François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815. Alex Andriesse translation. New York Review Books, 2022.

 

With Napoleon out of the way, Louis XVIII came to Paris, returning the Legitimist regime to France. Things did not look well to Chateaubriand, who saw Napoleon’s troops, a regiment of the Old Guard, lining the route to Notre Dame; “I cannot believe human faces and bodies have ever worn such menacing and terrible expressions” as these veteran soldiers, “the conquerors of Europe,” now “forced to salute an old king—enfeebled by time, not battle—while being guarded by an army of Russians, Austrians, and Prussians in Napoleon’s invaded capital.” “Never, it must be said, have men been put to such a test or suffered such torment.” 

The monarch, his foreign allies, and his advisers had “committed an irreparable error” by allowing the French troops to remain united. They should have dissolved the army temporarily, kept the top officers on the payroll, then gradually reconstituted French forces, integrating some of Napoleon’s troops with new men. As it was, defeat followed by humiliation fostered “regrets and feelings hostile to their new leader,” along with resentment toward new recruits who had been given high ranks unearned in battle.

To this moral and military error Louis added a political one, a new constitution issued by himself, a royal charter instead of a document ratified by the people. Although the Charter of 1814 guaranteed a bicameral legislature, “taxes freely consented to, public and individual liberty, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, inviolable and sacred rights of property,” and an independent judiciary—the regime institutions of pre-Jacobin France—its origin as an act of the monarch reignited “the smoldering question of royal, as opposed to popular, sovereignty.” No one was satisfied: not the Bonapartists, whose hero had been deposed; not the republicans, who objected to the implication of Bourbon resumption of the power to make constitutional law; not the royalists themselves, who disliked the Charter’s rather un-monarchic contents. Although the Charter “was sufficient to satisfy men of conscience,” how many of those are there in any society, especially when it comes to politics? “In the end, if the Charter seemed defective, it was because the Revolution wasn’t over; the principles of equality and democracy had rooted themselves in men’s minds and worked against the monarchical order.” Chateaubriand had seen three regime changes, already: old, absolutist monarchy to constitutional monarchy; constitutional monarchy into republic; republic into “military autocracy”; military autocracy back into a constitutional monarchy. “Such metamorphoses would be repugnant were they not partly attributable to the flexibility of the French spirit,” Chateaubriand offers, with a touch of irony, having already described Napoleon as similarly chameleonlike. (“A Frenchman would shout ‘Off with my head!’ if he heard his neighbor shouting it;” reasoning having fallen into habitual disuse in politics, of what use was one’s head?) “Overjoyed” by the exile of Napoleon, who had brought down such suffering upon them, the French were not really Legitimists, either, but rather “a mob who held all manner of opinions” when it came to the question of what regime France should adopt. This would remain true for the next century and a half. In the meantime, “we Legitimists, poor devils, we were not admitted anywhere and counted for nothing” in French civil society, despite the titular reign of Louis.

In response to all of this, Chateaubriand published a new book, Political Reflections, annoying the king with his insistence that monarchy could survive only if it acknowledged popular sovereignty as the only kind acceptable in contemporary France. Fortunately, he had again won the friendship of influential woman, the Duchess of Duras, who arranged his appointment to the French embassy in Sweden, headed by Louis’s brother, King Bernadotte. (“A man protects you with what he is worth, a woman with what you are worth: that is why, of these two empires, the former is so odious and the latter so sweet.”) Before leaving, Chateaubriand witnessed the exhumation and transfer of the remains of Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, preparatory to their transfer to the Saint-Denis cemetery, where French kings are properly buried. “Among the bones, I recognized the queen’s head by the smile she had given me at Versailles.” A memoir from beyond the grave thus encompasses a memoir from the grave, and while the moral lesson of such a memento mori is so obvious as to need no remark, Chateaubriand draws a less obvious moral-political lesson. On this matter, the Bourbons got something right. They “must be praised for having thought of Louis XVI from the moment they returned. They had to smear their forehead with his ashes before they put his crown on their heads,” in a gesture of humility, memory, and respect before the dignity of rule. At the time, Chateaubriand “wanted a statue of Louis XVI to be set upon the very spot where the martyr shed his blood,” but he now thinks otherwise. “At the present time it is to be feared that a monument raised with a view to remembering the terror of populist excesses may well instill a desire to imitate them,” evil being “more tempting than good.”

Still, the deaths’ head smile of the queen and the sight of the tombs of French kings raise questions not merely about “the vanity of human grandeur” but about “the nature of man.” “Is everything emptiness and absence in the region of the grave? Is there nothing in this nothing? Is there no life at all in the void, no thoughts at all to be had by dust?” And “in your eternal silence, oh, tombs, if tombs you be, does a man hear nothing but mocking laughter forever and ever? Is this laughter God, the only derisory reality, which will survive the imposture of the universe?” Chateaubriand can only answer: “I am a Christian.”

Unlike the elderly Bourbon now elevated to the throne, Napoleon in exile retained “the two sources from which his extraordinary life had sprung: democracy and royal power”—democracy in the sense of the ability to gather popular support, royal power in the sense of “his genius,” his virtù in the Machiavellian sense, which the Bourbon line and especially its entourage no longer possessed. “His ambition had been disappointed, not extinguished; misfortune and vengeance were rekindling its flames.” The same was true of his partisans in France whose ambition to act grew “as it became progressively clearer to them how weak the Bourbons’ character was.” Cartoons began to be published, showing eagles flying through the Tuileries Palace windows, “while a flock of turkeys doddered out through the gates.” All that the Bonapartists and Napoleon lacked was an opportunity, as “more traitors are made by events than by opinions.” As always, Napoleon was guided not by news from France but by “the faith he had in himself,” and in the event he was right. Eluding his captors on Elba, “he advances unhindered among those men and women who, a few months previous, had wanted to murder him.” “Alongside the wonder of a one-man invasion” Chateaubriand places “the torpor of the Legitimacy,” its cowardice, which spread throughout the state and “paralyzed France.” Louis managed to pull himself together to give a strong and noble speech to the Chamber of Deputies, a speech worthy of a “heroic dynasty on the verge of extinction”; students from the university schools of law and medicine rallied to his side, as did Chateaubriand (“one is never entitled to say all is lost if he has attempted nothing”). With his “ragtag collection of troops,” Napoleon would not have attempted to seize a Paris united behind the king. But his courtiers wavered, and the people did not rally. Exiled from France for twenty-three years, the Bourbon circle no longer understood the people, and the people felt little connection to the old monarchy. “Thus the impossibility of understanding or supporting each other. Religion, ideas, interests, language, earth, and heaven—everything was different for the people and the king, for they were separated by a quarter century equivalent to centuries,” thanks to the succession of regime changes the people had endured. Chateaubriand can only lament, “Why was I born into an era where I was so badly placed?… Why was I hurled into this horde of mediocrities, who took me for a fool when I spoke of courage and a revolutionary when I spoke of freedom?” (“And you, youthful generations of the moment, let twenty-three years go by, and when I am dead and buried, you, too, shall be asking yourselves what happened to the loves and illusions you cherish today.”)

The king fled to Ghent, where Chateaubriand joined him and was named Acting Minister of the Interior of the regime in exile. He took the appointment as an opportunity to propose an amendment to the Charter guaranteeing freedom of the press, “for this freedom is inseparable from any representative government.” But “I perceived the catastrophe of society,” taking “refuge from idlers and boors” in a cloister, the kind of place where The Genius of Christianity had granted him a lifetime passport. And he nursed his memories; “it seems no one can become my companion unless he has gone to the other side of the grave.” “I wandered around Ghent as I wander around everywhere, alone.”

As he consoled himself, the French once again began to long for the ruler they did not have. “The French enjoyed the sight of a sovereign, who, defeated, had borne the chains of a man bearing, victorious, the yoke of a dynasty,” a dynasty from whom “all the royal lines of Europe” derived. In Ghent a hostess trapped him into dining with Joseph Fouché, former Jacobin and ardent advocate of Louis XVI’s execution, former and future Minister of Police under the Directory, then Napoleon, and soon Napoleon once again. As cynical a habitual turncoat as they come, he earns Chateaubriand’s sharpest irony: “regicide was the peak of his innocence.” “Garrulous, like all revolutionaries, beating the air with empty phrases” [1] full of ‘fate,’ ‘the law of things,’ ‘progress,’ ‘the march of society,’ ‘the justice of success,’ and similar resounding general ideas brandished to impress the easily impressed. “M. Fouché never forgave me my dryness or the minimal effect he had on me….The Jacobins detest men who ignore their atrocities and deride their murders; their pride is provoked, like that of writers whose talents one contests.”

But “Ghent was merely a dressing room behind the scenes of the show being put on in Paris,” where Napoleon ruled for his One Hundred Days after his seizure of the capital. By now, “the spell was broken” since “the few moments in which the laws had reappeared” under Louis and his Charter, however dubious, “were enough to make the reestablishment of arbitrary rule unimaginable.” “Despotism seems like freedom when it takes the place of anarchy,” which Napoleon had done at the beginning of his rule, “but it remains what it truly is when it takes the place of liberty.” Napoleon now “could do nothing with victory, which had turned its back on him, and nothing for order, since it existed without him.” The factions that preceded him continued under his faltering rule; he was reduced to “proclaim[ing] the sovereignty of the people in which he did not believe.” French internal politics could not topple him, however, since “the power combating him was as exhausted as he was,” bringing on “only a battle between ghosts.” Regime changes and the timeserving prevarications of those, like Fouché (merely an exceptionally conspicuous example of the type) left Napoleon with no one to trust, a “great man” standing “alone among all those traitors, men and fate, on a reeling earth, beneath a hostile sky, face-to-face with his destiny and the judgment of God.” [2]

At the Congress of Vienna, Czar Alexander agreed to an alliance with the Bourbons, Austria, and England against Bonaparte, who no longer had anything like the military power he’d wielded during his first reign. Heading toward Waterloo, the French army consisted of only 70,000 men. Chateaubriand wondered, “Were lots being cast upon the world, as upon Christ’s vesture?” If the Allies won, wouldn’t French glory be lost? And “if Napoleon won, what would become of our liberty?” He confesses that his heart was with France and Napoleon, against the “foreign domination” that he expected to result from the victory of a coalition now led by the British and their general, Wellington (“a mind seeing nothing in the French year of 1793 but the antecedent English year of 1649”). A restoration of the Bourbons under those circumstances would de-legitimatize Legitimacy. This time, “Alexander was not there at the beginning to temper the triumph and curb the insolence of victory.”

The Allied victory (at a cost of 25,000 French soldiers, 18,000 Allied)—there “was not a family in England who did not mourn”—came after the “two armies crossed iron and fire with a bravery and ferocity animated by ten centuries of national enmity.” Napoleon “threw himself upon his horse and fled” to Paris, not before raging at the French officer who urged him to do so. There, he “abdicated so as not to be forced to abdicate,” uselessly declaring his young son his successor as Emperor Napoleon II. That wasn’t going to work, although “all the omens of the Second Restoration” were almost equally bad: “Bonaparte had returned leading four hundred Frenchmen, while Louis XVIII was returning behind four hundred thousand foreigners.” Understanding that, Chateaubriand declined the position of advisor to the king, despite also understanding that he was ceding the position to the despicable Talleyrand. “Had I remained with the king, the combination of the Talleyrand and Fouché ministry would have become almost impossible; had the Restoration begun with a moral and honorable ministry, the future might have been difference.” He can only sigh, “History is full of tangles like this one.” Soon, he would witness the arrival of both these enemies at the king’s chambers: “Vice, leaning on the arm of Crime.” “The loyal regicide,” Fouché, “on his knees, put the hands that ordered the beheading of Louis XVI into the hands of the martyred king’s brother, and the apostate bishop,” Talleyrand, “stood surety for this oath.”

While “everyone spoke of the constitution, liberty, equality, the rights of the nations,” “no one wanted these things; they were merely fashionable verbiage.” “Material interests predominated.” Royalists judged Chateaubriand too much the lover of liberty, whereas the republicans resented him for being “too contemptuous of their crimes.” When he told the king that the “monarchy is finished,” Louis admitted, “Well, Monsieur Chateaubriand, I believe you are right.” 

Napoleon would not be the one to finish it. At Malmaison, stripped of power, awaiting exile, “he could wonder whether, with a little more moderation, he might have held on to his happiness.” He would have no real companions with whom to discuss the matter. Having derived his authority from his successes, in failure those who accepted the example abandoned their teacher for the next successful set of men. “Like most despots, he was on good terms with his servants, but deep down he cared for no one. A solitary man, all he needed was himself. Misfortune did nothing but restore him to the desert that was his life.” After his presidency of the American republic, Washington returned to his home to live as a farmer among the farmers “he had freed.” Napoleon hadn’t defended the French as citizens; in exile, he could have neither equals nor subjects. On the distant island of St. Helena, he squabbled with his British captors, famous but miserable. “I, who believe in the legitimacy of good deeds and the sovereignty of misery, had I served Bonaparte, would not have left him. With my fidelity, I would have shown him the falsity of his political principles. Sharing his disgrace, I would have stayed by his side, like a living contradiction of his barren doctrines and the limited value of the rule of prosperity.” But of course Napoleon was incapable of accepting such a friendship, of any friendship; “a solitary man, all he needed was himself,” his soul a monument to self-sufficiency wrongly understood.

Writing some thirty years later, Chateaubriand appraises the long-dead tyrant. “The greatness of Napoleon’s heart did not match the greatness of his head.” [3] “A poet in action, an immense genius in war, an indefatigable, able, and intelligent mind in administration, and an industrious and rational administrator,” “as a politician he will always seem deficient in the eyes of statesmen.” His murder of the Duc d’Enghien was an act “contrary to all prudence” as well as God, and it must be understood as “the secret leaven of the discords that later arose between Alexander and Napoleon as well as between Prussia and France.” Alexander was a Christian prince, Prussia (in those days) a Christian nation. His offenses committed against Orthodox and Protestant Christians matched his offense against Catholicism; his imprisonment of the pope and annexation of the Papal States were nothing but “a tyrannical caprice, which lost him the advantage of passing himself off as the restorer of religion.” Deranged by his spectacular military successes, he lacked the moderation and prudence that would have told him to stop at the invasion of Russia; his refusal to heed the danger of the Russian winter, his hyper-modern defiance of nature itself, brought on nature’s just revenge. As a result, “he lost Europe as swiftly as he had seized it.” “He had the world at his feet, and all he got out of it was prison for himself, exile for his family, and the loss of all his conquests as well as a piece of old French territory.” 

All of these errors “originate in Bonaparte’s shortcomings as a politician.” After making an alliance, he would change its terms, “constantly showing a tendency to take back what he had given, and never letting anyone forget the oppressor for a moment.” After making a conquest, he would move on to the next one, without troubling to reform the regime of his latest nation he had acquired. By so doing, he built not stable ruling institutions but a “poetic edifice of victories, lacking a foundation and kept in the air only by his genius,” and edifice that “fell the moment his genius deserted him.” He wanted to rule the world but “never troubled his head about how to preserve what he ruled.” It is noteworthy that Chateaubriand here identifies exclusively political failures, without recapitulating Bonaparte’s moral flaws. But the moral flaws did cause the political failures: “One of the things that most contributed to rendering Napoleon so repellent in his lifetime was his penchant for debasing everything,” a penchant owing to his “monstrous pride and incessant affectation.” He was an actor, “his own mime.” 

What, then, motivated him? Libido dominandi, the vice Augustine regards as the Satanic passion. “Domination incarnate” and “dry as a bone,” Bonaparte “had nothing good-natured about him,” finding “within himself no word, only actions—and actions ready to become hostile at the slightest sign of independence.” That is, he had neither philosophic logos nor Christian Logos. He ruined Europe’s legitimate monarchs not to replace them with republics but with himself, with tyranny. True, he came to power initially on the wave of Jacobin ‘republicanism’—itself tyrannical—but to say, as some were doing in the 1840s, that he intended to act as a modern version of the Roman dictator, tyrannizing in order to found or to defend republican regimes, tyrannizing in order to restore liberty, “proves only one thing: how easily reason can be abused.” The same sort of sophistry animates those who pretend that the Terror “was a time of great humanity”; in fact, its leaders called “for the abolition of the death penalty while they were killing half the world.” The same sophism, it might be added, reappeared in the arguments of apologists for the genocidal tyrannies of the twentieth century. 

Eric Voegelin has asked how it was that the German people allowed themselves to follow Hitler. [4] Chateaubriand addresses that question respecting the French. The French, he maintains, love not freedom but authority. “Equality alone is their idol,” and as Chateaubriand’s nephew, Alexis de Tocqueville, had already seen, “equality and tyranny have secret links.” Napoleon “pleased the French” by exercising military authority and “seat[ing] common people beside him” on the imperial throne. “A proletarian king, he humiliated kings and nobles in his antechambers.” By so inflating the pride and vanity of the French, he quietly set up another aristocracy, one beholden to himself, all the while teaching “us all to worship brute force.” In this he was in truth “the mortal enemy of equality,” the equality he made a show of delivering. “The wrong that true wisdom will never forgive Bonaparte is his having habituated society to passive obedience, driven mankind back to times of moral degradation, and perhaps bastardized human character to such a degree that it is impossible to say when hearts will begin to throb with generous feelings again….Bonaparte has deranged the future.” “The despotism that Bonaparte left hanging in the air will come down and enclose us like a fortress.” 

Brute force is a false god. Bonaparte sacrificed as many as three million French soldiers to it. To say that today’s generations flourish, that such calamities “were for the salvation of all,” ignores the reality: “He did not make France. France made him.” The justification of Chateaubriand’s memoir may be seen here. “No talent, no eminence will ever induce me to consent to an authority that can, with one word, deprive me of my independence, my home, my friends.” But “without liberty, the world is nothing,” as it “makes life worthwhile.” “Even if I should find myself the last man defending it, I will never cease proclaiming its rights.” By committing “crimes against liberty,” Napoleon committed crimes “against the human race.” 

The true honor is not in Napoleonic triumphalism but in martyrdom at the hands of that triumphalism. Chateaubriand regards his defense of liberty in his memoir as likely to fail. “The world belongs to Bonaparte,” to the legend of Bonaparte. “What the ravager was unable to conquer, his fame usurps. While alive, he may have failed to win the world, but dead, he possesses it.” As the despot of our memories, reigning as a “fantastical hero” held up by “poets’ whims, soldiers’ estimations, and the people’s stories,” by the “busts and portraits of Napoleon in [French] houses, palaces, cottages.” “Today there is universal agreement we should accept the shackles he throws on us from beyond the grave,” for “how can a free government come into being, when he has corrupted the principle of liberty in the hearts of humanity”? As of the 1840s in France, even in Europe, the authoritative memoirs from beyond the grave are not Chateaubriand’s but Napoleon’s. He acted, spectacularly, allowing the artists and the people to do the rest by telling everyone, including themselves, that his greatness was also goodness, that the soul of libido dominandi must have been a soul of magnanimity, too. “Fortunately for him, he did not write his life. He would have diminished it.”

On St. Helena, Napoleon eventually “takes to bed and does not rise again.” No Christ, he nonetheless professed on his deathbed, with a crucifix on his chest, “I die in the apostolic and Roman religion, in the bosom of which I was born more than fifty years ago.” That he did not live as he was born and died may be seen in the world he left behind, a world without the Legitimist—Christian and law-governed—monarchies of pre-revolutionary Europe. “The map of the world has changed; we have had to learn a new geography,” a political geography in which, “separated from their legitimate sovereigns, nations have been thrown to rulers picked at random,” picked democratically in the manner Plato’s Socrates’ ascribes to democratic regimes, by a lottery of one sort or another. Thanks to this egalitarianism, “his will be the last of the great individual lives. From now on, nothing will dominate in our minor and equalized societies. Napoleon’s shade will stand alone at the far end of the devastated old world, like the phantom of the deluge at the edge of its abyss.” Eventually, Napoleon’s bones were transferred to Paris, but they “will not reproduce his genius, they will teach his despotism to mediocre soldiers.” Napoleon III comes to mind.

As he died in exile, Napoleon manifested a glimmer of the magnanimity that had otherwise eluded him. When Chateaubriand wrote an article, saying that “the nations have called Bonaparte a scourge, but God’s scourges retain something of the eternity and grandeur of the divine wrath from which they emanate”—the dry bones the prophet Ezekial hears God promise he will breathe life back into—Napoleon told General Montholon, who accompanied him to St. Helena, that the restored monarchy should have put Chateaubriand in charge of affairs, not Talleyrand and Fouché. “There is no question that all that is great and national must befit his genius,” Napoleon continued; “he would have indignantly rejected the shameful acts of the administration of those days.” And more: “Nature has accorded Chateaubriand a sacred fire,” a prophetic insight, as his works attest. Admitting that Bonaparte’s remarks pandered to his pride, Chateaubriand rightly ventures to remark that “many little men to whom I have rendered eminent services”—surely including Talleyrand, quite possibly Louis XVIII—have “not judged me so favorably as the giant whose power I had dared to attack.”

It is telling that Bonaparte did not reflect upon what good Chateaubriand might have done him, had the Emperor brought him into his confidence. If Louis could not, owing to his mediocrity—having dismissed Chateaubriand as a worse than useless poet—Napoleon, the embodiment of libido dominandi, perhaps distanced himself out of a need not to reflect. Napoleon restricted his thinking to vulpine calculation. On St. Helena, had he paused, speaking of Louis but thinking of himself, as well? Chateaubriand never suggests it, but it is not impossible. [5]

He has a larger consideration in mind. “Napoleon brought the era of the past to a close. He made war in such a way, on such a scale, that it no longer interests mankind. He slammed the doors to the Temple of Janus impetuously behind him, and behind those doors he piled up stacks of corpses, so that they would never be opened again.” True, but only in Europe, and only for a hundred years.

And much more than that. He recalls visiting Cannes, near where Napoleon landed upon returning from Elba. He recalls Saint Honorat, who landed on the nearby Lérins Islands in the fifth century and founded a monastery, inaugurating Christian civilization in France. “Paganism vanished and a new civilization was born in the West.” “Fourteen hundred years later, Bonaparte came to finish that civilization in the very place where the saint had started it.” “The last of an exhausted race,” Chateaubriand could not halt Christendom’s ruin. At most, he slowed it. “Ah, if only I was as carefree as one of those old waterfront Arabs I saw in Africa,” who “while away their final hours watching the beautiful flamingos fly through the azure over the ruins of Carthage.” “Lulled by the murmur of the waves,” like the waves on the beach at Cannes, “they forget their existence and, in a hushed voice, sing a song of the sea: they are going to die.”

 

Notes

1. Editor/translator Alex Andriesse marvelously cites the Biblical allusion: “So fight I, not as one that beateth the air” (I Corinthians 9:26).
2. “It is hard to be born in times of improbity, in days when two men chatting together must be on guard against using certain words for fear of causing offense or making the other man blush.” So then, and so in more recent times, in other countries.
3. De Gaulle to André Malraux: “What do you think of the Emperor?” Malraux: “A very great mind, and a rather small soul.”
4. Eric Voegelin: Hitler and the Germans (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). Reviewed on this website; see “Voegelin, Hitler, and the Germans” in the “Philosophers” section.
5. Malraux regretted that Chateaubriand did not visit Bonaparte on St. Helena.

 

 

 

François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.

 

Napoleon led a life parallel to Alexander the Great—the main difference being, as Chateaubriand has observed, that in modernity it is impossible to pass oneself off as a god. After his victory at Austerlitz over the allied forces of Austria and Russia, Napoleon engaged in badinage with the defeated Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II. “Were such sovereigns worth being slaughtered for?” No, but there was another Alexander, Czar Alexander I, who was worth fighting for. “After the Battle of Austerlitz, almost everything Bonaparte does is in error,” and the Russian Orthodox Christian Czar of Russia, neither a god nor a beast (no emulator of the lion or the fox) exposed those errors. “The designs of Providence were fulfilled no less surely than those of Napoleon: we can see both God and man together on the march,” the one unerring, the other not. If Hegel claimed that the arrival of Napoleon in Prussia in 1806 betokened the appearance of the Absolute Spirit, the Holy Spirit finally marched its rival right back again, a decade later. Although Napoleon reconstructed the burial vaults at the Church of Saint-Denis to house the bodies “the princes of his race,” not even he would be entombed there. “Man digs the grave, and God fills it.” To write memoirs from beyond the grave means, among other things, to write them from the vantage point of seeing how Providence worked things out. For himself, while Berlin, “this monument of philosophy, was crumbling on the banks of the Spree, I was in Jerusalem, visiting the imperishable monument of religion.”

More immediately, Austerlitz resulted in the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, Francis II renouncing the imperial throne and becoming the founding emperor of Austria-Hungary as Francis I. With Napoleon the principal emperor of western Europe, having established the Confederation of the Rhine, Prussia would be free to unite the many German states, once Napoleon was disposed of, initiating the geopolitics of twentieth-century Europe. As early as the 1840s, Chateaubriand judged that although “Germany dreamed of political unity…it lacked the political education needed to attain liberty—just as Italy lacked the military education to attain it.” Chateaubriand considered the Confederation of the Rhine “a great unfinished work, which required a good deal of time and a special knowledge of the laws and interests of the nations” to realize, “but it fell quite suddenly to pieces in the mind of the man who had conceived it” because the triumph of Austerlitz turned Napoleon from the task of political founding toward the task of mere conquest. “All that remained of this profound scheme were a military and a fiscal machine,” as “once the genius of his early vision passed, Bonaparte thought of nothing but money and soldiers”: “the tax collector and recruiting officer took the place of the great man.” Even on that level, Providence had other ideas. By barring England from his continental system, Napoleon did help to spur the industrialization of France, Germany Switzerland, and Italy,” as intended, but it also “extended English trade to the rest of the globe,” extending the already formidable British Empire, still recovering from the loss of its North American possession.

One civil accomplishment Napoleon did undertake successfully was the integration of Jews in his new ‘confederal’ empire (not so confederal, since he selected the rulers of the several nations within it). He did this by calling for the convening of a “Grand Sanhedrin,” in imitation of the Sanhedrin of ancient Israel, consisting of prominent rabbinical and lay Jewish men, charged with establishing laws governing the legal status of Jews; these laws, promulgated in 1808, consisted of a ban on polygamy, permission to intermarry with Gentiles in civil, not religious, ceremonies, and acknowledgment of Jewish-Gentile brotherhood within the nations of the new empire (including the obligation to defend national territories alongside Gentiles). Chateaubriand is having none of this, falsely claiming that the agreement “let the finances of the world go to the stalls of the Jews, and thereby produced a fateful subversion in the social economy.” In fact, the new Sanhedrin banned usurious practices by Jews in their dealings with fellow Jews and Gentiles alike. While the actual intention of new set of laws was to promote Jewish assimilation (thus setting many German Jews against Orthodox Jews in eastern Europe), settling the so-called ‘Jewish problem’ along Napoleonic lines, Chateaubriand takes it to have been a (failed) attempted preliminary to the empire’s extension into the Holy Land.

Napoleon and Alexander I met at the Tilsit conference in 1807. They agreed to divide Europe between Turkey going to Russia, along with “whatever conquests the Muscovite armies could make in Asia,” while Bonaparte was free to consolidate Italy, take Spain, Portugal, and North Africa, thereby making the Mediterranean a French mare nostrum. In the event, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain diverted troops he would need against Russia in the war he soon would undertake against the czar, whom he believed to be “a fool.” But Alexander was only playing for time, “pretend[ing] to be a conquered prince.” “The politics of the West and the politics of the East did not depart from their usual character.” 

In Italy, Rome attempted to dominate the papacy. “Perhaps it was the moral and religious power of the Holy See that Napoleon feared,” although by his bullying he only enhanced that power. “What drove Napoleon?” Chateaubriand asks, not for the first time. “It was “the evil side of his genius, his inability to remain at rest,” the same incapacity that caused him to botch the founding of the Confederation by making it a platform for new conquests. “An eternal gambler, when he wasn’t laying bets on new empires, he was chancing fantasies.” These, Chateaubriand suggests were fantasies spurred by libido dominandi. “All authority (even the authority of time and faith) not attached to him personally struck the emperor as usurpation.” He failed to “see that by persecuting Pius VII, and thus making himself guilty of pointless ingratitude”—the pope had participated in the ceremony crowning him Emperor—Napoleon “lost the advantage of passing, among Catholic populations, for the restorer of religion.” It is true, Chateaubriand concedes in proper Catholic fashion, that “Rome is always the world’s greatest prize.” Napoleon annexed the Papal States to the French Empire in 1809, a degradation of the papacy numbering among the “miserable outrages of sophomoric philosophy.” But “the lowering of the pontifical flag” and its replacement by the Tricolor “presaged glory and ruins” there, as it would do “in every corner of the world.” When the pope now excommunicated Napoleon, Napoleon had him arrested and imprisoned. “If the iniquitous invasion of Spain turned the political world against Bonaparte, the disagreeable occupation of Rome repulsed the moral world,” as Napoleon “alienated himself from both the nations and the churches, from both man and God.” Pius XII died in French custody. Chateaubriand reminds his readers that this was the pope he had met in the course of his ambassadorial duties in his brief diplomatic career under the Consulate. “May my remembrance of his torments pay the det of gratitude I owe him for the torments he blessed in Rome, in 1803,” when Chateaubriand was recovering from the loss of Madame de Beaumont.

In spring of 1809, yet another coalition, this consisting of England, Austria, and Spain, declared its opposition to Napoleon. The allies still did not fully understand the new kind of warfare Napoleon had invented, although they were learning. Chateaubriand calls it “large-scale war,” a notion “inspired by the conquests of the Republic, which had requisitioned the masses.” That is, Napoleon democratized warfare. Instead of small, aristocratic armies, anchored in castles, Napoleon, the man who could not rest, led his armies out into the enemy’s country, “uninterested in retreats” but instead concentrating his troops on a single point in the enemy’s line, breaking it. “This maneuver, which was peculiar to him, was well suited to French fury, but would never have worked with less agile and impetuous soldiers.” But the result of Napoleonic action was European reaction: “When France went to war, Europe, learned to march,” as “the masses have counterbalanced the masses.” Chateaubriand hopes that Europeans will return to “civilized warfare,” warfare “that leaves populations alone while a small number of soldiers do their duty” of defending their country instead of devastating others in “fields of carnage, which ultimately bring about no results commensurate with their calamities.” Looking ahead from the 1840s, Chateaubriand forecasts that “Europe, barring unforeseen events, will be fed up with fighting for a long time to come,” as “Napoleon killed war by blowing it out of proportion.” A long time to come turned out to be a century after Napoleon’s defeat, some seventy years after Chateaubriand wrote his memoirs. Even in the twenty-first century, such restraint seems to need relearning, once a generation that has learned it passes from the scene.

By marrying the Hapsburg Archduchess Marie Louise in 1810, Bonaparte “obtained the only thing he lacked”: a link to monarchic legitimacy. “He is now, in every sense, master of the ages—if only he had wished to settle at the summit,” from which he could survey a domain of more than 85 million persons, “half the population of Christendom.” His wrongly ordered soul prevented him from so wishing. “While he has the power to stop the world, he does not have the power to stop himself. He will go on until he has conquered the last crown, which gives meaning to all the others, the crown of misfortune.” 

For “in the depths of his heart, Napoleon had retained a secret enmity for Alexander” of Russia. Russia remained formidable, a possible rival for control of Europe. The peace he had established with the czar was “a peace that Bonaparte’s character could not endure.” “By expanding the boundaries of France, Bonaparte had collided with the Russians, as Trajan, crossing the Danube, had collided with the Goths.” He formed an alliance with Austria and Prussia, while Turkey and Sweden aligned with Russia. In his new empire, “the French no longer recognized each other in the vastness of a country delimited by no natural border.” He had deranged the spirit of the city in his own country, “blinded by his hatred for the liberty of the nations”—his “hatred of constitutional governments [being] invincible.” And he failed to learn the geopolitical lesson of the Great European Plain: “that warlike people who inhabit the plains are condemned to be conquered,” as “all the various invaders of Europe have swooped down on the plains.” If Moses and Mohammad were armed prophets, Napoleon was an “armed poet.” Nero-like, “He wanted to ascend the Kremlin to sing and sign a decree on the theaters”—an allusion, Mr. Andriesse helpfully informs us, not only to Nero’s tyrannical antics but to Napoleon’s contemporaneous reorganization of the Comédie Française.

In May 1812, Napoleon headed the Conference of Dresden, whose attendees included the nominal rulers of the states composing his empire (“they are fighting over vassalage”). There, the Emperor gathered his polyglot armies for the invasion of Russia—680,000 infantry, 176,850 cavalry. Napoleon, Chateaubriand writes, “addressed himself to Destiny,” his counterpart, Alexander, addressed himself “to Providence.” 

The Russians refused to engage in the kind of war Napoleon wanted to fight. They retreated, lengthening the French supply lines. Characteristically, “Bonaparte could not restrain himself” pushing forward. At times, he caught up with the Russians; after the Battle of Koldrina, “a murderous clash,” “French corpses were buried in haste, so that Napoleon could not measure the enormity of his losses.” September 1812 saw the Battle of Borodino, where Napoleon won a Pyrrhic victory in the bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars, seeing some 30,000 French imperial troops killed, wounded, or captured and more than 40,000 Russians taken in defense of their homeland. 

Russian Field Marshall Mikhail Kutuzov, surrounded himself with Orthodox priests and religious icons. His soldiers prayed before battle, impressing a French officer who witnessed them by their piety, which “reminded me that the greatest of our kings, Charlemagne, also prepared for the most perilous of his undertakings with religious Christians.” Many among the French troops, sons of the Revolution, mocked the Russians for doing so, but one officer recalled, “our utter annihilation,” months later, “whose glory they cannot claim, since it was the manifest work of Providence, went to prove…that they had received what they had asked for.” In the battle at hand, however, “the French troops covered themselves with glory and demonstrated their great superiority over the Russian troops,” but “cursed be victories not won in defense of the homeland, which merely serve a conqueror’s vanity!” One of Napoleon’s generals “admitted that, on that important day, he no longer saw any signs of Napoleon’s genius.” As his difficulties mounted (the Russians continued to retreat, evading any decisive battle), Napoleon struggled. “We can find no other explanation for this other than in the very nature of the man. Adversity arrived, and its first touch froze him.” Unlike a Christian, ready to sacrifice, to suffer humiliation and injury, “prosperity alone left him with his faculties intact.”

“The Russians were withdrawing in good order to Moscow.” When Bonaparte’s army entered, the city’s governor-general, Fyodor Rostopchin, ordered the evacuated capital to be burned, “a decision [that] will go down in history as a heroic decision that saved one nation’s independence and contributed to the liberation of several others.” Chateaubriand concurs with the judgment of Madame de Staël: “This religious city has perished like a martyr whose spilled blood reinvigorates the brethren who survive.” Had Bonaparte seized Moscow, he would have “wrapped the world in his despotism like a mortuary sheet.” In destroying the city before he could do that, the Russians showed that “the rights of humanity come first.” “Speaking for myself, if the earth were an explosive globe, I wouldn’t hesitate to set it on fire were it a question of delivering my country from an oppressor. However, nothing less than the supreme interests of human liberty are needed to induce a Frenchman—his head covered in mourning and his eyes full of tears—to speak of a decision that would prove fatal to so many of his countrymen,” beginning with those who choked on the smoke or were crushed by collapsing arches and buildings. Bonaparte himself could only escape ingloriously “over the coals of a neighborhood that had already been reduced to ash.”

Bonaparte railed at what he took to be the madness of Rostopchin. “He who fails to understand greatness in another will not understand what it would mean for himself, when the time for sacrifices comes.” As for the czar, “Alexander betrayed no despondency when he learned of his adversities,” instead blessing “the hand that has chosen us to be first among nations in the cause of virtue and liberty.” As always, Chateaubriand understands the way men use words. To speak of God, virtue, and liberty pleases, reassures, and consoles a people. “How superior it is to those affected phrases, sadly scrounged from pagan locutions and defined by fatalism: it was to be they had to be, destiny drags them on!—empty phraseology, which is always barren, even when it refers to the most significant acts.” A century later, Russian rulers would take up exactly such language, and Russia has systematically ruined itself, ever since.

Having conquered an empty place, Bonaparte turned to the thought of attacking St. Petersburg. “Such were the new chimeras that filled Napoleon’s head”—chimeras, since “it is not possible to subjugate a nation whose last stronghold is the North Pole.” “The man was on the brink of madness, yet his dreams were still those of a great mind.” As he drew up his new plans, he lingered at Moscow, despite the threat of the Russian winter. “By delaying these few days”—thirty-five, to be precise—he “was sentencing the 100,000 men left to him to death.” 

As he finally retreated from Moscow, the Russians counterattacked, cutting off his escape route. Passing back over one battlefield, the French saw that “the birds of the sky had not finished eating what we had sown when we passed that way again.” Kutuzov pursued, leisurely. “Just wait until the snow comes.” At Borodino, “a vast scene of butchery lay before them, with forty thousand corpses in various stages of decay.” Would they “soon be like the companions whose remains they had seen”? But Napoleon, “indifferent to the miseries of his soldiers, cared for nothing but his own interests.” One of his officers asked, “Is this the civilization we’re bringing to Russia?” Chateaubriand remarks, “When you have committed a reproachable act, Heaven imposes on you the sanction of witnesses.” With Napoleon, Chateaubriand himself is the most eloquent among them. “The Russian expedition was aa true extravagance, which all the civil and military authorities of the Empire had condemned.”

And what of the Russian dead? Who remembers them? “Who thinks of the peasants left behind in Russia? Are those rustics glad to have been at ‘the great battle beneath the walls of Moscow’? Perhaps I am the only one who, on autumn evenings, watching the birds of the north wheel high in the sky remembers that they have seen our countrymen’s graves.” Now that industrial companies have taken over that land, “with their furnaces and boilers,” the bones of the French “have been converted to animal black. That is what we are doing with the dead nowadays! These are the sacred rights of the new religion!”

Concurrent with this long retreat, a coup attempt failed in Paris, a sign of Napoleon’s waning authority. “The rights that Napoleon had founded on force were being destroyed, along with his forces, by Russia, while in the capital all it took was one man to cast them into doubt. Outside of religion, justice, and freedom, there are no rights at all”—none, that is, that can be secured. As for Napoleon himself, he took care to leave his troops behind, just after declaiming that he would never do so. After all, “Can I remain at the head of a rout?” Not if I am Napoleon. His great cavalry commander, Joachim Murat, lamented, “It is no longer possible to serve a madman. We are no longer safe with him. Not a prince in Europe believes his words or his treaties.”

The French Senate nonetheless ‘doubled down,’ providing another quarter of a million men under Napoleon’s command. But Napoleon could no longer overawe the Legitimists. Louis XVIII issued a proclamation “that would later be set down in a constitutional charter—the first hopes of liberty, which came to us from our ancient kings.” Czar Alexander addressed his own proclamation not the French but to all of Europe: “May there soon be nothing left of the bloodthirsty colossus who has threatened the continent with his endless criminality but a long-abiding memory of horror and pity!” And the pope repudiated the so-called Concordat of 1813, whereby Napoleon would have increased his power over the Church, thus “giving the signal to depose the oppressor of nations.” For his part, “Bonaparte declared that he had always wanted peace and that the world was in need of it. But this world no longer had any wish to serve him.” More, it wished to overthrow him, as England’s Duke of Wellington, “the fatal man,” opened a new front in the west of France and the “Young Germany” movement, spurred by the philosophy professor Johann Gottlieb Fichte, brought Prussian forces to bear on the side of Russia, marching to patriotic verses “full of religious feeling and sincere human nature that sang of God, loyalty, and Germany.” “The man whose life was a dithyramb in action fell only when the poets of Young Germany had sung and taken up the sword against their rival, Napoleon, the poet of arms,” who had claimed that he made his battle plans out of the dreams of his sleeping soldiers. Czar Alexander “shared their lofty sentiments, and he was in a position powerful enough to make their dreams a reality,” but eventually would allow himself “to be scared by the fearful monarchs around him,” who, unlike French Legitimists, did not want liberty, that is, constitutional monarchy. The absolutists of the Holy Alliance would deny political liberty to post-Napoleonic Europe, eventually bringing on the revolutions of 1848 in the years immediately after Chateaubriand wrote these words.

Reinforced, Napoleon careened on, losing the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 and watching as Allied forces advanced across the Rhine in December. When the French legislature dared to tell him that he should restore political liberty to the country, he replied, while closing the legislature, “Do you wish to restore the sovereignty of the people? Very well, in that case, I declare myself the people, for I claim to be where sovereignty resides, now and forever.” Chateaubriand contents himself by remarking, “Never has a despot so emphatically explained his nature.” 

Not Napoleonic ‘Destiny’ but divine Providence “had changed the fortunes of the world.” Napoleon departed for the eastern front while Pius VII, now liberated, made his triumphal return to the Vatican, “making his way amid hymns and tears, to the sound of bells and cries of ‘Long live the pope! Long live the head of the Church!'” Protestants turned out, saying, “Here is the greatest man of his age,” a living martyr. “Such is the greatness of true Christian society,” Chateaubriand writes, “where God ceaselessly mingles with men. Such is the superiority of the power of the weak, sustained by religion and adversity, over the power of the sword and the scepter.” 

Chateaubriand himself had his own, literary, card to put down. He wanted the French to rise up against Napoleon before the foreign troops could defeat and overthrow him, to restore the Bourbon monarchy with institutions “modified to suit the times”—that is, institutions ensuring political liberty rather than the absolutism of Louis XIV, which Napoleon had attempted to revive. In the struggle of rival regimes that would wrack his country for a century and a half to come, Chateaubriand opposed radical, Jacobin republicanism, Napoleonic despotism, and socialism in defense of constitutional monarchy, a regime strong enough to defend France from foreign enemies (which would soon see a united Germany at the forefront) without engaging in wars of conquest, while maintaining domestic tranquility under the rule of law and of Christian, especially Catholic, moral authority. He made his argument in a pamphlet, Bonaparte et des Bourbons, but it was too late for any insurrection to stop the Allied armies. 

“The war came and installed itself outside the gates of Paris”—the first time in centuries that “Paris had seen the smoke of enemy camps.” Defeated once again, Napoleon had returned to the capital, “leaving behind him the immense inferno of his pointless conquests.” Ever-scheming Talleyrand wanted to get rid of him and to replace him with the regency of Marie-Louise which of course he would head. It was too late for his schemes, as well. Paris surrendered on March 31, 1814, “within ten days of the anniversary of the Duc d’Enghien’s death.” Recalling Napoleon’s vicious injuries to Russia, Christian Czar Alexander refused vengefulness. “I am a just man, and I know that the French people are not to blame. The French are my friends, and I want to prove to them that I come to return good for evil. Napoleon is my only enemy.” He extended his protection over Paris, respecting “all its public institutions,” quartering only so many troops there as to guarantee civil order while the French “secure for yourself a government that will give peace to France and Europe both.” Not long after, having seen that “order, peace, and moderation reigned throughout” the city, “Alexander departed, leaving us our masterworks”—unlike Napoleon, he plundered no paintings or statues from the country he had conquered—and “our liberty, set down in the charter—a liberty we owed to his intelligence as well as to his influence.” “Chief of two supreme authorities, an autocrat of the sword and the church, Alexander alone, of all the sovereigns of Europe” (very much including the deposed Napoleon) “understood that France had reached an age of civilization at which she could only governed under a free constitution.” The Czar “considered himself merely an instrument of Providence and claimed nothing for himself.” When Louis XVIII entered Paris, Alexander kept out of sight. Most beautifully, when told by a Frenchman that his arrival “long been waited and wished for,” he replied, “I would have come sooner, had French valor not delayed me.” In all, “he appeared to be astonished by his triumph; his almost tender gaze wandered over a population he seemed to consider superior to himself,” “as if he felt he was a barbarian in our midst, as a Roman might have felt ashamed in Athens.” 

It was at this point that the Chateaubriand’s pamphlet did have some good effect. Napoleon still had “more than forty thousand of the best soldiers on earth surround[ing] him,” and for his part, ever-scheming Talleyrand hoped to place the French crown on the four-year-old Napoleon II (as a former revolutionary, “he dreaded the Bourbons”), a policy consistent with Bonaparte’s own stated desire at the time. With the publication of Bonaparte et les Bourbons, “I flung myself headlong into the fray” in “an effort to tip the scales” in favor of Legitimacy. Later, Louis XVIII said that “my pamphlet was more advantageous than an army of a hundred thousand men,” and even Bonaparte allowed that “I have no reason to reproach Chateaubriand; he resisted me when I was still in power.” Chateaubriand courteously returns, “My admiration for Bonaparte has always been great and sincere, even when I was attacking him with all my might,” although cautioning his readers that the uncritical admiration of the Emperor among those who no longer remember the sufferings he inflicted during his years of tyranny distort the past and threaten France’s future. Like Alexander, Chateaubriand wants a life of Christian humility without personal or national humiliation, for himself and for his countrymen, and for the men of every country. 

Such a life had been impossible under the regime of Napoleon. Under it, we French “no longer mattered.” “Everything belonged to Bonaparte: I have ordered, I have won, I have spoken; my eagles, my crown, my blood, my family, my subjects.” Even under the pseudo-republican oligarchy of the Jacobins, “we did not have the shame of being the property of a man,” and no foreigner invaded us, thanks to the valor and sacrifice of our own men. “Despite his enormous acquisitions,” Napoleon “succumbed not because he was defeated, but because France no longer wanted him. An important lesson! Let it never be forgotten that there is a germ of death in everything that offends human dignity.”

The French would re-learn this lesson in the 1940s. To that generation, Chateaubriand still spoke: “God, in His patient eternity, sooner or later brings justice to bear. In those moments when Heaven appears to sleep, it is a fine thing that honest men look on with disapproval, for this disapproval remains as a rein on absolute power. May France never repudiate the noble souls who dried out against her servitude when all were prostrate, when there were so many advantages to remaining prostrate, so many graces to receive in exchange for flattery, so many persecutions to reap for sincerities sown.”

In the end, Talleyrand got what he really wanted: power for himself. He negotiated with Alexander for permission to form a provisional government with himself as its president, even as he adroitly switched to backing the Bourbon Restoration. “From that moment forward, M. de Talleyrand seemed to be the arbiter of the world; his parlors became centers of negotiation.” Chateaubriand issues his riposte. “The first acts of the Restoration were entrusted to the barren Bishop of Autun.” [1] Alluding to the likelihood that Talleyrand owed his physical condition to syphilis, Chateaubriand remarks, “He infected this Restoration with sterility and passed on to it a germ of dishonor and death.” 

Napoleon abdicated in April 1814. Departing for what would be only his first exile, at the island of Elba, Napoleon continued to hold Louis XVIII less legitimate than himself, since Louis was elected by the “lowly Senate,” while Napoleon had been chosen by “the unanimous wish of the people.” That he now departed in accordance with the nearly unanimous wish of the people he preferred not to notice. Chateaubriand, it is scarcely necessary to say, does.

Chateaubriand concludes his assessment of Napoleon’s character. “Bonaparte cannot be judged according to the rules we apply to the great geniuses, for he lacked magnanimity.” Unlike the great-souled man of Aristotle’s Ethics, Bonaparte could expand or condense his soul as conditions warranted. “Like the rebel angel, he could shrink his immeasurable mass down and fit himself into a measurable space; his ductility permitted him both salvation and rebirth,” enabling him to live in exile on an island and then return to France in a final attempt to regain his empire. “Changing his manners and costume at will, flawless in comedy and tragedy alike, he was an actor who could look natural under the tunic of a slave or the mantle of a king.” As such, he “was, in one person, all things great and miserable in man”—a consummate Machiavellian prince, waging a futile war against God and nature alike.

 

Note

1. Talleyrand, an ordained priest, had risen to the station of Bishop of Autun by the eve of the French Revolution. He quickly metamorphosed into an open scoffer at religion, earning excommunication. Reinstated as a member of the Church at the beginning of the century, he was laicized by Pius VII in 1802, an act very much in line with prudential reasoning on the Pope’s part.

 

 

 

 

François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.

 

After Napoleon’s judicial murder of the Duc d’Enghien, Chateaubriand moved to the Rue de Mirosmesnil, near the now abandoned Parc de Monceaux, “where the Revolution had begun among the orgies of the Duc d’Orléans,” who used it as a hideaway “embellished with marble nudes and mock ruins—symbols of the frivolous, debauched politics that were to flood France with prostitution and debris.” Philippe d’Orleans, first in line for the French throne if the Bourbons died out, built the park as a “folly garden,” years before the revolution. Indeed a libertine, he banned the Paris police from the area, making it a haven not only for ordinary illegal activities but also for Jacobin meetings. Philippe supported the Revolution, even to the extent of legally changing his name to Phillippe Égalité, before himself falling victim to trumped-up charges during the Reign of Terror. As for Chateaubriand, “at most I talked to the rabbits in the park or chatted about the Duc d’Enghien with three crows on the bank of an artificial stream,” not “know[ing] what to do with my imagination or my feelings.” In his anxious boredom, he took to the road, traveling to Geneva to visit Madame de Staël, a friend from his Atala days, and the noble if eccentric painter, Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin, a man of “a species between the monkey and the satyr,” in whose studio “no model was safe.” Unlike the Duc d’Orleans, the libertine artist could exhibit a “total abnegation of self, an uncalculating devotion to the miseries of others, a delicate, superior, idealize way of feeling.” As for Madame de Staël, her professions of suffering perplexing—how “could there be any misery in having fame, leisure, peace, and a sumptuous sanctuary with a view of the Alps”—but he concludes that “hearts have different secrets, incomprehensible to other hearts. Let us not deny anyone his suffering. Sorrows are like countries: each man has his own.”

Chateaubriand’s sufferings still centered on the emptiness caused by the death of Madame de Beaumont. “Old seasons of ardor returned to me with all their fire and melancholy. I was no longer in the places I was living. I was dreaming of other shores.” He learned of the death of his sister, Lucile, who had descended into madness and died in Paris, alone. Tending to his wife’s illness at the time, Chateaubriand could not attend the funeral and knew nothing of her burial arrangements. “My sister was buried among the poor. In what cemetery was she lain?” For his part, Napoleon was about to triumph at Austerlitz. “What did it matter to me at the moment I lost my sister, the millions of soldiers who were falling on the battlefield, the crumbling of thrones—the changing of the face of the world?” We are ineluctably centered in our own bodies and souls, attending for the most part to them and to the bodies and souls who have touched us. “When she disappeared, my childhood, my family, and the first vestiges of my life disappeared with her.” Reflecting on his wife’s less heartfelt response to his sister’s death (she was “still smarting from Lucile’s imperious whims”), Chateaubriand writes, “Let us be mild if we wish to be mourned. Only angels weep for lofty genius and superior qualities.”

Like Napoleon, however, Chateaubriand was soon on the move once more. In 1806 he traveled to Greece (“amidst the silence of Sparta’s wreckage, glory itself was mute”), Constantinople (again silence, jammed with “a mute crowd who seem to wish to pass unseen and always appear to be hiding from the gaze of the master”), and Jerusalem (“the sight of the cradle of the Israelites and the homeland of Christians filled me with joy and reverence”). Three places, three regimes. Sparta betokens the limits of military-aristocratic prowess (with a glance at Napoleon?). Constantinople, a religious despotism, where marketplace and cemetery (making it seem “as if Turks were here only to buy, sell, and die”) defined one aspect of the way of life, prison and seraglio another. “No sign of joy or look of happiness meets your eyes here. What you see is not a people, but a herd led by an imam and slaughtered by a janissary,” with the seraglio functioning as “the capital of servitude,” where “a sacred guardian carefully preserves the germs of pestilence and the primitive laws of tyranny.” Jerusalem, by contrast, still lives, as the place where, “even humanly speaking, the greatest event that has ever changed the face of the world occurred.” Returning through Carthage and Spain, Chateaubriand counts as his ‘spoils’ not territory but a book, his Itinerary to Jerusalem. Uninflamed by ambition, he devotes himself to learning, not conquering. In his writing and thinking alike, “My accuracy is due to my good common sense; I am a child of the pedestrian race of Celts and tortoises, not of the race of Tartars and birds who are endowed with horses and wings.” Even if religion “has often ravished me in its embrace,” it has always “set me down on earth again.” Travel itself bores him; “I love travel only because of the independence it gives me,” the countryside only for “the solitude it offers.”

Between Napoleonic military conquest and the privacy of family, friends, and thoughts stands politics. Chateaubriand never loses sight of it. “I am, in a certain sense, the last person to visit the Turkish empire while it still practiced its old way of life. Revolutions, which precede or follow me everywhere I go, have spread across Greece, Syria, and Egypt. Is a new Orient coming into being? What will emerge from it? Will we receive the punishment we deserve for having taught the modern art of warfare to nations whose social state is founded on slavery and polygamy?”

More immediately, back in France, “Bonaparte’s successes, far from subjugating me, had revolted me.” As publisher and editor of the Mercure, he wrote an article reminding his readers of the murder that initiated the modern despotism Napoleon had founded. The Emperor had him arrested for his troubles and confiscated his property but, in line with the milder tyrannies of the day, allowed him to retreat to internal exile in the village of Vallée-aux-Loups, where he planted trees and thought of settling in a park of his own designing. That, too, would never happen: “I fear that the only way I will be able to leave this world is by crossing over the corpses of my dreams.” 

The publication of his next book, The Martyrs, “earned me the renewed attention of persecution.” It is an account of “the struggle between two religions,” paganism and Christianity, “one dying and the other being born,” a theme that offers “one of the richest, most fertile, and most dramatic subjects.” But the undermining of an imperial despotism of the past “could not escape the notice of the imperial police” of the present— “all the more so since the English translator, who had no reason to be circumspect and who did not care a whit about compromising me, had, in his preface, pointed out these allusions.” As before, the pressure lessened in due course. Much worse, his cousin Armand, an unrepentant Legitimist, was arrested, jailed, and executed after returning to France from exile in England, having hoped to sound out public sentiment in Paris regarding Napoleon’s regime. “I saw my cousin for the last time, and was unable to recognize him; the shot had disfigured him and his face was gone.” Decades later, at the time he wrote this chapter, the bloodstains were still visible on the wall.

To protect him from further persecution, his friends got him elected to the Académie Française, where his very prominence might serve as a shield. The honor brought with it an obligation to make a speech. “I was determined to make my claims in favor of liberty heard and to raise my voice against tyranny,” paying homage to Legitimist monarchy and decrying “the horrors of 1793.” Napoleon himself read and edited the draft, which Chateaubriand was then allowed to publish but not to read aloud. He was “baffled” that the bowdlerized text still retained his celebration of liberty, “the greatest good and the first need of mankind,” indispensable to literature, which “languishes and dies in irons.” 

“The mixture of anger and attraction Bonaparte felt toward me is constant and strange.” The regime locked him up one day, allowed him to take a seat at the Académie the next, signed off on the publication of his latest book, then instigated attacks on it by hostile reviewers. Beside these contradictions—likely actions taken according to a strategy of carrot-and stick manipulation—Chateaubriand places his own coherence: “I examine everything. I am a republican who serves the monarchy and a philosopher who honors religion”—all “inevitable consequences of the uncertainty of theory and the certainty of practice in human life.” “My mind, made to believe in nothing, not even myself, made to disdain everything, whether splendors or miseries, nations or kings, has nevertheless been dominated by a rational instinct that ordered it to submit to what is acknowledged to be good: religion, justice, humanity, equality, liberty, glory.” Moral and divine beauty remain “superior to all earthly dreams.” “All it takes is a bit of courage to reach out and grasp it.” With the publication of The Genius of Christianity, The Martyrs, and the Itinerary, “my life of poetry and study really came to an end.” It was only with the Bourbon Restoration, following the fall of Napoleon, that he turned, or returned, to politics. He regards The Genius of Christianity as his greatest work, the one that began “the religious revolution against the philosophism of the eighteenth century” and the literary revolution of French Romanticism (“for there can be no renovation in thought without an innovation in style”).

Accordingly, he turns now to the political man about whom he could not write explicitly and at length until after the years in which his religio-poetic writings appeared. Although some have ridiculed Chateaubriand for writing himself into a ‘parallel life’ with the great Napoleon, they are wrong. The two men did have parallel but contrasting lives, the one a writer who defended liberty, the other as a despot who abused it. But each man was, in his own way, a weaver of imagined things.  Each was the preeminent Frenchman of that generation, in his way of life. Each experienced glory and exile as a result of his way of life. Who will have the last word, in the eyes of posterity—the Christian man of thought or the Enlightenment man of action? 

Chateaubriand recalls the confusion of the Legitimist monarchs at the outset of the French Revolution, which they misunderstood as a mere revolt “where they should have seen the changing of the nations, the end and the beginning of a world.” Not only the Bourbons but all the European monarchs could not fathom the rise of ‘the democracy.” Militarily, politically, diplomatically, they attempted to counter mass warfare and mass politics with the old ways of conduct. “Soon enough conscripts were going to rout Frederick’s grenadiers, monarchs were going to go plead for peace in the antechambers of obscure demagogues, and the terrible revolutionary attitude would unravel old Europe’s entanglements on the scaffold. Old Europe thought it was only warring with France and did not perceive that a new age was marching on it.” Napoleon did perceive it, reconstituting monarchy along new lines in France, and throughout the continent, where he acted as kingmaker in half a dozen countries. “How were these miracles worked? What qualities did the man who produced them possess?”

Unlike Alexander the Great, the son of a king, tutored by the greatest philosopher of his time, Napoleon “did not find power in his family; he created it.” Those who claim that Napoleon served as “merely the implementer of the social thinking that swirled around him,” embodying the ‘spirit of the age,’ do not ask themselves “how could there be a man capable of harnessing and steering so many strange supremacies.” 

Admittedly, Napoleon’s family origins weren’t low. The Buonapartes “have always been among the most ancient and most noble families,” one line in Tuscany, the other (Napoleon’s) in Corsica. During the Revolution he “was a democrat only momentarily”; “his leanings were aristocratic.” His first name had been “borne by several cardinals.” Although he falsified his birth date so that he could claim to have been born after France had taken Corsica, making him a native-born Frenchman, in his youth “he detested the French” as Corsica’s oppressors, “until their valiance gave him power.” Chateaubriand argues that Napoleon never relinquished his resentment of the French, speaking only “of himself, his empire, his soldiers, and almost never of the French” once he had achieved the summit of French politics. Rousseau had predicted that Corsica might astonish the world someday; he meant that its republican political institutions would serve as a model for the greater states. Chateaubriand confirms the conjecture, in a way. “Reared in Corsica, Bonaparte was educated in that primary school of the revolutions,” so called because the Corsicans, led by their republican hero, Filippo Antonio Pasquale de Paoli, had rebelled against their French conquerors in the years before Napoleon’s birth. And so, “to begin with, he brought us neither the calm nor the passions of the young, but a spirit already stamped with political passions.” Leaving Corsica for a French school at the age of nine, taunted by his classmates, who found his first name odd and his homeland contemptible, he told a friend, “I will do you Frenchmen all the harm I can,” as indeed he would come to do. “Morose and rebellious, he irritated his teachers. He criticized everything ruthlessly.” He got through, receiving an appointment in an artillery regiment.

There, his real education began, and not only in logistics. He read widely in history, economics, philosophy (“I do not believe a word of it,” he said of Rousseau’s first Discourse), and geography. Among the epic poets, he preferred Ariosto to Tasso, as Ariosto draws “portraits of future generals.” His own literary style, seen in his letters and even a novella, Chateaubriand describes as “declamatory,” as befits his commanding temperament.

He returned to Corsica, where the elderly but unbowed Paoli distrusted him, since young Buonaparte’s father had given up on Corsican independence, becoming Corsica’s representative to the French royal court. Rejected by his patriotic hero, in 1792 Napoleon sided with the Corsican Jacobins against Paoli’s nationalists and the Corsican Legitimists. Now senior gunner and artillery commander of the Republican forces, he returned to France to oversee the siege of Toulon, which had recognized the Bourbons and opened itself to the English navy. “Here, Bonaparte’s military career begins” in terms of its historical significance, as he formulated the plan that retook the city. Chateaubriand does not neglect to note that during the siege Napoleon laughed at how a young officer, recently married, was cut in two by an artillery shell. And he comments that Napoleon rose to prominence by killing Frenchmen. “He grew strong on our flesh; he broke our bones and fed on the marrow of lions,” allied with the bloodthirsty Jacobins while Chateaubriand himself was fighting on the Royalist side. Although offered the command of Paris by Robespierre, Napoleon declined the honor, confident that he would take Paris by his own arms, “later on.” He had correctly calculated that the Reign of Terror could not rule for long. 

Robespierre and his colleagues not being ones to take ‘no’ for an answer, he soon found himself threatened by them, as well. Truth to tell, “He was difficult to help; he accepted favors with the same grudgingness he had shown when he was promoted by the king’s munificence” in his early career. At the same time, “he resented anyone more fortunate than he was.” “Here we see a glimmering,” Chateaubriand remarks, “of the loathing the communists and proletarians of the present time express for the rich.” Chateaubriand disagrees with his cousin, Tocqueville, who hopes that the regime of social equality may prove enduring and decent. “Whatever efforts democracy may make to improve its moeurs by means of the great purpose it sets itself, its habits drag its moeurs down.” Confusing licentiousness with liberty, “it feels a strong resentment toward any sense of restriction,” and its terror-rule didn’t last because “it couldn’t kill everyone.” It is easy to overlook this, because the revolutionary armies defeated the old-regime armies arrayed against them, bringing glory to the regime. 

That regime soon had need of a brilliant commander, when Royalists in Paris, backed by the English, clashed with Republican forces. Threatened with ruin, the leader of the Parisian Republican forces turned to Napoleon, whose “quick and expert thinking” won the day, made him a hero of the people, and earned him the generalship of the French army in Italy. “At this point, Napoleon enters fully into his destiny”; “events had fashioned him, and now he is going to fashion events,” no longer needing “to bow and scrape before the mediocrities” whose patronage he had reluctantly sought. In Italy, “the eagle does not walk, he flies, with the banner of victory from his neck and wings.” He drove the Austrians out of the country, going on to defeat the Germans at Rivoli in January 1791. By mid-year he had taken Trieste and the Austrians sued for peace. “As Muhammad went forth with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, so we [French] went forth with the sword and the Rights of Man.“

Under such circumstances, in the presence of such a man, the Republicans faced the crisis of victory. With Napoleon at the head of an army of devoted soldiers far more numerous than was necessary to defend France, Republicans “fear[ed] a supreme despotism that would threaten the existence of every other despotism”—the one they had established. They praised Napoleon while casting about for a way to rid themselves of him. Napoleon himself devised an answer. Saying, “Europe is a molehill; all the great empires and revolutions have been in the East,” he announced that “I have won all the glory I can win here” and proposed a vast imperial venture, evidently in imitation of Alexander the Great, beginning with the conquest of Egypt and projected to end in India. The regime was only to happy to concur, “rush[ing] to send the victor abroad” in 1798. “This Egyptian adventure would change Napoleon’s fortune as well as his genius—gilding this genius, which was already too bright, with a ray of sun that struck at the pillars of cloud and smoke”—a reverse Exodus, a return to Egypt by France’s Pharaoh of the future.

Unlike Chateaubriand, Napoleon was “a man who never meander[ed].” Also unlike Chateaubriand, his brain was a “chaos,” combining “positive ideas and novelistic feelings, systems and chimeras, serious studies and flights of the imagination, wisdom and folly.” His traveling library on the Egyptian expedition included ‘Ossian,’ Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Rousseau’s The New Héloise, and the Old (but not the New) Testament. “From these incoherent productions of the age, he drew the Empire: an immense dream, which passed as swiftly as the disorderly darkness that brought it into the world.”

The Mamluk military class, controlled by the Ottoman Turks, ruled Egypt. Claiming to “respect God, his Prophet, and the Koran more than the Mamluks,” Napoleon marched his soldiers to the pyramids and declaimed, “From the heights of these monuments, forty centuries fix their eyes upon you!” And thanks to his courting of the Church, the Pope wrote him a letter calling him “my dearest son.” Although no devotee of the New Testament, the General knew how to be, or at least appear to be, all things to all men: Muslims, French secularists, Catholic Christians. The pose didn’t work for long. Soon enough, “his two-faced approach only made him, in the eyes of the Muslim masses, a false Christian and a false Muslim.” “By imitating Alexander, Bonaparte misjudged himself, and the age, and the state of religion—nowadays, no one can pass himself off as a god.” For a time, “his will was his destiny and his fortune,” but only for a time.

His soldiers in Egypt followed their, and his, “dreams of the Orient,” dreams going back to the Crusaders. And if the French “no longer had the faith that led them to liberate the Holy Sepulcher, they still had the boldness of crusaders, and a faith in the realms and the beauties that the troubadours and chroniclers had created around Godfrey.” But in reality, while expecting to “penetrate mysterious Egypt, descend into catacombs, excavate pyramids, unearth undiscovered manuscripts, decipher hieroglyphs, and reawaken Thermosirus,” priest of the Greek god Apollo, the god of reason, what they encountered in fact was mud huts, plague, Bedouins, Mamluks. Looking at things from several decades’ distance, Chateaubriand doesn’t quite share their disillusionment, since the French did, in the longer run, sow “seeds of civilization,” as a “ray of light stole into the darkness of Islam, and a breach was made in barbarism.”

From Egypt he marched his troops into Syria in February of 1799, pursuing his “dream of power.” Passing from Africa to Asia, “this colossal man was marching toward the conquest of the world—a conqueror bound for climes that were not to be conquered.” Climes: it was nature that would impose limits on Napoleon’s ambition, soon in Asia, later in Russia.

At Jaffa, he executed enemy soldiers who had surrendered, anticipating by many hundreds his future murder of the Duc d’Enghien. And as with that later crime, “this deed is passed over in silence or indicated vaguely in the official dispatches and accounts of men close to Bonaparte.” Ten years later, Napoleon would deplore the act of an Austrian military officer who allowed French and Bavarian prisoners to be slaughtered. “But what did he care about such contradictions? He knew the truth and toyed with it; he used it the same way he would have used a lie,” rather as Machiavelli advises his prince to judge words and men alike for their usefulness. “Heaven punishes the violation of human rights,” this time in a plague that descended upon the French troops. Claiming victory, Napoleon returned to Egypt.

Although “the French people raved about the Egyptian expedition and did not observe that it was a violation of both probity and political rights,” Chateaubriand does not join them. Indeed, he condemns European imperialism generally. Napoleon himself wanted to leave Egypt, seeing the war to have been “pointless and impolitic.” Similar plans for colonizing Egypt were entertained by the Old Regime Chateaubriand usually prefers. And the unromantic, dreamless English, who “esteem only practical politics, founded on interests,” also “consider fidelity to treaties and moral scruples childish” as the advance into other continents. Chateaubriand registers the ancient association of imperialism with tyranny.

In departing for France, Napoleon imitated Julius Caesar, who, to avoid capture by naval forces aligned with Ptolemy XIII, “saved himself by jumping into the harbor of Alexandria and swimming to shore,” where Ptolemy’s rival, Julius’ lover, Cleopatra awaited him. No Cleopatra waited for Napoleon, since love “held no real power over a man so devoted to death.” He “was bound for the secret rendezvous that another faithless potentate, Destiny, had made with him.” In Chateaubriand’s judgment, one must choose between God’s Providence, always faithful if not always smiling, and the false goddess, Fortuna. Following Machiavelli, Napoleon supposed that he could master Fortuna, but the goddess, and God, had other plans.

By the turn of the century, Fortuna remained active. “Change now sweeps the world,” with “the man of the last century,” George Washington, “step[ping] down from the stage and the man of the new century,” Bonaparte, stepping up on it. At this time, Chateaubriand remained offstage, in obscurity. “Napoleon was my age. We both emerged from the army, but when he had already won one hundred battles, I was still languishing in the shadows among those emigres who formed the pedestal of his fortune Having so far behind, could I ever catch up to him again?” Or did it matter? In exchange for Napoleon’s glorious victories, “would I have given up even one of the unremembered hours I spent in an out-of-the-way little town in England,” during his exile,” where he lived by turns in “sad poverty” and “merry destitution” with friends? Whatever the answer might be, the fact was that by the spring of 1799, when Napoleon returned to Paris from Egypt and Chateaubriand returned to Paris from London, “he had captured cities and kingdoms, his hands were full of powerful realities,” whereas “I had nothing but dreams.”

The next year, Napoleon led French troops back into Austria, then to northern Italy in a thirty-day campaign ending in the defeat of Austria. England remained at war with the Republic, by now a republic in name only, ruled by the three-man Directorate, not the Assembly, with Napoleon elected as consul for life in 1802. But by fall of the previous year, the preliminary agreements of the Treaty of Amiens ended the Wars of the French Revolution, with France relinquishing its claim to Egypt while regaining territories it had lost in the French Revolutionary Wars, England recognizing the ‘republic’ and gaining access to Continental trade for the first time in more than a decade. Napoleon used what he intended as a brief spell of peace to consolidate his power, murdering the Duc d’Enghien in March 1804 while decreeing “on the same day the Civil Code, or Napoleonic Code” in order “to teach us respect for the laws.” He would be elevated to the position of emperor less than shortly after that, an act solemnized by plebiscite by the end of the year. 

“Injured Europe was attempting to bandage its wounds.” A new military coalition formed against he obvious threat presented by the newly crowned French potentate. Napoleon would greet his rivals at Austerlitz.