by Will Durant
Early in 1800 Fontanes invited Chateaubriand to return to France. Fontanes was persona grata with the First Consul, and would see to it that the young émigré should not be harmed. Napoleon was already thinking of restoring Catholicism; a good book on the virtues of Christianity might help him meet the inevitable gibes of the Jacobins.
On May 16, 1800, Chateaubriand rejoined his wife and Lucile in Paris. Fontanes introduced him to a literary circle that gathered in the home of the frail but beautiful Comtesse Pauline de Beaumont, daughter of Comte Armand-Marc de Montmorin, once minister of foreign affairs under Louis XVI, and then guillotined. Soon she became Chateaubriand’s mistress. It was in her country house, and under her prodding, that he finished Le Génie. He did not think the time ripe for the complete publication of a book so contrary to the skepticism prevailing in intellectual circles; but in 1801 he offered Paris a 100-page extract from it as an unpretentious idyl of Christian virtue and romantic love. It made him at once the talk of literate France, the idol of the women, and the favorite son of the reviving Church.
He called it Atala, or The Loves of Two Savages in the Desert. The initial scene is in Louisiana as peopled by the Natchez Indians; the narrator is the blind old chieftain Chactas. He tells how, in his youth, he was captured by a hostile tribe, and was sentenced to be burned to death, but was saved by the Indian maid Atala. They flee together through marshes and forests, over mountains and streams; they fall in love by force of propinquity and through dangers shared; he seeks—she refuses—consummation, having pledged lifelong virginity to her dying mother. They meet an old missionary, who supports her piety by satirizing love as a form of inebriation, and marriage as a fate worse than death.108 Torn (like history) between religion and sex, Atala solves her dilemma by taking poison. Chactas is desolate, but the missionary explains that death is a blessed release from life:
“Despite so many days gathered on my head, … I have never met a man who had not been deceived by dreams of happiness, no heart that did not hold a hidden wound. The spirit apparently most serene resembles the natural wells of Florida’s savannas: their surface seems calm and pure, but when you see to the bottom… you perceive a large crocodile, which the well nourishes with its waters.”109
Chateaubriand’s description of Atala’s funeral—priest and pagan mingling their hands to cover her corpse with the soil—became a famous passage in the literature of romance; it inspired also one of the great paintings of the Napoleonic period—The Burial of Atala, with which Girodet-Trioson brought half of Paris to tears in 1808. But the classical tradition was too strong in the France of 1801 to win for the tale the full acclaim of critics. Many of them smiled at the purple passages, and the ancient use of love, religion, and death to stir hearts broken or young, and the conscription of nature to serve, with her various moods, as an obbligato to human joys and woes. But others praised—and a multitude of readers enjoyed—the simple words and quiet music of the style; the sounds, forms, and colors of the fauna and flora; the mountains, forests, and streams that supplied a living background to the tale. The mood of France was ready to hear a good word for religion and chastity. Napoleon was planning a reconciliation with the Church. It seemed a good time to publish Le Génie du christianisme.
3. The Genius of Christianity
The book appeared in five volumes on April 14, 1802, in the same week that saw the promulgation of the Concordat. “As far as I can judge,” wrote Jules Lemaître in 1865, “the Génie du christianisme was the greatest success in the history of French literature.”110 Fontanes greeted it with a Moniteur article praising it with friendly superlatives. A second edition appeared in 1803, dedicated to Napoleon. From that moment the author felt that Bonaparte was the only man of the age whom he had to surpass.
The génie of the title did not quite mean genius, though it meant that too. It meant the distinctive character, the inherent creative spirit, of the religion that had begotten and nurtured the civilization of postclassical Europe. Chateaubriand proposed to annul the eighteenth-century Enlightenment by showing, in Christianity, such understanding tenderness toward human needs and griefs, such multifarious inspiration to art, and such powerful supports to moral character and social order, that all questions as to the credibility of the Church’s dogmas and traditions became of minor importance. The real question should be: Is Christianity an immeasurable, inseparable, and indispensable support to Western civilization?
A more logical mind than Chateaubriand’s might have begun with a picture of the moral, social, and political deterioration of that Revolutionary France which had divorced itself from Catholic Christianity. But Chateaubriand was a man of feeling and sentiment, and probably he was right in assuming that most of the French, of either sex, were more like him than like Voltaire and the other philosophes who had labored so ardently to “crush the infamy” of an authoritarian religion. He called himself an anti-philosophe; he carried far beyond Rousseau the reaction against rationalism, and he reproved Mme. de Staël for defending the Enlightenment. So he began with an appeal to feeling, and left reason to fall in line after feeling had led the way.
He proclaimed at the outset his belief in the fundamental mystery of Catholic doctrine, the Trinity: God as the Father creating, God as the Son redeeming, God as the Holy Spirit enlightening and sanctifying. One must not worry here about credibility; the important thing is that without a belief in an intelligent God, life becomes a merciless struggle, sin and failure become unforgivable, marriage becomes a fragile and precarious association, old age a somber disintegration, death an obscene but inescapable agony. The sacraments of the Church—baptism, confession, Communion, confirmation, matrimony, extreme unction (deathbed anointment), and sacerdotal ordination—transformed the chapters in our painful growth and ignominious decay into advancing stages of spiritual development, each deepened with priestly guidance and solemn ceremony, and strengthening the infinitesimal individual with membership in a powerful and confident community of believers in a redeeming and lovable Christ, a sinless and interceding Mother, a wise, omnipotent, watchful, punishing, forgiving, and rewarding God. With that faith man is redeemed from the greatest curse of all—to be meaningless in a meaningless world.
Chateaubriand proceeded to contrast the virtues recommended by the pagan philosophers with those taught by Christianity: on the one hand fortitude, temperance, and prudence—all directed toward individual advancement; on the other, faith, hope, and charity—a creed that ennobled life, strengthened the social bond, and made death a resurrection. He compared the philosopher’s view of history as the struggle and defeat of individuals and groups with the Christian view of history as the effort of man to overcome the sinfulness original to his nature and to achieve a widening caritas. Better to believe that the heavens declare the glory of God than that they are accidental accumulations of rock and dust, persistent but senseless, beautiful but dumb. And how can we contemplate the loveliness of most birds and many quadrupeds without feeling that some divinity lurks in their resilient growth and their enchanting forms?
As for morality, the matter seemed to Chateaubriand painfully clear: our moral code must be sanctioned by God, or it will collapse against the nature of man. No code of confessedly human origin will carry sufficient authority to control the unsocial instincts of men; the fear of God is the beginning of civilization, and the love of God is the goal of morality. Moreover, that fear and love must be handed down, generation after generation, by parents, educators, and priests. Parents with no God to transmit, teachers with no support in religious creed and garb, will find the infinite inventiveness of selfishness, passion, and greed stronger than their uninspired words. Finally, “there can be no morality if there is no future state”;111 there must be another life to atone for the tribulations of virtue on the earth.
European civilization (Chateaubriand argued) is almost entirely due to the Catholic Church—to her support of the family and the school, to her preaching of the Christian virtues, to her checkin
g and cleansing of popular superstitions and practices, to the healing processes of the confessional, to her inspiration and encouragement of literature and art. The Middle Ages wisely abandoned the unguided pursuit of truth for the creation of beauty, and they produced in the Gothic cathedrals an architecture superior to that of the Parthenon. Pagan literature has many excellences for the mind, many pitfalls for morality. The Bible is greater than Homer, the Prophets are more inspiring than the philosophers; and what fiction can compare, in tenderness and influence, with the life and teaching of Christ?
Obviously a book like the Génie could appeal only to those who, through the excesses of the Revolution or the trials of life, were emotionally ready to believe. So the philosopher Joubert, Chateaubriand’s friend, said that he sought in Catholicism a refuge from a revolutionary world too horrible to bear.112 Such readers may have smiled at the childish teleology which taught that “the song of birds is ordained expressly for our ears. … In spite of our cruelty [to them] they cannot forbear to charm us, as they are obliged to fulfill the decrees of Providence.”113 But those readers were so carried along by the elegance and music of the style that they passed over the use of the Three Graces to explain the Trinity, or of the Malthusian fear of overpopulation to defend ecclesiastical celibacy. If the arguments were sometimes weak, the charm was strong; even Nature would have been pleased if, after some earthquake, flood, or hurricane, she had heard Chateaubriand’s litany of her loveliness.
Did he really believe? From 1801 to late in life, we are told,114 he omitted his “Easter duty” of confession and Communion—the Church’s minimal demand upon her children. Sismondi reported a conversation with him in 1813:
Chateaubriand observed the universal decadence of religions both in Europe and in Asia, and compared these symptoms of dissolution with those of polytheism in the time of Julian…. He concluded from this that the nations of Europe would disappear along with their religions. I was astounded to find him so free a spirit…. Chateaubriand talked of religion; … he believes it [religion] necessary to sustain the state; he thinks that he and others are bound to believe.115
No wonder that, carrying with him through sixty years such a burden of secret doubt, he never recovered from the youthful pessimism that he described in René. In old age he said, “I ought not to have been born.”116
4. René
The Genius of Christianity was a major expression of the Romantic movement in the religious field: it formulated the return of faith and hope, if not of charity; it exalted medieval poetry and art, and stimulated the revival of Gothic architecture in France. Within its five volumes it originally included not only Atala but, till 1805, René. This forty-page paean to pessimism reflected the despondency of émigrés, and Chateaubriand’s youthful infatuation with his sisters. It became the fount and standard of a thousand moans of melodious despair.
René is a young French aristocrat who has fled from France and has joined the Natchez Indian tribe in the hope of forgetting an incestuous love. His adoptive father, Chactas, having told him the tale of Atala, persuades him to tell his own story. “Timid and constrained before my father, I found ease and contentment only with my sister Amélie.” When he realized that his love for her was nearing incest, he sought release by losing himself in the Paris crowd—”vast wilderness of men”; or he sat for hours in an unfrequented church, begging God to free him from the crime of his love or from the incubus of life. He looked for solitude amid mountains and fields, but nowhere could he drive from his thoughts the tenderness and loveliness of Amélie. Tormented with desire to go to her and declare his love, he decided, in shame, to kill himself. Amélie divined this decision when she learned that he was making his will. She hurried to Paris, found him, embraced him wildly, and “covered my forehead with kisses.” Three months of comradeship and restrained happiness followed. Then, overcome with remorse, she fled to a convent, leaving him a word of comfort and all her fortune. He sought her and begged permission to talk with her; she would not see him. When she was about to take the vows he made his way into the chapel, knelt near her, heard her, prostrate before the altar, begging, “God of mercy, let me never rise from this somber bed, and cover with your favors the brother who never partook of my criminal passion.” They never saw each other again. He resumed his thoughts of suicide, but decided to bear the greater pain of life. “I found” (and this passage became a locus classicus of romantic grief) “a kind of satisfaction in my suffering. I discovered, with a secret movement of joy, that sorrow is not, like pleasure, a feeling that wears itself out…. My melancholy became an occupation which filled all my moments; my heart was entirely and naturally steeped in ennui and misery.”117 Sick of civilization, he decided to lose himself in America and live the simple life of an Indian tribe. A missionary reproved him for his self-centered mood, and bade him return to France and cleanse himself by services to mankind. However, “René perished afterward, with Chactas,… in the massacre of the French and the Natchez Indians in Louisiana.”
It is a story well told, except that the events are improbable and the sentiment is overdone. But sentiment had been starved for a decade; grief had been dangerous and too deep for tears; now, the Revolution ended and security restored, sentiment was free, and tears might flow. The melancholy of René, echoing Werther’s across a generation, became a pose for René de Chateaubriand, was echoed in Sénancour’s Obermann in 1804, and was carried on in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1813); Chateaubriand reproached Byron for not acknowledging his debt.118 The little book infected a generation with mal de siècle—the characteristic “illness of the time”; it became the model of a thousand, perhaps a hundred thousand, melancholy tales (romans); its hero was called a “storyteller,” un romancier; so, perhaps, the Romantic movement derived its name. For half a century now it would dominate the literature and art of France.
5. Chateaubriand and Napoleon
The Genius of Christianity, said Napoleon, “is a work of lead and gold, but the gold predominates…. Everything great and national in character ought to acknowledge the genius of Chateaubriand.”119 For his part he welcomed the book as admirably concordant with the Concordat. He arranged a meeting with the author, recognized him as a valuable property, and appointed him (1803) first secretary to the French Embassy in Rome. The author recorded the meeting with modesty and pride: “It mattered little to him that I had no experience of public affairs, that I was entirely unfamiliar with practical diplomacy; he believed that some minds are capable of understanding, and have no need of apprenticeship.”120 He was soon followed to Rome by his mistress; however, she died in Rome (November 5), with Chateaubriand at her side, and after bidding him return to his wife.
He was soon persona grata to the Pope, and ingrata to the ambassador, Napoleon’s uncle, Cardinal Fesch, who complained that the brilliant author was assuming ambassadorial authority. The Cardinal was not the man to allow this; he asked to be relieved of his aide; Napoleon recalled the Viscount by appointing him chargé-d’affaires in the little Swiss republic of Valais. Chateaubriand went to Paris to consider; but on hearing of the Duc d’Enghien’s execution he sent to Napoleon his resignation from the diplomatic service.
By daring to leave Bonaparte I had placed myself on his level, and he was turned against me by all the force of his perfidy, as I was turned against him by all the force of my loyalty. … Sometimes I was drawn to him by the admiration with which he inspired me, and by the idea that I was witnessing a transformation of society and not a mere change of dynasty; but our respective natures, antipathetic in so many respects, always gained the upper hand; and if he would gladly have had me shot, I should have felt no great compunction about killing him.121
No immediate harm came to him. He was distracted from politics by the illness of his wife (whom he loved between liaisons) and the death of his sister Lucile (1804). Meanwhile he had taken as mistress Delphine de Custine. In 1806 he sought to replace her with Natalie de Noailles, but Natalie made her favors cond
itional on his undertaking a journey to the holy places in Palestine.122 Leaving his wife in Venice, he went on to Corfu, Athens, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Jerusalem; he returned via Alexandria, Carthage, and Spain, and reached Paris in June, 1807. He had shown courage and stamina on this arduous tour, and on the way he had sedulously gathered material and background for two books that reinforced his literary fame: Les Marytrs de Dioclétien (1809), and Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811).
While preparing these volumes he carried on his feud with Napoleon (then negotiating peace at Tilsit) by an article in the Mercure de France for July 4, 1807. It was ostensibly about Nero and Tacitus, but it could readily be applied to Napoleon and Chateaubriand.
When, in the silence of abjection, no sign can be heard save that of the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; when all tremble before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to merit his displeasure, the historian appears, entrusted with the vengeance of the nation. Nero prospers in vain, for Tacitus has already been formed within the Empire; he grows up unknown beside the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just Providence has delivered into the hands of an obscure child the glory of the master of the world. If the historian’s role is a fine one it often has its dangers; but there are altars such as that of honor, which, though deserted, demand further sacrifices.
