Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb

"Yes, he died in 1848. The first thing everyone says about Chateaubriand is that he was the literary inventor of French romanticism. He came from a provincial aristocratic family from Brittany, fallen on hard times, but his father had done something to restore its fortunes. So he comes from of an ultra-traditionalist family in the last years of the Ancien Régime. He talks about being presented at court to Louis XVI. Louis XVI addresses one word to him and he’s very amusing about this. Then he played a role as a representative of the Breton nobility in 1789 in the lead-up to the French Revolution . He comes from this conservative, highly traditional background and arrives in Paris during the first stages of the revolution. Initially he had a certain sympathy with what they were trying to do but, with a kind of aristocratic fastidiousness, he didn’t like what he saw in the streets from the very beginning. He has wonderful passages on the early violence and the crowds and the demagogy and none of that appealed to his sensibility. But he wasn’t by any means totally out of sympathy with some of the early aspirations for a more liberal monarchy. Then he spends some time in America and comes back to France just before the Terror is getting into its full stride in 1792. He goes into exile with the émigrés, then actually fights with the royalist forces, the Austrians and the Prussians, against the revolution, is quite badly wounded, and goes into exile in London. He’s in London from 1793 until he returns to France in 1802 after Napoleon has taken power. He works in London on a book about the origins of the revolution, but also the book that made his reputation, Génie du Christianisme, The Genius of Christianity , which was really a major Romantic statement. It was about re-discovering Catholicism and the beauty of Christianity. Back in France, he’s actually appointed to a diplomatic position by Napoleon , but quarrels with him very quickly in 1804 when he thinks Napoleon is becoming despotic, after the assassination of the Duc d’Enghien, an important member of the Bourbon family. At that point Chateaubriand goes into a kind of internal exile in France, and it’s when he’s in this internal exile in France, he’s persona non grata, he retires to his estates in the country, La Vallée aux Loups, the house he bought not far from Paris, that he starts to write these memoirs. Then, after the Restoration in 1815, he becomes a big figure in French politics. He becomes ambassador to London, ambassador to Berlin. So he’s writing the memoir over the rest of his life. The memoirs are written from the period when he was in internal exile right up until his death. One of the fascinating things about the book is that it’s a work continuously in progress, where the disillusioned old man, or ageing man, is reflecting on his life and how things haven’t worked out and so on. I think this takes us to why de Gaulle was so fascinated by Chateaubriand. I chose this book because de Gaulle himself has said it had ‘haunted’ him. He said that when he started to re-read it in 1947-48, as he was beginning to think about his own memoirs. He said in a letter he wrote to Chateaubriand’s great grand-niece, that this book had lived with him since he first read it when he was twelve. He comes back to it again in 1969, when he starts his next set of memoirs after he’s left power, after May ’68. So Chateaubriand lives with him, and in his notebooks there are endless quotations from Chateaubriand and his speeches. What fascinates de Gaulle about Chateaubriand is that this was a man who had been presented at court to Louis XVI as a young man, who had lived through the revolution, who lived through the post-revolution, and actually just lived to see the early days of the revolution of 1848. Chateaubriand was a man caught between two worlds – a man of the old world, who’s having to think about the new world made by the revolution, and his whole writing is suffused with a kind of melancholy, in the sense that you have to accept that the world has changed. That parallels de Gaulle. What fascinates de Gaulle in Chateaubriand, a running theme in Chateaubriand’s memoirs, is the tension between dreaming about the world as you want it and accepting the world as it is; finding a way between dreams and realities. Songes (dreams) is one of Chateaubriand’s favourite words, and de Gaulle wrote in his memoirs (slightly misquoting Chateaubriand), ‘What have I tried to do except to lead the French by dreams to reality?’ There’s a deep melancholy in Chateaubriand. There will be moments when he says, ‘Is any of this worthwhile, is anybody going to read me in 20 years’ time, will I even be remembered, do I count?’ There’s an element of play-acting in that, but there is also an element of genuine despair. De Gaulle once said about Chateaubriand, “what attracts me in Chateaubriand is his despair”. I think one of the aspects of a romantic sensibility is that sense of the meaninglessness of life. Also, Chateaubriand has this extraordinarily complicated relationship to Napoleon. He felt that Napoleon was a despot but, at the same time, had a romantic fascination with him. De Gaulle had a similar, very complicated relationship with Napoleon. On one level, he wrote a lot about Napoleon, the great figure of the early 19th century, and yet de Gaulle once said that Napoleon left France smaller than he found it. You could say a lot of Chateaubriand’s book is a meditation on Napoleon."