FRANÇOIS-AUGUSTE-RENÉ VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND (1847)

Diplomat and author, one of the first Romantic writers in France.

He had a profound influence on the youth of his day, voicing their innermost aspirations, and he rendered exotic accounts of America and its Indians. But his most enduring preoccupation was himself, and his memoirs have proved to be his most enduring work.

The youngest child of an eccentric and impecunious noble, he spent his school holidays largely with his sister in the romantic solitudes of the family estate at Combourg with its half-derelict medieval castle set in ancient oak woods and wild heaths. After leaving school, he eventually became a cavalry officer.

At the beginning of the French Revolution, he refused to join the Royalists and sailed in April 1791 for the United States, a stay memorable chiefly for his travels with fur traders through virgin forests and for his firsthand acquaintance, with Indians.

After learning of Louis XVI´s flight in June 1791, he felt that he owed obligations to the monarchy and returned to France.

Penniless, he married an insipid heiress of 17, took her to Paris, which he found too expensive; he then left her and joined the Royalist army. Wounded at the siege of Thionville, he was discharged.

He went to England in May 1793. Often destitute, he supported himself by translating and teaching. He began his Essai sur les révolutions (1797), an emotional survey of world history as a constant repetition of such upheavals as the French Revolution. In the work, Chateaubriand voiced many of the rationalists arguments of the Enlightenment against Christianity, but he also upheld its poetic and spiritual appeal.

In 1800 Chateaubriand returned to Paris, where he worked as a free-lance journalist and continued to write his books. A fragment of an unfinished Indian epic appeared as Atala (1801); immediately successful, it combined the simplicity of a classical idyll with the more troubled beauties of Romanticism.

Shortly after the death of his mother in 1798, Chateaubriand reconciled his conflict between religion and rationalism and returned to traditional Christianity. His treatise extolling Christianity, Le Génie du christianisme (1802), which he began in London, won favour both with the Royalists and with Napoleon, who was restoring Catholicism as the state religion.

Chateaubriand became first secretary to the embassy at Rome in 1803. In 1804, when Napoleon stunned France with the unfair trial and hasty execution of the duc d´Enghien on a flimsy pretext of conspiracy. Chateaubriand resigned his posts in protest. He spent the next years in literary work and in many love affairs. In 1811 he was elected to the Académie Française.

With the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814, Chateaubriand´s hopes of a political career revived. In 1815 he was created a viscount and a member of the House of Peers. In financial difficulties, he found his only pleasure in his liaison with Mme. Récamier who illumined the rest of his life. He began Mémoires d´outre-tombe, his memoirs from "beyond the tomb", written for posthumous publication and perhaps his most lasting monument.

After six months as ambassador to Berlin in 1821, he became ambassador to London in 1822. He represented France at the Congress of Verona in 1822 and served as minister of foreign affairs under the ultra-Royalist premier Joseph, comte de Villèle, until 1824. In this capacity he brought France into the war withSpain in 1823 to restore that country´s Bourbon king Ferdinand VII. The campaign was a success, but its high cost diminished the prestige Chateaubriand won by it. He passed the rest of his life privately, except for a year as ambassador to Rome (1828-29).