christian, especially Catholic, moral authority. He made his argument in a pamphlet, Bonaparte et des Bourbons, but it was too late for any insurrection to stop the Allied armies. 

“The war came and installed itself outside the gates of Paris”—the first time in centuries that “Paris had seen the smoke of enemy camps.” Defeated once again, Napoleon had returned to the capital, “leaving behind him the immense inferno of his pointless conquests.” Ever-scheming Talleyrand wanted to get rid of him and to replace him with the regency of Marie-Louise which of course he would head. It was too late for his schemes, as well. Paris surrendered on March 31, 1814, “within ten days of the anniversary of the Duc d’Enghien’s death.” Recalling Napoleon’s vicious injuries to Russia, Christian Czar Alexander refused vengefulness. “I am a just man, and I know that the French people are not to blame. The French are my friends, and I want to prove to them that I come to return good for evil. Napoleon is my only enemy.” He extended his protection over Paris, respecting “all its public institutions,” quartering only so many troops there as to guarantee civil order while the French “secure for yourself a government that will give peace to France and Europe both.” Not long after, having seen that “order, peace, and moderation reigned throughout” the city, “Alexander departed, leaving us our masterworks”—unlike Napoleon, he plundered no paintings or statues from the country he had conquered—and “our liberty, set down in the charter—a liberty we owed to his intelligence as well as to his influence.” “Chief of two supreme authorities, an autocrat of the sword and the church, Alexander alone, of all the sovereigns of Europe” (very much including the deposed Napoleon) “understood that France had reached an age of civilization at which she could only governed under a free constitution.” The Czar “considered himself merely an instrument of Providence and claimed nothing for himself.” When Louis XVIII entered Paris, Alexander kept out of sight. Most beautifully, when told by a Frenchman that his arrival “long been waited and wished for,” he replied, “I would have come sooner, had French valor not delayed me.” In all, “he appeared to be astonished by his triumph; his almost tender gaze wandered over a population he seemed to consider superior to himself,” “as if he felt he was a barbarian in our midst, as a Roman might have felt ashamed in Athens.” 

It was at this point that the Chateaubriand’s pamphlet did have some good effect. Napoleon still had “more than forty thousand of the best soldiers on earth surround[ing] him,” and for his part, ever-scheming Talleyrand hoped to place the French crown on the four-year-old Napoleon II (as a former revolutionary, “he dreaded the Bourbons”), a policy consistent with Bonaparte’s own stated desire at the time. With the publication of Bonaparte et les Bourbons, “I flung myself headlong into the fray” in “an effort to tip the scales” in favor of Legitimacy. Later, Louis XVIII said that “my pamphlet was more advantageous than an army of a hundred thousand men,” and even Bonaparte allowed that “I have no reason to reproach Chateaubriand; he resisted me when I was still in power.” Chateaubriand courteously returns, “My admiration for Bonaparte has always been great and sincere, even when I was attacking him with all my might,” although cautioning his readers that the uncritical admiration of the Emperor among those who no longer remember the sufferings he inflicted during his years of tyranny distort the past and threaten France’s future. Like Alexander, Chateaubriand wants a life of Christian humility without personal or national humiliation, for himself and for his countrymen, and for the men of every country. 

Such a life had been impossible under the regime of Napoleon. Under it, we French “no longer mattered.” “Everything belonged to Bonaparte: I have ordered, I have won, I have spoken; my eagles, my crown, my blood, my family, my subjects.” Even under the pseudo-republican oligarchy of the Jacobins, “we did not have the shame of being the property of a man,” and no foreigner invaded us, thanks to the valor and sacrifice of our own men. “Despite his enormous acquisitions,” Napoleon “succumbed not because he was defeated, but because France no longer wanted him. An important lesson! Let it never be forgotten that there is a germ of death in everything that offends human dignity.”

The French would re-learn this lesson in the 1940s. To that generation, Chateaubriand still spoke: “God, in His patient eternity, sooner or later brings justice to bear. In those moments when Heaven appears to sleep, it is a fine thing that honest men look on with disapproval, for this disapproval remains as a rein on absolute power. May France never repudiate the noble souls who dried out against her servitude when all were prostrate, when there were so many advantages to remaining prostrate, so many graces to receive in exchange for flattery, so many persecutions to reap for sincerities sown.”

In the end, Talleyrand got what he really wanted: power for himself. He negotiated with Alexander for permission to form a provisional government with himself as its president, even as he adroitly switched to backing the Bourbon Restoration. “From that moment forward, M. de Talleyrand seemed to be the arbiter of the world; his parlors became centers of negotiation.” Chateaubriand issues his riposte. “The first acts of the Restoration were entrusted to the barren Bishop of Autun.” [1] Alluding to the likelihood that Talleyrand owed his physical condition to syphilis, Chateaubriand remarks, “He infected this Restoration with sterility and passed on to it a germ of dishonor and death.” 

Napoleon abdicated in April 1814. Departing for what would be only his first exile, at the island of Elba, Napoleon continued to hold Louis XVIII less legitimate than himself, since Louis was elected by the “lowly Senate,” while Napoleon had been chosen by “the unanimous wish of the people.” That he now departed in accordance with the nearly unanimous wish of the people he preferred not to notice. Chateaubriand, it is scarcely necessary to say, does.

Chateaubriand concludes his assessment of Napoleon’s character. “Bonaparte cannot be judged according to the rules we apply to the great geniuses, for he lacked magnanimity.” Unlike the great-souled man of Aristotle’s Ethics, Bonaparte could expand or condense his soul as conditions warranted. “Like the rebel angel, he could shrink his immeasurable mass down and fit himself into a measurable space; his ductility permitted him both salvation and rebirth,” enabling him to live in exile on an island and then return to France in a final attempt to regain his empire. “Changing his manners and costume at will, flawless in comedy and tragedy alike, he was an actor who could look natural under the tunic of a slave or the mantle of a king.” As such, he “was, in one person, all things great and miserable in man”—a consummate Machiavellian prince, waging a futile war against God and nature alike.

 

Note

1. Talleyrand, an ordained priest, had risen to the station of Bishop of Autun by the eve of the French Revolution. He quickly metamorphosed into an open scoffer at religion, earning excommunication. Reinstated as a member of the Church at the beginning of the century, he was laicized by Pius VII in 1802, an act very much in line with prudential reasoning on the Pope’s part.

 

 

 

 

François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.

 

After Napoleon’s judicial murder of the Duc d’Enghien, Chateaubriand moved to the Rue de Mirosmesnil, near the now abandoned Parc de Monceaux, “where the Revolution had begun among the orgies of the Duc d’Orléans,” who used it as a hideaway “embellished with marble nudes and mock ruins—symbols of the frivolous, debauched politics that were to flood France with prostitution and debris.” Philippe d’Orleans, first in line for the French throne if the Bourbons died out, built the park as a “folly garden,” years before the revolution. Indeed a libertine, he banned the Paris police from the area, making it a haven not only for ordinary illegal activities but also for Jacobin meetings. Philippe supported the Revolution, even to the extent of legally changing his name to Phillippe Égalité, before himself falling victim to trumped-up charges during the Reign of Terror. As for Chateaubriand, “at most I talked to the rabbits in the park or chatted about the Duc d’Enghien with three crows on the bank of an artificial stream,” not “know[ing] what to do with my imagination or my feelings.” In his anxious boredom, he took to the road, traveling to Geneva to visit Madame de Staël, a friend from his Atala days, and the noble if eccentric painter, Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin, a man of “a species between the monkey and the satyr,” in whose studio “no model was safe.” Unlike the Duc d’Orleans, the libertine artist could exhibit a “total abnegation of self, an uncalculating devotion to the miseries of others, a delicate, superior, idealize way of feeling.” As for Madame de Staël, her professions of suffering perplexing—how “could there be any misery in having fame, leisure, peace, and a sumptuous sanctuary with a view of the Alps”—but he concludes that “hearts have different secrets, incomprehensible to other hearts. Let us not deny anyone his suffering. Sorrows are like countries: each man has his own.”

Chateaubriand’s sufferings still centered on the emptiness caused by the death of Madame de Beaumont. “Old seasons of ardor returned to me with all their fire and melancholy. I was no longer in the places I was living. I was dreaming of other shores.” He learned of the death of his sister, Lucile, who had descended into madness and died in Paris, alone. Tending to his wife’s illness at the time, Chateaubriand could not attend the funeral and knew nothing of her burial arrangements. “My sister was buried among the poor. In what cemetery was she lain?” For his part, Napoleon was about to triumph at Austerlitz. “What did it matter to me at the moment I lost my sister, the millions of soldiers who were falling on the battlefield, the crumbling of thrones—the changing of the face of the world?” We are ineluctably centered in our own bodies and souls, attending for the most part to them and to the bodies and souls who have touched us. “When she disappeared, my childhood, my family, and the first vestiges of my life disappeared with her.” Reflecting on his wife’s less heartfelt response to his sister’s death (she was “still smarting from Lucile’s imperious whims”), Chateaubriand writes, “Let us be mild if we wish to be mourned. Only angels weep for lofty genius and superior qualities.”

Like Napoleon, however, Chateaubriand was soon on the move once more. In 1806 he traveled to Greece (“amidst the silence of Sparta’s wreckage, glory itself was mute”), Constantinople (again silence, jammed with “a mute crowd who seem to wish to pass unseen and always appear to be hiding from the gaze of the master”), and Jerusalem (“the sight of the cradle of the Israelites and the homeland of Christians filled me with joy and reverence”). Three places, three regimes. Sparta betokens the limits of military-aristocratic prowess (with a glance at Napoleon?). Constantinople, a religious despotism, where marketplace and cemetery (making it seem “as if Turks were here only to buy, sell, and die”) defined one aspect of the way of life, prison and seraglio another. “No sign of joy or look of happiness meets your eyes here. What you see is not a people, but a herd led by an imam and slaughtered by a janissary,” with the seraglio functioning as “the capital of servitude,” where “a sacred guardian carefully preserves the germs of pestilence and the primitive laws of tyranny.” Jerusalem, by contrast, still lives, as the place where, “even humanly speaking, the greatest event that has ever changed the face of the world occurred.” Returning through Carthage and Spain, Chateaubriand counts as his ‘spoils’ not territory but a book, his Itinerary to Jerusalem. Uninflamed by ambition, he devotes himself to learning, not conquering. In his writing and thinking alike, “My accuracy is due to my good common sense; I am a child of the pedestrian race of Celts and tortoises, not of the race of Tartars and birds who are endowed with horses and wings.” Even if religion “has often ravished me in its embrace,” it has always “set me down on earth again.” Travel itself bores him; “I love travel only because of the independence it gives me,” the countryside only for “the solitude it offers.”

Between Napoleonic military conquest and the privacy of family, friends, and thoughts stands politics. Chateaubriand never loses sight of it. “I am, in a certain sense, the last person to visit the Turkish empire while it still practiced its old way of life. Revolutions, which precede or follow me everywhere I go, have spread across Greece, Syria, and Egypt. Is a new Orient coming into being? What will emerge from it? Will we receive the punishment we deserve for having taught the modern art of warfare to nations whose social state is founded on slavery and polygamy?”

More immediately, back in France, “Bonaparte’s successes, far from subjugating me, had revolted me.” As publisher and editor of the Mercure, he wrote an article reminding his readers of the murder that initiated the modern despotism Napoleon had founded. The Emperor had him arrested for his troubles and confiscated his property but, in line with the milder tyrannies of the day, allowed him to retreat to internal exile in the village of Vallée-aux-Loups, where he planted trees and thought of settling in a park of his own designing. That, too, would never happen: “I fear that the only way I will be able to leave this world is by crossing over the corpses of my dreams.” 

The publication of his next book, The Martyrs, “earned me the renewed attention of persecution.” It is an account of “the struggle between two religions,” paganism and Christianity, “one dying and the other being born,” a theme that offers “one of the richest, most fertile, and most dramatic subjects.” But the undermining of an imperial despotism of the past “could not escape the notice of the imperial police” of the present— “all the more so since the English translator, who had no reason to be circumspect and who did not care a whit about compromising me, had, in his preface, pointed out these allusions.” As before, the pressure lessened in due course. Much worse, his cousin Armand, an unrepentant Legitimist, was arrested, jailed, and executed after returning to France from exile in England, having hoped to sound out public sentiment in Paris regarding Napoleon’s regime. “I saw my cousin for the last time, and was unable to recognize him; the shot had disfigured him and his face was gone.” Decades later, at the time he wrote this chapter, the bloodstains were still visible on the wall.

To protect him from further persecution, his friends got him elected to the Académie Française, where his very prominence might serve as a shield. The honor brought with it an obligation to make a speech. “I was determined to make my claims in favor of liberty heard and to raise my voice against tyranny,” paying homage to Legitimist monarchy and decrying “the horrors of 1793.” Napoleon himself read and edited the draft, which Chateaubriand was then allowed to publish but not to read aloud. He was “baffled” that the bowdlerized text still retained his celebration of liberty, “the greatest good and the first need of mankind,” indispensable to literature, which “languishes and dies in irons.” 

“The mixture of anger and attraction Bonaparte felt toward me is constant and strange.” The regime locked him up one day, allowed him to take a seat at the Académie the next, signed off on the publication of his latest book, then instigated attacks on it by hostile reviewers. Beside these contradictions—likely actions taken according to a strategy of carrot-and stick manipulation—Chateaubriand places his own coherence: “I examine everything. I am a republican who serves the monarchy and a philosopher who honors religion”—all “inevitable consequences of the uncertainty of theory and the certainty of practice in human life.” “My mind, made to believe in nothing, not even myself, made to disdain everything, whether splendors or miseries, nations or kings, has nevertheless been dominated by a rational instinct that ordered it to submit to what is acknowledged to be good: religion, justice, humanity, equality, liberty, glory.” Moral and divine beauty remain “superior to all earthly dreams.” “All it takes is a bit of courage to reach out and grasp it.” With the publication of The Genius of Christianity, The Martyrs, and the Itinerary, “my life of poetry and study really came to an end.” It was only with the Bourbon Restoration, following the fall of Napoleon, that he turned, or returned, to politics. He regards The Genius of Christianity as his greatest work, the one that began “the religious revolution against the philosophism of the eighteenth century” and the literary revolution of French Romanticism (“for there can be no renovation in thought without an innovation in style”).

Accordingly, he turns now to the political man about whom he could not write explicitly and at length until after the years in which his religio-poetic writings appeared. Although some have ridiculed Chateaubriand for writing himself into a ‘parallel life’ with the great Napoleon, they are wrong. The two men did have parallel but contrasting lives, the one a writer who defended liberty, the other as a despot who abused it. But each man was, in his own way, a weaver of imagined things.  Each was the preeminent Frenchman of that generation, in his way of life. Each experienced glory and exile as a result of his way of life. Who will have the last word, in the eyes of posterity—the Christian man of thought or the Enlightenment man of action? 

Chateaubriand recalls the confusion of the Legitimist monarchs at the outset of the French Revolution, which they misunderstood as a mere revolt “where they should have seen the changing of the nations, the end and the beginning of a world.” Not only the Bourbons but all the European monarchs could not fathom the rise of ‘the democracy.” Militarily, politically, diplomatically, they attempted to counter mass warfare and mass politics with the old ways of conduct. “Soon enough conscripts were going to rout Frederick’s grenadiers, monarchs were going to go plead for peace in the antechambers of obscure demagogues, and the terrible revolutionary attitude would unravel old Europe’s entanglements on the scaffold. Old Europe thought it was only warring with France and did not perceive that a new age was marching on it.” Napoleon did perceive it, reconstituting monarchy along new lines in France, and throughout the continent, where he acted as kingmaker in half a dozen countries. “How were these miracles worked? What qualities did the man who produced them possess?”

Unlike Alexander the Great, the son of a king, tutored by the greatest philosopher of his time, Napoleon “did not find power in his family; he created it.” Those who claim that Napoleon served as “merely the implementer of the social thinking that swirled around him,” embodying the ‘spirit of the age,’ do not ask themselves “how could there be a man capable of harnessing and steering so many strange supremacies.” 

Admittedly, Napoleon’s family origins weren’t low. The Buonapartes “have always been among the most ancient and most noble families,” one line in Tuscany, the other (Napoleon’s) in Corsica. During the Revolution he “was a democrat only momentarily”; “his leanings were aristocratic.” His first name had been “borne by several cardinals.” Although he falsified his birth date so that he could claim to have been born after France had taken Corsica, making him a native-born Frenchman, in his youth “he detested the French” as Corsica’s oppressors, “until their valiance gave him power.” Chateaubriand argues that Napoleon never relinquished his resentment of the French, speaking only “of himself, his empire, his soldiers, and almost never of the French” once he had achieved the summit of French politics. Rousseau had predicted that Corsica might astonish the world someday; he meant that its republican political institutions would serve as a model for the greater states. Chateaubriand confirms the conjecture, in a way. “Reared in Corsica, Bonaparte was educated in that primary school of the revolutions,” so called because the Corsicans, led by their republican hero, Filippo Antonio Pasquale de Paoli, had rebelled against their French conquerors in the years before Napoleon’s birth. And so, “to begin with, he brought us neither the calm nor the passions of the young, but a spirit already stamped with political passions.” Leaving Corsica for a French school at the age of nine, taunted by his classmates, who found his first name odd and his homeland contemptible, he told a friend, “I will do you Frenchmen all the harm I can,” as indeed he would come to do. “Morose and rebellious, he irritated his teachers. He criticized everything ruthlessly.” He got through, receiving an appointment in an artillery regiment.

There, his real education began, and not only in logistics. He read widely in history, economics, philosophy (“I do not believe a word of it,” he said of Rousseau’s first Discourse), and geography. Among the epic poets, he preferred Ariosto to Tasso, as Ariosto draws “portraits of future generals.” His own literary style, seen in his letters and even a novella, Chateaubriand describes as “declamatory,” as befits his commanding temperament.

He returned to Corsica, where the elderly but unbowed Paoli distrusted him, since young Buonaparte’s father had given up on Corsican independence, becoming Corsica’s representative to the French royal court. Rejected by his patriotic hero, in 1792 Napoleon sided with the Corsican Jacobins against Paoli’s nationalists and the Corsican Legitimists. Now senior gunner and artillery commander of the Republican forces, he returned to France to oversee the siege of Toulon, which had recognized the Bourbons and opened itself to the English navy. “Here, Bonaparte’s military career begins” in terms of its historical significance, as he formulated the plan that retook the city. Chateaubriand does not neglect to note that during the siege Napoleon laughed at how a young officer, recently married, was cut in two by an artillery shell. And he comments that Napoleon rose to prominence by killing Frenchmen. “He grew strong on our flesh; he broke our bones and fed on the marrow of lions,” allied with the bloodthirsty Jacobins while Chateaubriand himself was fighting on the Royalist side. Although offered the command of Paris by Robespierre, Napoleon declined the honor, confident that he would take Paris by his own arms, “later on.” He had correctly calculated that the Reign of Terror could not rule for long. 

Robespierre and his colleagues not being ones to take ‘no’ for an answer, he soon found himself threatened by them, as well. Truth to tell, “He was difficult to help; he accepted favors with the same grudgingness he had shown when he was promoted by the king’s munificence” in his early career. At the same time, “he resented anyone more fortunate than he was.” “Here we see a glimmering,” Chateaubriand remarks, “of the loathing the communists and proletarians of the present time express for the rich.” Chateaubriand disagrees with his cousin, Tocqueville, who hopes that the regime of social equality may prove enduring and decent. “Whatever efforts democracy may make to improve its moeurs by means of the great purpose it sets itself, its habits drag its moeurs down.” Confusing licentiousness with liberty, “it feels a strong resentment toward any sense of restriction,” and its terror-rule didn’t last because “it couldn’t kill everyone.” It is easy to overlook this, because the revolutionary armies defeated the old-regime armies arrayed against them, bringing glory to the regime. 

That regime soon had need of a brilliant commander, when Royalists in Paris, backed by the English, clashed with Republican forces. Threatened with ruin, the leader of the Parisian Republican forces turned to Napoleon, whose “quick and expert thinking” won the day, made him a hero of the people, and earned him the generalship of the French army in Italy. “At this point, Napoleon enters fully into his destiny”; “events had fashioned him, and now he is going to fashion events,” no longer needing “to bow and scrape before the mediocrities” whose patronage he had reluctantly sought. In Italy, “the eagle does not walk, he flies, with the banner of victory from his neck and wings.” He drove the Austrians out of the country, going on to defeat the Germans at Rivoli in January 1791. By mid-year he had taken Trieste and the Austrians sued for peace. “As Muhammad went forth with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, so we [French] went forth with the sword and the Rights of Man.“

Under such circumstances, in the presence of such a man, the Republicans faced the crisis of victory. With Napoleon at the head of an army of devoted soldiers far more numerous than was necessary to defend France, Republicans “fear[ed] a supreme despotism that would threaten the existence of every other despotism”—the one they had established. They praised Napoleon while casting about for a way to rid themselves of him. Napoleon himself devised an answer. Saying, “Europe is a molehill; all the great empires and revolutions have been in the East,” he announced that “I have won all the glory I can win here” and proposed a vast imperial venture, evidently in imitation of Alexander the Great, beginning with the conquest of Egypt and projected to end in India. The regime was only to happy to concur, “rush[ing] to send the victor abroad” in 1798. “This Egyptian adventure would change Napoleon’s fortune as well as his genius—gilding this genius, which was already too bright, with a ray of sun that struck at the pillars of cloud and smoke”—a reverse Exodus, a return to Egypt by France’s Pharaoh of the future.

Unlike Chateaubriand, Napoleon was “a man who never meander[ed].” Also unlike Chateaubriand, his brain was a “chaos,” combining “positive ideas and novelistic feelings, systems and chimeras, serious studies and flights of the imagination, wisdom and folly.” His traveling library on the Egyptian expedition included ‘Ossian,’ Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Rousseau’s The New Héloise, and the Old (but not the New) Testament. “From these incoherent productions of the age, he drew the Empire: an immense dream, which passed as swiftly as the disorderly darkness that brought it into the world.”

The Mamluk military class, controlled by the Ottoman Turks, ruled Egypt. Claiming to “respect God, his Prophet, and the Koran more than the Mamluks,” Napoleon marched his soldiers to the pyramids and declaimed, “From the heights of these monuments, forty centuries fix their eyes upon you!” And thanks to his courting of the Church, the Pope wrote him a letter calling him “my dearest son.” Although no devotee of the New Testament, the General knew how to be, or at least appear to be, all things to all men: Muslims, French secularists, Catholic Christians. The pose didn’t work for long. Soon enough, “his two-faced approach only made him, in the eyes of the Muslim masses, a false Christian and a false Muslim.” “By imitating Alexander, Bonaparte misjudged himself, and the age, and the state of religion—nowadays, no one can pass himself off as a god.” For a time, “his will was his destiny and his fortune,” but only for a time.

His soldiers in Egypt followed their, and his, “dreams of the Orient,” dreams going back to the Crusaders. And if the French “no longer had the faith that led them to liberate the Holy Sepulcher, they still had the boldness of crusaders, and a faith in the realms and the beauties that the troubadours and chroniclers had created around Godfrey.” But in reality, while expecting to “penetrate mysterious Egypt, descend into catacombs, excavate pyramids, unearth undiscovered manuscripts, decipher hieroglyphs, and reawaken Thermosirus,” priest of the Greek god Apollo, the god of reason, what they encountered in fact was mud huts, plague, Bedouins, Mamluks. Looking at things from several decades’ distance, Chateaubriand doesn’t quite share their disillusionment, since the French did, in the longer run, sow “seeds of civilization,” as a “ray of light stole into the darkness of Islam, and a breach was made in barbarism.”

From Egypt he marched his troops into Syria in February of 1799, pursuing his “dream of power.” Passing from Africa to Asia, “this colossal man was marching toward the conquest of the world—a conqueror bound for climes that were not to be conquered.” Climes: it was nature that would impose limits on Napoleon’s ambition, soon in Asia, later in Russia.

At Jaffa, he executed enemy soldiers who had surrendered, anticipating by many hundreds his future murder of the Duc d’Enghien. And as with that later crime, “this deed is passed over in silence or indicated vaguely in the official dispatches and accounts of men close to Bonaparte.” Ten years later, Napoleon would deplore the act of an Austrian military officer who allowed French and Bavarian prisoners to be slaughtered. “But what did he care about such contradictions? He knew the truth and toyed with it; he used it the same way he would have used a lie,” rather as Machiavelli advises his prince to judge words and men alike for their usefulness. “Heaven punishes the violation of human rights,” this time in a plague that descended upon the French troops. Claiming victory, Napoleon returned to Egypt.

Although “the French people raved about the Egyptian expedition and did not observe that it was a violation of both probity and political rights,” Chateaubriand does not join them. Indeed, he condemns European imperialism generally. Napoleon himself wanted to leave Egypt, seeing the war to have been “pointless and impolitic.” Similar plans for colonizing Egypt were entertained by the Old Regime Chateaubriand usually prefers. And the unromantic, dreamless English, who “esteem only practical politics, founded on interests,” also “consider fidelity to treaties and moral scruples childish” as the advance into other continents. Chateaubriand registers the ancient association of imperialism with tyranny.

In departing for France, Napoleon imitated Julius Caesar, who, to avoid capture by naval forces aligned with Ptolemy XIII, “saved himself by jumping into the harbor of Alexandria and swimming to shore,” where Ptolemy’s rival, Julius’ lover, Cleopatra awaited him. No Cleopatra waited for Napoleon, since love “held no real power over a man so devoted to death.” He “was bound for the secret rendezvous that another faithless potentate, Destiny, had made with him.” In Chateaubriand’s judgment, one must choose between God’s Providence, always faithful if not always smiling, and the false goddess, Fortuna. Following Machiavelli, Napoleon supposed that he could master Fortuna, but the goddess, and God, had other plans.

By the turn of the century, Fortuna remained active. “Change now sweeps the world,” with “the man of the last century,” George Washington, “step[ping] down from the stage and the man of the new century,” Bonaparte, stepping up on it. At this time, Chateaubriand remained offstage, in obscurity. “Napoleon was my age. We both emerged from the army, but when he had already won one hundred battles, I was still languishing in the shadows among those emigres who formed the pedestal of his fortune Having so far behind, could I ever catch up to him again?” Or did it matter? In exchange for Napoleon’s glorious victories, “would I have given up even one of the unremembered hours I spent in an out-of-the-way little town in England,” during his exile,” where he lived by turns in “sad poverty” and “merry destitution” with friends? Whatever the answer might be, the fact was that by the spring of 1799, when Napoleon returned to Paris from Egypt and Chateaubriand returned to Paris from London, “he had captured cities and kingdoms, his hands were full of powerful realities,” whereas “I had nothing but dreams.”

The next year, Napoleon led French troops back into Austria, then to northern Italy in a thirty-day campaign ending in the defeat of Austria. England remained at war with the Republic, by now a republic in name only, ruled by the three-man Directorate, not the Assembly, with Napoleon elected as consul for life in 1802. But by fall of the previous year, the preliminary agreements of the Treaty of Amiens ended the Wars of the French Revolution, with France relinquishing its claim to Egypt while regaining territories it had lost in the French Revolutionary Wars, England recognizing the ‘republic’ and gaining access to Continental trade for the first time in more than a decade. Napoleon used what he intended as a brief spell of peace to consolidate his power, murdering the Duc d’Enghien in March 1804 while decreeing “on the same day the Civil Code, or Napoleonic Code” in order “to teach us respect for the laws.” He would be elevated to the position of emperor less than shortly after that, an act solemnized by plebiscite by the end of the year. 

“Injured Europe was attempting to bandage its wounds.” A new military coalition formed against he obvious threat presented by the newly crowned French potentate. Napoleon would greet his rivals at Austerlitz.

 

François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1800-1815. Books XIII-XVI. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.

 

Exiled to England after having fought on the royalist side in the French civil war of the 1790s, Chateaubriand returned to France in 1800, where the future First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte was even then “restoring order through despotism.” He writes this thirteenth chapter of his Memoirs thirty-six years later, in Dieppe, where the seventeenth-century aristocrat, Anne Geneviève de Bourbon, Madame de Longueville, herself had set off for exile during the Fronde. As he walked the cliff behind the chateau where he was staying, Chateaubriand thought of the “monarchic grandeur” of the splendid century and the “plebeian celebrity” of his own time. “I now compared the men at these two ends of society,” “ask[ing] myself to which of these epochs I would prefer to belong.” While the persons of the Old Regime—Louis XIV, Richelieu, Mazarin, Turenne, the Prince of Condé—impressed him far more than the mediocrities of the ever-democratizing nineteenth century, “What are the troubles of 1648 compared to the Revolution that has devoured the old world, of which it will die perhaps, leaving behind neither an old nor a new society.” The “facts” of the present century, “the value of events,” counterpoise the persons, “the value of names,” of the seventeenth. 

The Memoirs preserve the names of Chateaubriand and his contemporaries. He thinks of his memoirs as “Confessions,” having in mind Saint Augustine, who prayed to God, “Be Thou a tabernacle unto my soul,” asking of his readers, “When you find me in these books of mine, pray for me.” Men need to pray and to be prayed for, inasmuch as their living memories can fail them and the memory of their own lives will soon fade in the minds of their contemporaries. “Oh, the vanity of man forgetting and forgotten!” 

In France, when he arrived from eight years of exile during the revolutionary wars, “everywhere was mud and dust, muck and rubble”—betokening a nation “beginning a world anew” (Chateaubriand slyly borrows a slogan from the Revolutionists), “like those nations emerging from the barbarian, ruinous night of the Dark Ages.” “France was now as new to me as the American forests had been.” The transformation was more than physical. “We have no idea today of the impression the excesses of the revolution had made on European minds, and above all on men who had not been in France during the Terror,” as “it seemed to me that I was literally about to descend into Hell,” with no Virgil to guide him. At the site where the guillotine had severed the heads of Louis XVI and Chateaubriand’s brother and sister-in-law, “I feared stepping in the blood not a trace of which remained.” With such memories of imagination, and after so many years in England, “talking, writing, and even thinking in English,” only “gradually I came to savor the sociability that distinguishes us—that charming, simple, rapid exchange of intelligence, that absence of all stiffness and prejudice that disregard of great fortunes and names, that natural leveling of all ranks, and that equality of minds which makes French society unlike any other, and which redeems our faults.” “After a few months’ residence among us, a man feels that he can no longer live except in Paris.”

Revisiting “the places where I had led my youthful dreams,” he found that while “so many heads had rolled…yet the rabble remained,” attending such entertainments as a magic-lantern horror show in what had been a cloister for the Capuchins. French religiosity, for centuries woven into the way of life, had itself suffered decapitation. Politically, as he writes these words in 1836, three regimes contend with one another: the Republic, with its principle of equality; the Napoleonic Empire, with its principle of power; and the monarchic Restoration, with its principle of liberty. Chateaubriand had missed all but the beginning of the Republican era. “No one had ever seen, and no one will ever see again, physical order produced by moral disorder, unity issuing from government by the multitude, the scaffold substituted for the rule of law and obeyed in the name of humanity.” A year after his arrival, he witnessed the second regime change, in which returned exiles concealed their identities, even their nationality, in “an agreed-upon travesty” so as not to offend the partisans of the Republican regime, now replaced, or the Napoleonic regime, now triumphant. “The returning émigré chatted peaceably with the murderers of a few of his relations.” Former revolutionaries had enriched themselves, some assuming aristocratic titles; the “Brutuses and Scaevolas” of the Terror now found employment as Napoleon’s police. “A vigorous generation was growing up, sown in blood, but raised to spill only the blood of foreigners,” as Napoleon would soon have them do. “Day by day, the transformation of republicans into imperialists—and from the tyranny of all into the despotism of one—was coming to pass.”

There was little a solitary and unknown writer could do about French politics, except to witness it. As it happened, however, he did more than he imagined in the realm of moral sentiment, secular and spiritual. The publication of his novel, Atala, began “my public career.” Although the substance was more or less Rousseauian, the style was new—a rejection of the tepid neo-classicism of the time, inaugurating the Romantic style in France as surely as Goethe’s Werther had done in Germany. “The old century rejected it, and the new one welcomed it.” 

“I became all the rage. My head was turned. I was unacquainted with the pleasures of self-importance, and I was intoxicated by them: I loved fame like a woman or, rather, like a first love,” sneaking into cafés to read “my praises sung in one or another unknown little paper.” “If I was not spoiled by all this, I must really have a good nature.” Still, “I did not have to wait long to be punished for my authorial vanity,” as “the profits of fame are charged to the soul.” He was introduced first to the sister, then to the brother of Bonaparte. His eventual acquaintance with the Emperor would indeed challenge his soul, test the goodness of his nature rather more sternly than the rapturous “perfumed notes” he had begun to receive from admirers. In the meantime, he spent his evenings in a circle of returned exiles, the salon of Madame la Comtesse de Beaumont, whose father, once “entrusted with the business of foreign affairs under Louis XVI,” had died on the scaffold. There was Louis-Mercelin de Fontanes, a poet, Grandmaster of the Imperial University, perpetual reviser of his own works; Louis de Bonald, who had fought alongside the royalists in the 11790s, but a philosophic modernist; and Charles-Julien de Chênedollé, another poet and veteran of the royalist army. It was de Fontanes whose “muse full of awestruck faith that directed mine toward the new paths she was hastening to make,” the paths toward The Genius of Christianity. In going back to the seventeenth century, to the works of Corneille and Racine, de Fontanes had acquired the strength of that fruitful age and sloughed off the sterility of the century that followed.” But of all his friends in this circle, Chateaubriand remembers Joseph Joubert most fondly, a man who “will forever be missed by those who knew him,” exercising “an extraordinary hold on the mind and heart.” “Once he had taken possession of you his image was there like a fact, like a fixed idea, like an obsession you could not shake.” “A profound metaphysician, his philosophy, following an elaboration all its own, became like painting or poetry.” He never completed anything, having “adopted an idea of perfection that prevented him.” “I am like an aeolian harp that makes beautiful sounds and plays no tune,” he confessed. He finally came to Catholicism before his death; “I will not be seeing him down here again.”

“Never again will there be a place where so many distinguished people belonging to different ranks and destinies come together under the same roof, able to chat on equal terms about the most ordinary or lofty things: a simplicity of speech that did not derive from indigence but from conscious choice. These were perhaps the last gatherings at which the wit of the old regime made its appearance,” with “an urbanity…born of education and transformed by long use into an attribute of character.” It was by Madame de Beaumont’s kind patronage that Chateaubriand was able to complete The Genius of Christianity. The project must have seemed a work out of season. “Accuracy in the representation of inanimate objects is the spirit of the arts in our times. It heralds high poetry and true drama’s decline into decadence,” as “we content ourselves with insignificant beauties when we are powerless to create great ones,” imitating “armchairs and velvet cushions to trick the eye when we are no longer able to depict the person seated on those cushions and chairs” thanks to our “realism of material form. “For the public, who have become materialists themselves, demand it.”

With the publication of the new book, “the Voltairean contingent raised a cry and rushed to arms.” Chateaubriand’s prospects looked dubious: “what hope was there for a nameless young man to undo the influence of Voltaire, in ascendance for more than half a century”? But on the contrary, “there was a need for faith, a craving for religious consolations which came of being so long deprived of them,” after the violence of Republican revolution and of Republican wars. “People hastened to the house of God as they hasten to the doctor’s house during a plague.” And the First Consul approved, having made overtures to the Catholic Church in order to “build his power upon society’s earliest foundation.” “Later, he would repent of his mistake. Ideas of legitimate monarchy came in with those religious ideas,” and the Bourbons were still alive. The Genius of Christianity had a more enduring effect than it had on Bonaparte’s ever-shifting tactics. “If the work represented an innovation of literary style, it also represented a change of doctrine”: in its wake, “atheism and materialism were no longer the basis of belief or unbelief in young minds.” “A person was no longer nailed in place by anti-religious prejudice,” anti-Christlike; “he no longer felt himself obliged to remain a mummy of nullity bound in the bandages of philosophy,” and not very good philosophy, at that. After all, what are Saint-Simonianism, Phalansterism Fourierism, and Humanism next to the metaphysics of Abelard, Saint Bernard, or Thomas Aquinas? “The shock The Genius of Christianity delivered to men’s minds thrust the eighteenth century out of its rut and put it off the road for good.”

It was the one possible counter to Bonaparte. Science continued apace, following the lead of eighteenth-century materialism. But scientists had no answer to despotism. “The Laplaces, the Lagranges, the Monges, the Chaptals, the Berthollets, all of these prodigies, once proud democrats, became Napoleon’s most obsequious servants.” “These men whose research had soared to the loftiest heavens could not raise their souls above Bonaparte’s boots.” “They pretended to have no need of God, and that is why they had need of a tyrant.”  It was “the men of letters” who pushed for freedom, as “Christianity is the thought of the future and of human liberty” as well as “the only basis for social equality,” balancing equality “with the sense of duty which corrects and regulates the democratic impulse.” While a despot’s commands, and even the commands of Republican law, can change, being “the work of mortal and various men,” morality “springs from the immutable order,” and “it alone can endure.” “Wherever Christianity has prevailed, it has changed, minds, rectified notions of justice and injustice, substituted affirmation for doubt, embraced the whole human race with its doctrines and precepts.” Chateaubriand goes so far as to pin his own hopes for divine mercy on the continued influence of The Genius of Christianity. As for literary affairs here below, he thought at the time that writers will henceforth divide between the style of the Enlightenment savants and that of the “classical models,” the models of the seventeenth century, albeit presented “in the new light” of what became known as Romanticism, its Gothicism animated by a reanimated spirit of Christianity. And more: “What has touched me—at least I have ventured to think so—is the thought that I have done some little good, that I have consoled a few distressed souls, that I have revived in a mother’s breast the hope of raising a Christian child, which is to say a submissive, respectful child, attached to his parents.” 

Enter Bonaparte, “the Man of his times” on the verge of taking “his seat at the head of the table of the human race.” They met in 1802, at a reception given by his brother Lucien, Minister of the Interior. “He made a favorable impression on me”—his smile engaging, his eyes “marvels to behold,” with “nothing of the charlatan in his gaze, nothing theatrical or affected.” He had read Bonaparte’s book and it had “struck a chord” with him. “A prodigious imagination animated that coldly calculating politician: he would not have been what he was if the Muse had not been with him. Reason effectuated a poet’s ideas. All these men who lead great lives are a compound of two natures, for they must be capable of both inspiration and action; one man conceives the plan, the other executes it.” Recognizing Chateaubriand (the incident had surely been arranged), he engaged him with a few remarks about the grandeur of Christianity. Chateaubriand recalls his previous interview with George Washington, “the man of the last century,” who sent him away “with a kindly wish.” Napoleon would soon send him away “with a crime.”

Before that, however, the First Consul had use for Chateaubriand, appointing him First Secretary of the French embassy in Rome. (“He was a great discoverer of men; but he wanted them to put their talents to work only for him,” as “there was to be no one but Napoleon in the universe.”)  On his way to his appointment, he recalled that his route to the south followed that of Hannibal, whereby “the vengeance of the human race bore down upon a free people, who could not establish their greatness except through slavery and the rest of the world’s blood.” So it would be for the French, under the command of Napoleon. Chateaubriand takes care to distinguish Napoleon from the French soldiers he sent to war. On his way to Rome, he saw Milan, occupied by the French army. The troops were not oppressors, there. “Lively, witty, intelligent, the French soldier involves himself in the doings of the people he lives among. He draws water from the well, like Moses for the daughters of Midian.” 

“Not only is ancient Italy gone, medieval Italy has vanished,” both leaving traces behind. Saint Peter’s Cathedral “and its masterworks,” the Roman Capital “and its ruins” stand on opposite sides of the Tiber. “Planted in the same dust, pagan Rome subsides deeper and deeper into its tombs, while Christian Rome is descending again, little by little, into its catacombs.” The desperately ill Madame de Beaumont joined him there. On her deathbed, she told the priest that “she had always been deeply faithful at heart but that the unthinkable horrors that had befallen her during the Revolution had, for a time, made her doubt the justice of Providence; that she was prepared to confess her transgression and to put herself at the mercy of God; but that she hoped the sorrows she had suffered in this world would curtail her expiation in the other.” She died “without the slightest sign of fear”; Chateaubriand pressed his hand on her heart and felt it stop. She “was the very soul of a vanishing society.” With her death, Chateaubriand decided to give up his political career. “You have not experienced desolation of the heart if you have never lingered on alone, wandering in places lately inhabited by a person who made your life worthwhile.” He also conceived of writing his memoirs, “the one work capable of mollifying my grief,” as he wrote to Joubert. “Rest easy, though,” he continued. “These will not be confessions painful to my friends,” following the bad example of Rousseau. “I will say nothing of myself not in keeping with my dignity as a man and, I daresay, with the exaltation of my heart,” for “it is not lying in the eyes of God if we reveal only those parts of our life that will encourage noble and generous feelings in our fellow man.” “There’s no shortage of examples if one wants to see poor human nature trounced.” [1]

Rome, ancient and medieval. Against the excesses of modernity, Chateaubriand sets his memoirs, defending both elements of the Old Regime: “religion alone commanded my attention with its seriousness and the loftier considerations it suggested to me”; at the same time “I thought I understood the importance the ancients attached to the value of their name,” to honoring the dead in remembrance. “Perhaps, among the great men of antiquity, this idea of an immortal human life took the place of the immortality of the soul, which for them remained a riddle.” It is true that death is a blessing. As Chateaubriand reads the Book of Genesis, after Adam comes to know evil, God mercifully prevents him from taking the fruit of the tree of life; knowing evil, Adam “is now oppressed by misery” and “should therefore not live forever.” “What a gift from God is death!” Only God can bear the misery of knowing evil.

And “such enormous misery!” In the thirty-five years since Madame Beaumont’s death, he has seen how “man stumbles from one mistake to the next.” “When he is young and drives his life before him, he still has a shadow of an excuse, but when he is yoked to his life and drags it painfully behind him, what excuses him then? Our days excuse one another. Our life is a perpetual blush, for it is a neverending blunder.”

In the parallel but sharply contrasting soul of Napoleon, plans for imperial conquest gestated, as “his genius”—distant from the genius of Christianity—”was “growing to keep up with the greatness of events.” That genius didn’t endure death but dealt it out. “He had the capacity, like gunpower expanding, to blow the world away.” Napoleon wanted to retain him in his service, establishing a new republic in a Catholic section of the Alps for that purpose. In March 1804, back in Paris, Chateaubriand presented himself to Napoleon prior to departing for his new assignment. He saw a change in the man. “There must be something strange going on we don’t know about,” he told his friends, as there was “something sinister” in Bonaparte’s eyes. “A superior man does not bring forth evil painlessly, for it is not its natural fruit, and he should not bear it.” Two days later, he learned that Louis-Antoine Henri de Bourbon, the Duc d’Enghien, had been sentenced to death by a hastily-arranged military court.

The Duc d’Enghien had commanded a corps of émigrés in the Army of Condé, the royalist troops who had attempted to retake France for the monarchy in the 1790s. He had been condemned to death by the First Republic. Now, more than a decade later, Napoleon had received police reports, which were false, claiming that the Duc had been conspiring with royalists to undertake a coup d’état against him. He refused an interview when the Duc sought to exonerate himself, after which a firing squad killed him. The killing alarmed monarchs throughout Europe, with Czar Alexander fatefully determining that Napoleon must be resisted. Later on, one French cynic judged the execution “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” Chateaubriand, immediately understood it as worse than a blunder but a crime, a legal murder. Against his wife’s pleadings—she saw that “the lion had tasted blood, and this was not a moment to irritate him”—he wrote a letter of resignation. 

“There are times when loftiness of soul is a veritable infirmity. No one understands it; it passes for a kind of closed-mindedness, a prejudice, an obtuse ingrained habit, a caprice, a foible that prevents you from seeing things as they are,” making yourself, in the eyes of “the mediocre,” “a stranger to the march of the age, the movement of ideas, the transformation of mores, the progress of society.” Not so with Napoleon himself, however. No mediocrity, he much later told Chateaubriand’s old friend, M. de Fontanes, that “my resignation was one of the things that had most impressed him.” This did not of course prevent Napoleon to hold “the sword suspended above my head until the day of his downfall.” They were linked together, now. “Our two natures, opposite in so many respects, always reared their heads again, and if he would gladly have had me shot, killing him wouldn’t have weighed too heavily on my conscience.”

In Paris, fears of a Robespierre-like Reign of Terror flared. The Bourbon exile Louis XVIII wrote to the King of Spain, “There can be nothing in common between me and the great criminal whom audacity and fortune have placed on the throne that he has had the barbarity to soil with the pure blood of a Bourbon, de Duc d’Enghien. Religion might make me pardon a murderer, but the tyrant of my people must always be my enemy.” Gustav IV of Sweden—who, unlike the young Louis XVIII, had actually reigned as the king of his country—also “dared to raise his voice in defense of the young French prince,” who had been the last of the eminent Condé line. Gustav condemned this violation of “the laws of chivalry” in a Europe that had long since abandoned them. “Alas, we had gone through too many different forms of despotism.” In their obsequiousness, most of Napoleon’s contemporaries “sputtered congratulations on the dangers the First Consult had just escaped” and “society rapidly returned to its pleasures, for it was afraid of its grief,” of being convicted of “the crime of memory.”

Chateaubriand asks himself, if Bonaparte had not killed the Duc d’Enghien, “what would have been the result for me?”  A glittering political career, with no more literary productions. “France may have gained something from my alliance with the emperor, but I would have lost something. Perhaps I would have succeeded in preserving a few ideas of liberty and moderation in the great man’s head; but my life, classed among those called ‘happy,’ would have been deprived of what has given it character and honor: poverty, struggle, and independence.” Instead, he followed the way of the Man of Sorrows, against the modern Caesar. 

As for Bonaparte, “he was not able to subdue his conscience as he had subdued the world.” Like so many human beings, “superior men and little men alike,” he tried to pass off his error “as a work of genius—a monumental scheme beyond the grasp of the vulgar,” an attempt dictated by pride and believed by folly. Bonaparte thought of himself as Napoleon, man of destiny. “How it justifies, chalking it all up to destiny, the evil that we do ourselves!” And so, the man who murders his father excuses himself by saying, “I was made like that!” Chateaubriand replies: “But what do I care if you were made like that? Am I expected to submit to your way of being?” God, the ultimate reality, God alone is entitled to make such a demand. “When people cannot erase their errors, they deify them; they make a dogma of their misdeeds, they change their sacrileges into a religion, and they would consider themselves apostates if they gave up worshipping their vices.”

“There is a serious lesson to be drawn from Bonaparte’s life.” He was ruined by two bad actions whose consequences only turned unfavorable years later. The first was the murder of d’Enghien, which marked him as a dangerous man in the eyes of Europe; the second, in 1807-08, was his betrayal of his ally, Spain, a year into the Peninsular War, which eventually drew British intervention. It is true that he prevailed initially after both crimes, rolling up victories against Spain, Prussia, and Russia in that decade, but ultimately “it did no good for him to ride over [these crimes] in glory; they remained, and they ruined him.” With them, “he violated the laws of morality while neglecting and scorning his true strength, which is to say his superior capacity for order and equity. As long as he concentrated his attacks on anarchy and the foreign enemies of France, he was victorious; he found himself robbed of his vigor only when he entered upon the paths of corruption.” A crime always “bears within it a radical incapacity and a germ of tragedy,” a flaw or crack in the soul that weakens the criminal. Proof of this may be seen not only in the response of the King of Sweden, but the Russian cabinet’s protests, prefiguring later wars, and the Prussian campaign of 1806, the War of the Fourth Coalition, which Frederick William III called an act avenging the Duc’s murder. To be sure, France won that war, going on to defeat Russia, too, in 1807, but the animosities that brought on Napoleon’s eventual ruin began with the murder and subsequent war with Spain. “These historical details, which are rarely noted, deserve to be for they explain enmities whose first cause would be very difficult to locate elsewhere, and at the same time they reveal those steps by which Providence leads the destiny of a man from the crime to the punishment.”

Bonaparte’s soul became progressively disfigured. “He became suspicious; he inspired fear; people lost confidence in him and in his destiny; he was compelled to see, if not to seek out, men he would never have seen before, and who, because they had been admitted into his company, believed they had become his equals. Their defilement infected him. His nature began to deteriorate.” It is Chateaubriand’s answer not only to Bonaparte but to Machiavelli and his attack on Christianity.

 

 

Note

1. In this, André Malraux takes Chateaubriand, not Rousseau, as his model. See his Anti-Memoirs (Terence Kilmartin translation, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).