CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANcOIS RENE, VICOMTE DE (1768-1848), French author, youngest son of Rene Auguste de Chateaubriand, Comte de Combourg, was born at St. Malo on Sept. 4, 1768. He was a brilliant representative of the reaction against the ideas of the French Revolution, and the most con spicuous figure in French literature during the First Empire. His naturally poetical temperament was fostered in childhood by picturesque influences, the mysterious reserve of his morose father, the ardent piety of his mother, the traditions of his ancient family, the legends and antiquated customs of the seques tered Breton district, above all, the vagueness and solemnity of the neighbouring ocean. His closest friend was his sister Lucille,' a passionate-hearted girl, divided between her devotion to him and to religion. Francois received his education at Dol and Rennes. From Rennes he proceeded to the College of Dinan, to prepare for the priesthood, but decided, after a year's holiday at the family château of Combourg (1786) to enter the army. In 1788 he received the tonsure in order to enter the order of the Knights of Malta. In Paris (1787-89) he met La Harpe, Evariste Parny, "Pindare" Lebrun, Nicolas Chamfort, Pierre Louis Ginguene, and others, of whom he has left portraits in his memoirs. In 1791 he departed for America to take part in a romantic scheme for the discovery of the North-West Passage. The passage was not found or even attempted, but the adventurer returned from his seven months' stay in America enriched with new ideas and new imagery. In 1792 he married Mlle. Celeste Buisson de Lavigne, a girl of 17, who brought him a small for tune. He then joined the emigres, and after many vicissitudes reached London, where he lived in great poverty.
From his English exile (1794-99) dates the Natchez (first printed in his Oeuvres completes, 1826-31), a prose epic portray ing the life of the Red Indians. Two brilliant episodes originally designed for this work, Atala and Rene, are famous. Chateau briand's first publication, however, was the Essai historique, poli tique et moral sur les revolutions . . . (London, 1797), which the author subsequently retracted, but did not suppress. In this volume he appears as a mediator between royalist and revolution 'Her Oeuvres were edited in 1879, with a memoir, by Anatole ary ideas, a free-thinker in religion, and a disciple of Rousseau. A great change in his views was, however, at hand, induced, if we accept his own statement, by a letter from his sister Julie (Mme. de Farcy), telling him of the grief his views had caused his mother, who had died soon after her release from the Conciergerie in the same year. His brother had perished on the scaffold in April and both his sisters, Lucile and Julie, and his wife had been imprisoned at Rennes. Mme. de Farcy did not long survive her imprisonment.
On Chateaubriand's return to France in i800 the Genie du christianisme was already in an advanced state. Chateaubriand's favourite resort in Paris was the salon of Pauline de Beaumont, who was to fill a great place in his life, and gave him some help in the preparation of his book. Atala, ou les amours de deux sauvages dans le desert, used as an episode in the Genie du christianisme, appeared separately in 1801 and immediately made his reputation. Alike in its merits and defects the piece is a more emphatic and highly coloured Paul et Virginie. The Genie du christianisme, ou beautes de la religion chretienne, appeared in 1802, upon the eve of Napoleon's re-establishment of the Catholic religion in France. No coincidence could have been more oppor tune, and Chateaubriand esteemed himself the counterpart of Napoleon in the intellectual order. The work is not to be judged by its apologetics, but as a masterpiece of literary art. Its in fluence in French literature was immense. The Eloa of Alfred de Vigny, the Harmonies of Lamartine and even the Legende des siecles of Victor Hugo may be said to have been inspired by the Genie du christianisme. At the moment of publication it admir ably subserved the statecraft of Napoleon, and Talleyrand in 1803 appointed the writer attaché to the French legation at Rome, whither he was followed by Mme. de Beaumont, who died there.
When his insubordinate and intriguing spirit compelled his recall he was transferred as envoy to the canton of the Valais. The murder of the duke of Enghien (March 21, 1804) took place before he took up this appointment. Chateaubriand im mediately resigned his post. In 1807 he offended Napoleon by an article in the Mercure de France (July 4), containing allusions to Nero which were rightly taken to refer to the emperor. The Mercure, of which he had become proprietor, was temporarily suppressed, and was in the next year amalgamated with the Dec ade. In 1806, he had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, under taken in quest of new imagery. He returned by way of Tunis, Carthage, Cadiz and Granada. At Granada he met Mme. de Mouchy, and the place and the meeting apparently suggested the romantic tale of Le Dernier Abencerage, which, for political reasons, remained unprinted until the publication of the Oeuvres completes (1826-31). The journey also produced L'Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem . . . (3 vols., 181I ), and inspired his prose epic, Les Martyrs, on le triomplie de la religion chretienne (2 vols., 1809). Rene had appeared in 1802 as an episode of the Genie du christianisme, and a separate unauthorized edition appeared at Leipzig. The tale forms a connecting link in European literature between Werther and Childe Harold; it paints the misery of a morbid and dissatisfied soul. Chateaubriand betrayed amazing egotism in describing his sister Lucile in the Amelie of the story, and much is obviously descriptive of his own early surroundings. With Les Natchez his career as an imaginative writer is closed. In 1831 he published his Etudes on discours jiistoriques ... (4 vols.) dealing with the fall of the Roman empire.
Chateaubriand's vanity and ambition made him dangerous and untrustworthy as a political associate. He was forbidden to de liver the address he had prepared (18r 1) for his reception to the Academy on M. J. Chenier on account of the bitter allusions to Napoleon contained in it. From this date until 1814 Chateau briand lived in seclusion at the Vallee-aux-loups, an estate he had bought in 1807 at Aulnay. His pamphlet De Bonaparte, des Bourbons, et de la necessite de se rallier •a nos princes legitimes, appeared on March 31, 1814, the day of the entrance of the allies into Paris. Louis XVIII. declared that it had been worth a hundred thousand men to him. Chateaubriand, as minister of the interior, accompanied him to Ghent during the Hundred Days, and for a time associated himself with the excesses of the royalist reaction. But he rapidly drifted into liberalism and opposition, and was disgraced in Sept. 1816 for his pamphlet De la monarchie salon la charte. He had to sell his library and his house of the Vallee-aux-loups.
After the fall of his opponent, the duc Decazes, Chateaubriand obtained the Berlin embassy (1821), from which he was trans ferred to London (1822), and he also acted as French plenipoten tiary at the Congress of Verona (1822). He here made himself mainly responsible for the iniquitous invasion of Spain. He was foreign minister for a brief period, and then, after another inter lude of effective pamphleteering in opposition, accepted the embassy to Rome in 1827, under the Martignac administration, but resigned it at Prince Polignac's accession to office.
During the first half of Louis Philippe's reign he wrote a Memoire sur la captivite de madame la duchesse de Berry (1833) and other legitimist pamphlets; but as the prospect of his again performing a conspicuous part diminished, he relapsed into an attitude of complete discouragement. His Congres de Verone (1838), Vie de Rance (1844), and his translation of Milton, Le Paradis perdu de Milton (1836), belong to the writings of these later days. He died on July 4, 1848, affectionately tended by his old friend Madame Recamier, herself deprived of sight. For the last 15 years of his life he had been engaged on his Memoires, and his chief distraction had been his daily visit to Madame Recamier, at whose house he met the European celebrities. He was buried in the Grand Be, an islet in the bay of St. Malo. Shortly of ter his death appeared his celebrated Memoires d'outre-tombe (12 vols., 1849-50). These memoirs undoubtedly reveal his vanity, his egotism, the frequent hollowness of his professed convictions, and his incapacity for sincere attachment, except, perhaps, in the case of Madame Recamier. Though the book must be read with the greatest caution where others are concerned, it is perhaps now the most read of all his works.
Chateaubriand is chiefly significant as marking the transition from the old classical to the modern romantic school. The fertility of ideas, vehemence of expression and luxury of natural descrip tion, which he shares with the romanticists, are controlled by a discipline learnt in the school of their predecessors. His palette, always brilliant, is never gaudy; he is not merely a painter but an artist. He is a master of epigrammatic and incisive sayings. Perhaps, however, the most truly characteristic feature of his genius is the peculiar magical touch which Matthew Arnold indicated as a note of Celtic extraction, which supplies an element of sincerity to Chateaubriand's declamation. Egotism was his master-passion. He is a signal instance of the compatibility of genuine poetic emotion, of sympathy with the grander aspects both of man and nature, and of munificence in pecuniary matters, with absorption in self and general sterility of heart.