by Will Durant
He visited Mme. de Staël’s revived salon, and found that she had lost all interest in him. Since Charlotte was still in Germany, he announced in his journal (August 31, 1814) that he had fallen in love with Mme. Récamier, whose strategy of trembling but impregnable virginity he had long ridiculed. He confided to the Duc de Broglie that he had tried to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for the body of Juliette Récamier.85 As she had been an ardent supporter of the Bourbons, she feared for her safety when she learned that Napoleon had escaped from Elba and had landed at Cannes. She inspired Constant to publish in the Journal de Paris (March 6, 1815) a call to the people of France to rise against the “Usurper.” “Napoleon promises peace, but his very name is a signal for war. He promises victory; yet three times—in Egypt, Spain, and Russia—he deserted his armies like a coward.”86 La Récamier had lit in the inflammable Constant a fire that seemed to be burning all bridges behind him. On March 19 he proclaimed in the Journal des débats that he was ready to die for the restored King. That night Louis XVIII fled to Ghent; the next day Napoleon entered Paris; Constant hid in the United States Embassy. Napoleon issued a general amnesty; Constant emerged from hiding; on March 30 Joseph Bonaparte assured him that the Emperor was in a forgiving mood. On April 14 Napoleon received him and asked him to draft a liberal constitution. Napoleon revised the draft considerably, and then proclaimed it as the new charter of the French government. Constant was dizzy with glory.
On June 20, while he was reading Adolphe to Queen Hortense, the Duc de Rovigo entered to tell her that Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo two days before. On July 8 Louis returned to the Tuileries; Constant sent him a humble apology; the King, judging him to be a wayward irresponsible adolescent who wrote excellent French, issued a pardon that surprised everyone. All Paris shunned Constant, and spun puns around his name. He wrote to Mme. Récamier forgiving her for having ruined “my career, my future, my reputation, and my happiness.”87 In October he left for Brussels, where he rejoined the patient Charlotte. Early in 1816 they crossed to England, where he had Adolphe published. In September he returned with his wife to Paris, plunged into politics, and began a new career.
IV. CHATEAUBRIAND: 1768–1815
1. Youth
For his French contemporaries François-René de Chateaubriand was the greatest writer of the time—“le plus illustre [said Sainte-Beuve in 1849] de nos écrivains modernes”;88 and another paragon of literary learning, Émile Faguet, wrote, about 1887 (forgetting Voltaire): “Chateaubriand is the greatest date in the history of French literature since the Pléiade” (c. 1550);89 nearness lends enchantment to the view. Certainly his reign over French letters had been equaled only by Voltaire’s. His ascendancy marked the triumph of religion over philosophy, just as Voltaire’s had meant the triumph of philosophy over religion; and he lived long enough to see unfaith reborn. So one mood, passionately sustained, wears out its welcome, begets its opposite, and is revived, across the generations, through the embattled immoderation of mankind.
“My life and drama,” he wrote, “is divided into three acts. From my early youth until 1800 I was a soldier and traveler; from 1800 till 1814, under the Consulate and the Empire, my life was devoted to literature; from the Restoration to the present day [1833] my life has been political.”90 There would be a fourth and subsiding act (1834–48), in which the triple hero was to be a living but fragile memory, sustained by kindly women, but fading in the mist of time.
“My name was first written Brien, … then Briand … About the beginning of the eleventh century the Briens gave their name to an important château in Brittany, and this château became the seat of the barony of Châteaubriand.”91 When the proud family lost almost everything but its château and its pride, the father went to America, and made a modest fortune. Returning, he married Apolline de Bedée, who gave him so many children that he withdrew into a somber introversion which passed down to his last and only remembered son. The mother soothed her labors and illnesses with an intense piety. Four of her children died before René was born, September 4, 1768, at St.-Malo, on the Channel coast. He later remarked that “after being born oneself, I know no greater misfortune than that of giving birth to a human being.”92 His sister Lucile, ever ailing, mingled her mal-de-vie with his in an intimacy so intense that it left them cold to marriage. The fog coming from the Channel, and the waves that beat upon their island and home added to their somber spirit, but became dear in memory.
When he was nine the family moved to an estate in Combourg, which brought with it the title of comte, and made René a vicomte. Now he was sent to a school at nearby Dol, taught by priests who, at his mother’s urging, sought to inspire in him a vocation to the priesthood. They gave him a good grounding in the classics; soon he was making his own translations from Homer and Xenophon. “In my third year at Dol… chance put into my hands … an unexpurgated Horace. I obtained insight into… charms of an unknown nature in a sex in which I had seen only a mother and sisters…. My terror of the infernal shades… affected me both morally and physically. I continued, in my innocence, to fight against the storms of a premature passion and the terrors of superstition.”93 His sexual energy, without any known contact with the other sex, developed in him an image of an idealized woman, to whom he became mystically devoted with an intensity that may have diverted him from a normal development.
As the time for his First Communion neared, he feared to admit his secret agitations to his confessor. When he found courage to do so, and the kindly priest gave him comfort and absolution, he felt “the joy of the angels.” “The next day … I was admitted to the sublime and moving ceremony which I vainly endeavored to describe in Le Génie du christianisme…. The Real Presence of the Victim in the Blessed Sacrament on the altar was as manifest to me as my mother’s presence by my side. … I felt as though a light had been kindled within me. I trembled with veneration.”94 Three months later he left the Collège de Dol. “The memory of these obscure teachers will always be dear to me.”95
That exaltation subsided as his reading raised questions to his faith. He confessed to his parents that he felt no vocation to the priesthood. At seventeen he was sent for two years to the Collège de Rennes to fit him for appointment to the Naval Guard at Brest. In 1788, aged twenty, he reported there for tests, but the prospects of life and discipline in the French Navy so frightened him that he returned to his parents at Combourg, and, perhaps to quiet their reproaches, agreed to enter the Collège de Dinan and prepare for the priesthood; “the truth is that I was only trying to gain time, for I did not know what I wanted.”96 Finally he joined the Army as a commissioned officer. He was presented to Louis XVI, hunted with him, and saw the taking of the Bastille; he sympathized with the Revolution until, in 1790, it abolished all ranks, titles, and feudal rights. When his regiment voted to join the Revolutionary Army he resigned his commission, and—fortified by a modest income left him at his father’s death—he left on April 4, 1791, for the United States. He announced that he would try to find a northwest passage through Arctic America. “I was an ardent freethinker at the time.”97
He reached Baltimore July 11, 1791, drove to Philadelphia, dined with President Washington, amused him with his grandiose plans, made his way to Albany, hired a guide, bought two horses, and rode proudly westward. He marveled at the grandeur of the scenery, which mingled mountains, lakes, and streams under a summer sun. He reveled in these open spaces and their natural art, as a refuge from civilization and its cares. He recorded his experiences in a journal which he later polished and published as Voyage en Amérique, and which already displayed the scented beauty of his style:
Liberté primitive, je te retrouve enfin! Je passe comme cet oiseau qui vol devant moi, qui se dirige au hazard, et n’est embarrassé qu’au choix des ombrages. Me voilà tel que le Tout-Puissant m’a créé, souverain de la nature, porté triomphant sur les eaux, tandu que les habitants des fleuves accompagnent ma course, que les peuples de l’air me chantent leurs hymn
es, que les bêtes de la terre me saluent, que les forêts courbent leurs cimes sur mon passage. Est-ce sur le front de l’homme de la société ou sur le mien qu’est gravé le sceau immortel de notre origine? Courez vous enfermer dans vos cités, allez vous soumettre à vos petites lois, gagnez votre pain à la sueur de votre front, ou dévorez le pain du pauvre; égorgez-vous pour un mot, pour un maître; doutez de l’existence de Dieu, ou adorez-le sous des formes superstitieuses; moi j’irai errant dans mes solitudes; pas un seul battement de mon coeur ne sera comprimé; pas un seul de mes pensées ne sera enchainée; je serai libre comme la nature; je ne reconnaîtrai de souverain que celui qui alluma la flamme des soleils, et qui, d’un seul coup de sa main, fît rouler tous les mondes.*98
Here are all the paraphernalia of the Romantic movement: freedom, nature, friendship for all living things; scorn of cities and the struggle of man against man for bread or power; rejection of atheism and superstition; worship of God in nature; the escape from every law except that of God … It did not matter, for literature, that Chateaubriand had lost his religious faith, or that many of his descriptions were imaginary rather than factual, or that a hundred inaccuracies, exaggerations, or impossibilities were soon discovered in his Voyage by French or American critics;99 here was a prose that set aflutter all female—many male—breasts; not since Rousseau or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had French prose been so colorful, or nature so splendid, or civilization so absurd. All that the Romantic movement now awaited was a persuasive presentation of the American Indian as the lord of Eden and wisdom, and a panorama of religion as the mother of morals, art, and salvation. Chateaubriand would soon provide the one in Atala and René, the other in The Genius of Christianity.
The poet-explorer rode on through New York State, received hospitality from some Onondaga Indians, slept primitively on Mother Earth near Niagara, and heard the muffled roar of the falls. The next day, standing hypnotized by the river that hurried to its end, “I had an involuntary longing to throw myself in.”100 Eager to see the falls from below, he clambered down a rocky slope, lost his footing, broke an arm, and was hoisted to safety by Indians. Sobered, he surrendered his dream of a northwest passage, turned south, and reached the Ohio. At this point his narrative becomes dubious. He tells us that he followed the Ohio to the Mississippi, this to the Gulf of Mexico, then, over a thousand miles and a hundred mountains, to Florida. Critics, comparing distances, conveyances, and time, have judged his story incredible, and have branded his description of fauna and flora as quite unlike the landscapes and vegetation of those regions a hundred years later;101 however, a century could have drastically changed the wildlife, and even, through cultivation and mining, the contour of the earth.
After a stay with the Seminole Indians, Chateaubriand made his way northwest to Chillicothe, in what is now Illinois. There he saw in an English journal news of Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes (June 22, 1791). He worried that the captured King would now be daily in danger of his life. “I said to myself, ‘Go back to France,’ and abruptly brought my travels to a close.”102 On January 2, 1792, he reached France after an absence of nine months. He was still but twenty-three.
2. Development
He had exhausted nearly all his funds, and remained uncertain and insecure in a country hostile to viscounts and moving toward war and September Massacres. His sisters advised him to marry money, and found for him a moderately dowered bride, Céleste Buisson de La Vigne, aged seventeen. They married (February 21, 1792). The modest Céleste remained loyal to him through all his vicissitudes and mistresses, and through his decade of conflict with Napoleon, whom she admired; and after many years he learned to love her. They went to live in Paris, near his sisters Lucile and Julie. Part of his wife’s fortune, invested in church securities, was lost in the confiscation of ecclesiastical property by the revolutionary government; part of it René gambled away in the casinos.
On April 20 the Legislative Assembly declared war upon Austria. French émigrés formed a regiment to join Austria in overthrowing the Revolution. Chateaubriand, though not quite certain that he desired this, felt bound to join his fellow nobles. Leaving wife and sisters in a Paris that would soon imprison and then massacre hundreds of the aristocracy, he rushed to Coblenz, enrolled in the émigré army, and shared in the abortive siege of Thionville (September 1, 1792); he was wounded in the thigh, and was honorably discharged. Unable to get back through mobilized France to his wife, he made his way, mostly on foot, to Ostend, found passage to the island of Jersey, was nursed back to health by an uncle, and, in May, 1793, crossed to England.
There he learned the ways of poverty, and bore them well despite “the sickly temperament to which I was subject, and the romantic notions of freedom which I cherished.”103 He refused the allowance offered to émigré nobles by the British government; he survived by teaching French privately and in a boarding school. He fell in love with a pupil, Charlotte Ives; she returned his affection; her parents proposed that he marry Charlotte; he had to confess that he already had a wife. Meanwhile his wife, his mother, and his sisters had been imprisoned in France; his elder brother, with his wife and her heroic grandfather Malesherbes, were guillotined (April 22, 1794); his own wife and his sisters were not released till the end of the Terror with the fall of Robespierre.
Lucile had often noted his facility with words, and had urged him to be a writer. During these years in England he began a vast prose epic, Les Natchez, into whose 2,383 pages he poured his romantic dreams and his idealization of the American Indian. Anxious to win fame as a philosopher, he published in London (1797) an Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes. This was a remarkable performance for a youth of twenty-nine; poor in organization, rich in garnered ideas. Revolutions, Chateaubriand argued, are periodic outbursts following always the same curve from rebellion through chaos to dictatorship. So the Greeks deposed their kings, established republics, and then submitted to Alexander; the Romans deposed their king, established a republic, and then submitted to the Caesars;104 here, two years before the 18th Brumaire, was Chateaubriand’s forecast of Napoleon. History is a circle, or an enlarged repetition of the same circle, with frills that make the old seem new; the same good and the same evil survive in men despite such mighty overturns. There is no real progress; knowledge grows, but merely to serve instincts that do not change. The faith of the Enlightenment in the “indefinite perfectibility of mankind” is a childish delusion. Nevertheless (a conclusion that startled most readers) the Enlightenment had succeeded in undermining Christianity; there is no likelihood that the religion of our youth can ever recover from that century of political peace and intellectual war. What religion, then, will replace the Christian? Probably none (the young skeptic concludes). Intellectual and political turmoil will undermine European civilization, and return it to the barbarism from which it emerged; peoples now savage will rise to civilization, go through successive grandeurs and revolutions, and sink into barbarism in their turn.105
The book made Chateaubriand famous in émigré circles, but shocked those who felt that aristocracy and religion must stand together or die divided. These criticisms left their mark on Chateaubriand, whose later works were largely an apology for this one; but he was now deeply moved by a letter sent him from France July 1, 1798, by his sister Julie:
My friend, we have just lost the best of mothers. … If you knew how many tears your errors have drawn from our honorable mother, and how deplorable these errors seem to all who make profession not merely of piety but of reason—if you knew this pledge it would help to open your eyes, to make you give up writing; and if a Heaven touched by our prayers should permit our reunion, you would find, among us, all the happiness that we can taste on earth.106
When Chateaubriand received this letter it was accompanied by another to the effect that this sister Julie too had died. In the preface to Le Génie du christianisme he ascribed to these messages the complete change displayed by the later book: “These two
voices from the tomb, this death serving to interpret death, were a blow to me; I became a Christian. … I wept, and I believed.”
So sudden and dramatic a change invited skepticism, but in a less than literal sense it could be sincere. Probably Chateaubriand, in whom the philosopher was never distinct from the poet, ascribed to a moment, as by a figure of speech, the process by which he passed from unbelief to a view of Christianity as, first, beautiful, then morally beneficent, finally deserving, despite its faults, of private sympathy and public support. He was moved, in the last years of the dying century, by letters from his friend Louis de Fontanes, describing the moral disintegration then corroding France, and the rising desire of the people to return to their churches and their priests. Soon, in Fontanes’ judgment, this hunger would compel a restoration of Catholic worship.
Chateaubriand resolved to be the voice of that movement. He would write a defense of Christianity in terms not of science and philosophy but of morals and art. No matter if those fascinating stories that were told us in our youth were legends rather than history; they entranced and inspired us, and in some measure reconciled us to those Hebraic Commandments upon which our social order, and therefore Christian civilization, had been built. Would it not be the greatest of crimes to take from the people the beliefs that had helped them to control their unsocial impulses and to bear injustice, evil, suffering, and the fatality of death? So Chateaubriand, in his final Mémoires, expressed both his doubts and his faith: “My spirit is inclined to believe in nothing, not even in myself, to disdain everything—grandeur, miseries, peoples, and kings; nevertheless it is dominated by an instinct of reason that commands it to submit to everything evidently beautiful: religion, justice, humanity, equality, liberty, glory.”107
