François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1800-1815. Books XIII-XVI. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.
Exiled to England after having fought on the royalist side in the French civil war of the 1790s, Chateaubriand returned to France in 1800, where the future First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte was even then “restoring order through despotism.” He writes this thirteenth chapter of his Memoirs thirty-six years later, in Dieppe, where the seventeenth-century aristocrat, Anne Geneviève de Bourbon, Madame de Longueville, herself had set off for exile during the Fronde. As he walked the cliff behind the chateau where he was staying, Chateaubriand thought of the “monarchic grandeur” of the splendid century and the “plebeian celebrity” of his own time. “I now compared the men at these two ends of society,” “ask[ing] myself to which of these epochs I would prefer to belong.” While the persons of the Old Regime—Louis XIV, Richelieu, Mazarin, Turenne, the Prince of Condé—impressed him far more than the mediocrities of the ever-democratizing nineteenth century, “What are the troubles of 1648 compared to the Revolution that has devoured the old world, of which it will die perhaps, leaving behind neither an old nor a new society.” The “facts” of the present century, “the value of events,” counterpoise the persons, “the value of names,” of the seventeenth.
The Memoirs preserve the names of Chateaubriand and his contemporaries. He thinks of his memoirs as “Confessions,” having in mind Saint Augustine, who prayed to God, “Be Thou a tabernacle unto my soul,” asking of his readers, “When you find me in these books of mine, pray for me.” Men need to pray and to be prayed for, inasmuch as their living memories can fail them and the memory of their own lives will soon fade in the minds of their contemporaries. “Oh, the vanity of man forgetting and forgotten!”
In France, when he arrived from eight years of exile during the revolutionary wars, “everywhere was mud and dust, muck and rubble”—betokening a nation “beginning a world anew” (Chateaubriand slyly borrows a slogan from the Revolutionists), “like those nations emerging from the barbarian, ruinous night of the Dark Ages.” “France was now as new to me as the American forests had been.” The transformation was more than physical. “We have no idea today of the impression the excesses of the revolution had made on European minds, and above all on men who had not been in France during the Terror,” as “it seemed to me that I was literally about to descend into Hell,” with no Virgil to guide him. At the site where the guillotine had severed the heads of Louis XVI and Chateaubriand’s brother and sister-in-law, “I feared stepping in the blood not a trace of which remained.” With such memories of imagination, and after so many years in England, “talking, writing, and even thinking in English,” only “gradually I came to savor the sociability that distinguishes us—that charming, simple, rapid exchange of intelligence, that absence of all stiffness and prejudice that disregard of great fortunes and names, that natural leveling of all ranks, and that equality of minds which makes French society unlike any other, and which redeems our faults.” “After a few months’ residence among us, a man feels that he can no longer live except in Paris.”
Revisiting “the places where I had led my youthful dreams,” he found that while “so many heads had rolled…yet the rabble remained,” attending such entertainments as a magic-lantern horror show in what had been a cloister for the Capuchins. French religiosity, for centuries woven into the way of life, had itself suffered decapitation. Politically, as he writes these words in 1836, three regimes contend with one another: the Republic, with its principle of equality; the Napoleonic Empire, with its principle of power; and the monarchic Restoration, with its principle of liberty. Chateaubriand had missed all but the beginning of the Republican era. “No one had ever seen, and no one will ever see again, physical order produced by moral disorder, unity issuing from government by the multitude, the scaffold substituted for the rule of law and obeyed in the name of humanity.” A year after his arrival, he witnessed the second regime change, in which returned exiles concealed their identities, even their nationality, in “an agreed-upon travesty” so as not to offend the partisans of the Republican regime, now replaced, or the Napoleonic regime, now triumphant. “The returning émigré chatted peaceably with the murderers of a few of his relations.” Former revolutionaries had enriched themselves, some assuming aristocratic titles; the “Brutuses and Scaevolas” of the Terror now found employment as Napoleon’s police. “A vigorous generation was growing up, sown in blood, but raised to spill only the blood of foreigners,” as Napoleon would soon have them do. “Day by day, the transformation of republicans into imperialists—and from the tyranny of all into the despotism of one—was coming to pass.”
There was little a solitary and unknown writer could do about French politics, except to witness it. As it happened, however, he did more than he imagined in the realm of moral sentiment, secular and spiritual. The publication of his novel, Atala, began “my public career.” Although the substance was more or less Rousseauian, the style was new—a rejection of the tepid neo-classicism of the time, inaugurating the Romantic style in France as surely as Goethe’s Werther had done in Germany. “The old century rejected it, and the new one welcomed it.”
“I became all the rage. My head was turned. I was unacquainted with the pleasures of self-importance, and I was intoxicated by them: I loved fame like a woman or, rather, like a first love,” sneaking into cafés to read “my praises sung in one or another unknown little paper.” “If I was not spoiled by all this, I must really have a good nature.” Still, “I did not have to wait long to be punished for my authorial vanity,” as “the profits of fame are charged to the soul.” He was introduced first to the sister, then to the brother of Bonaparte. His eventual acquaintance with the Emperor would indeed challenge his soul, test the goodness of his nature rather more sternly than the rapturous “perfumed notes” he had begun to receive from admirers. In the meantime, he spent his evenings in a circle of returned exiles, the salon of Madame la Comtesse de Beaumont, whose father, once “entrusted with the business of foreign affairs under Louis XVI,” had died on the scaffold. There was Louis-Mercelin de Fontanes, a poet, Grandmaster of the Imperial University, perpetual reviser of his own works; Louis de Bonald, who had fought alongside the royalists in the 11790s, but a philosophic modernist; and Charles-Julien de Chênedollé, another poet and veteran of the royalist army. It was de Fontanes whose “muse full of awestruck faith that directed mine toward the new paths she was hastening to make,” the paths toward The Genius of Christianity. In going back to the seventeenth century, to the works of Corneille and Racine, de Fontanes had acquired the strength of that fruitful age and sloughed off the sterility of the century that followed.” But of all his friends in this circle, Chateaubriand remembers Joseph Joubert most fondly, a man who “will forever be missed by those who knew him,” exercising “an extraordinary hold on the mind and heart.” “Once he had taken possession of you his image was there like a fact, like a fixed idea, like an obsession you could not shake.” “A profound metaphysician, his philosophy, following an elaboration all its own, became like painting or poetry.” He never completed anything, having “adopted an idea of perfection that prevented him.” “I am like an aeolian harp that makes beautiful sounds and plays no tune,” he confessed. He finally came to Catholicism before his death; “I will not be seeing him down here again.”
“Never again will there be a place where so many distinguished people belonging to different ranks and destinies come together under the same roof, able to chat on equal terms about the most ordinary or lofty things: a simplicity of speech that did not derive from indigence but from conscious choice. These were perhaps the last gatherings at which the wit of the old regime made its appearance,” with “an urbanity…born of education and transformed by long use into an attribute of character.” It was by Madame de Beaumont’s kind patronage that Chateaubriand was able to complete The Genius of Christianity. The project must have seemed a work out of season. “Accuracy in the representation of inanimate objects is the spirit of the arts in our times. It heralds high poetry and true drama’s decline into decadence,” as “we content ourselves with insignificant beauties when we are powerless to create great ones,” imitating “armchairs and velvet cushions to trick the eye when we are no longer able to depict the person seated on those cushions and chairs” thanks to our “realism of material form. “For the public, who have become materialists themselves, demand it.”
With the publication of the new book, “the Voltairean contingent raised a cry and rushed to arms.” Chateaubriand’s prospects looked dubious: “what hope was there for a nameless young man to undo the influence of Voltaire, in ascendance for more than half a century”? But on the contrary, “there was a need for faith, a craving for religious consolations which came of being so long deprived of them,” after the violence of Republican revolution and of Republican wars. “People hastened to the house of God as they hasten to the doctor’s house during a plague.” And the First Consul approved, having made overtures to the Catholic Church in order to “build his power upon society’s earliest foundation.” “Later, he would repent of his mistake. Ideas of legitimate monarchy came in with those religious ideas,” and the Bourbons were still alive. The Genius of Christianity had a more enduring effect than it had on Bonaparte’s ever-shifting tactics. “If the work represented an innovation of literary style, it also represented a change of doctrine”: in its wake, “atheism and materialism were no longer the basis of belief or unbelief in young minds.” “A person was no longer nailed in place by anti-religious prejudice,” anti-Christlike; “he no longer felt himself obliged to remain a mummy of nullity bound in the bandages of philosophy,” and not very good philosophy, at that. After all, what are Saint-Simonianism, Phalansterism Fourierism, and Humanism next to the metaphysics of Abelard, Saint Bernard, or Thomas Aquinas? “The shock The Genius of Christianity delivered to men’s minds thrust the eighteenth century out of its rut and put it off the road for good.”
It was the one possible counter to Bonaparte. Science continued apace, following the lead of eighteenth-century materialism. But scientists had no answer to despotism. “The Laplaces, the Lagranges, the Monges, the Chaptals, the Berthollets, all of these prodigies, once proud democrats, became Napoleon’s most obsequious servants.” “These men whose research had soared to the loftiest heavens could not raise their souls above Bonaparte’s boots.” “They pretended to have no need of God, and that is why they had need of a tyrant.” It was “the men of letters” who pushed for freedom, as “Christianity is the thought of the future and of human liberty” as well as “the only basis for social equality,” balancing equality “with the sense of duty which corrects and regulates the democratic impulse.” While a despot’s commands, and even the commands of Republican law, can change, being “the work of mortal and various men,” morality “springs from the immutable order,” and “it alone can endure.” “Wherever Christianity has prevailed, it has changed, minds, rectified notions of justice and injustice, substituted affirmation for doubt, embraced the whole human race with its doctrines and precepts.” Chateaubriand goes so far as to pin his own hopes for divine mercy on the continued influence of The Genius of Christianity. As for literary affairs here below, he thought at the time that writers will henceforth divide between the style of the Enlightenment savants and that of the “classical models,” the models of the seventeenth century, albeit presented “in the new light” of what became known as Romanticism, its Gothicism animated by a reanimated spirit of Christianity. And more: “What has touched me—at least I have ventured to think so—is the thought that I have done some little good, that I have consoled a few distressed souls, that I have revived in a mother’s breast the hope of raising a Christian child, which is to say a submissive, respectful child, attached to his parents.”
Enter Bonaparte, “the Man of his times” on the verge of taking “his seat at the head of the table of the human race.” They met in 1802, at a reception given by his brother Lucien, Minister of the Interior. “He made a favorable impression on me”—his smile engaging, his eyes “marvels to behold,” with “nothing of the charlatan in his gaze, nothing theatrical or affected.” He had read Bonaparte’s book and it had “struck a chord” with him. “A prodigious imagination animated that coldly calculating politician: he would not have been what he was if the Muse had not been with him. Reason effectuated a poet’s ideas. All these men who lead great lives are a compound of two natures, for they must be capable of both inspiration and action; one man conceives the plan, the other executes it.” Recognizing Chateaubriand (the incident had surely been arranged), he engaged him with a few remarks about the grandeur of Christianity. Chateaubriand recalls his previous interview with George Washington, “the man of the last century,” who sent him away “with a kindly wish.” Napoleon would soon send him away “with a crime.”
Before that, however, the First Consul had use for Chateaubriand, appointing him First Secretary of the French embassy in Rome. (“He was a great discoverer of men; but he wanted them to put their talents to work only for him,” as “there was to be no one but Napoleon in the universe.”) On his way to his appointment, he recalled that his route to the south followed that of Hannibal, whereby “the vengeance of the human race bore down upon a free people, who could not establish their greatness except through slavery and the rest of the world’s blood.” So it would be for the French, under the command of Napoleon. Chateaubriand takes care to distinguish Napoleon from the French soldiers he sent to war. On his way to Rome, he saw Milan, occupied by the French army. The troops were not oppressors, there. “Lively, witty, intelligent, the French soldier involves himself in the doings of the people he lives among. He draws water from the well, like Moses for the daughters of Midian.”
“Not only is ancient Italy gone, medieval Italy has vanished,” both leaving traces behind. Saint Peter’s Cathedral “and its masterworks,” the Roman Capital “and its ruins” stand on opposite sides of the Tiber. “Planted in the same dust, pagan Rome subsides deeper and deeper into its tombs, while Christian Rome is descending again, little by little, into its catacombs.” The desperately ill Madame de Beaumont joined him there. On her deathbed, she told the priest that “she had always been deeply faithful at heart but that the unthinkable horrors that had befallen her during the Revolution had, for a time, made her doubt the justice of Providence; that she was prepared to confess her transgression and to put herself at the mercy of God; but that she hoped the sorrows she had suffered in this world would curtail her expiation in the other.” She died “without the slightest sign of fear”; Chateaubriand pressed his hand on her heart and felt it stop. She “was the very soul of a vanishing society.” With her death, Chateaubriand decided to give up his political career. “You have not experienced desolation of the heart if you have never lingered on alone, wandering in places lately inhabited by a person who made your life worthwhile.” He also conceived of writing his memoirs, “the one work capable of mollifying my grief,” as he wrote to Joubert. “Rest easy, though,” he continued. “These will not be confessions painful to my friends,” following the bad example of Rousseau. “I will say nothing of myself not in keeping with my dignity as a man and, I daresay, with the exaltation of my heart,” for “it is not lying in the eyes of God if we reveal only those parts of our life that will encourage noble and generous feelings in our fellow man.” “There’s no shortage of examples if one wants to see poor human nature trounced.” [1]
Rome, ancient and medieval. Against the excesses of modernity, Chateaubriand sets his memoirs, defending both elements of the Old Regime: “religion alone commanded my attention with its seriousness and the loftier considerations it suggested to me”; at the same time “I thought I understood the importance the ancients attached to the value of their name,” to honoring the dead in remembrance. “Perhaps, among the great men of antiquity, this idea of an immortal human life took the place of the immortality of the soul, which for them remained a riddle.” It is true that death is a blessing. As Chateaubriand reads the Book of Genesis, after Adam comes to know evil, God mercifully prevents him from taking the fruit of the tree of life; knowing evil, Adam “is now oppressed by misery” and “should therefore not live forever.” “What a gift from God is death!” Only God can bear the misery of knowing evil.
And “such enormous misery!” In the thirty-five years since Madame Beaumont’s death, he has seen how “man stumbles from one mistake to the next.” “When he is young and drives his life before him, he still has a shadow of an excuse, but when he is yoked to his life and drags it painfully behind him, what excuses him then? Our days excuse one another. Our life is a perpetual blush, for it is a neverending blunder.”
In the parallel but sharply contrasting soul of Napoleon, plans for imperial conquest gestated, as “his genius”—distant from the genius of Christianity—”was “growing to keep up with the greatness of events.” That genius didn’t endure death but dealt it out. “He had the capacity, like gunpower expanding, to blow the world away.” Napoleon wanted to retain him in his service, establishing a new republic in a Catholic section of the Alps for that purpose. In March 1804, back in Paris, Chateaubriand presented himself to Napoleon prior to departing for his new assignment. He saw a change in the man. “There must be something strange going on we don’t know about,” he told his friends, as there was “something sinister” in Bonaparte’s eyes. “A superior man does not bring forth evil painlessly, for it is not its natural fruit, and he should not bear it.” Two days later, he learned that Louis-Antoine Henri de Bourbon, the Duc d’Enghien, had been sentenced to death by a hastily-arranged military court.
The Duc d’Enghien had commanded a corps of émigrés in the Army of Condé, the royalist troops who had attempted to retake France for the monarchy in the 1790s. He had been condemned to death by the First Republic. Now, more than a decade later, Napoleon had received police reports, which were false, claiming that the Duc had been conspiring with royalists to undertake a coup d’état against him. He refused an interview when the Duc sought to exonerate himself, after which a firing squad killed him. The killing alarmed monarchs throughout Europe, with Czar Alexander fatefully determining that Napoleon must be resisted. Later on, one French cynic judged the execution “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” Chateaubriand, immediately understood it as worse than a blunder but a crime, a legal murder. Against his wife’s pleadings—she saw that “the lion had tasted blood, and this was not a moment to irritate him”—he wrote a letter of resignation.
“There are times when loftiness of soul is a veritable infirmity. No one understands it; it passes for a kind of closed-mindedness, a prejudice, an obtuse ingrained habit, a caprice, a foible that prevents you from seeing things as they are,” making yourself, in the eyes of “the mediocre,” “a stranger to the march of the age, the movement of ideas, the transformation of mores, the progress of society.” Not so with Napoleon himself, however. No mediocrity, he much later told Chateaubriand’s old friend, M. de Fontanes, that “my resignation was one of the things that had most impressed him.” This did not of course prevent Napoleon to hold “the sword suspended above my head until the day of his downfall.” They were linked together, now. “Our two natures, opposite in so many respects, always reared their heads again, and if he would gladly have had me shot, killing him wouldn’t have weighed too heavily on my conscience.”
In Paris, fears of a Robespierre-like Reign of Terror flared. The Bourbon exile Louis XVIII wrote to the King of Spain, “There can be nothing in common between me and the great criminal whom audacity and fortune have placed on the throne that he has had the barbarity to soil with the pure blood of a Bourbon, de Duc d’Enghien. Religion might make me pardon a murderer, but the tyrant of my people must always be my enemy.” Gustav IV of Sweden—who, unlike the young Louis XVIII, had actually reigned as the king of his country—also “dared to raise his voice in defense of the young French prince,” who had been the last of the eminent Condé line. Gustav condemned this violation of “the laws of chivalry” in a Europe that had long since abandoned them. “Alas, we had gone through too many different forms of despotism.” In their obsequiousness, most of Napoleon’s contemporaries “sputtered congratulations on the dangers the First Consult had just escaped” and “society rapidly returned to its pleasures, for it was afraid of its grief,” of being convicted of “the crime of memory.”
Chateaubriand asks himself, if Bonaparte had not killed the Duc d’Enghien, “what would have been the result for me?” A glittering political career, with no more literary productions. “France may have gained something from my alliance with the emperor, but I would have lost something. Perhaps I would have succeeded in preserving a few ideas of liberty and moderation in the great man’s head; but my life, classed among those called ‘happy,’ would have been deprived of what has given it character and honor: poverty, struggle, and independence.” Instead, he followed the way of the Man of Sorrows, against the modern Caesar.
As for Bonaparte, “he was not able to subdue his conscience as he had subdued the world.” Like so many human beings, “superior men and little men alike,” he tried to pass off his error “as a work of genius—a monumental scheme beyond the grasp of the vulgar,” an attempt dictated by pride and believed by folly. Bonaparte thought of himself as Napoleon, man of destiny. “How it justifies, chalking it all up to destiny, the evil that we do ourselves!” And so, the man who murders his father excuses himself by saying, “I was made like that!” Chateaubriand replies: “But what do I care if you were made like that? Am I expected to submit to your way of being?” God, the ultimate reality, God alone is entitled to make such a demand. “When people cannot erase their errors, they deify them; they make a dogma of their misdeeds, they change their sacrileges into a religion, and they would consider themselves apostates if they gave up worshipping their vices.”
“There is a serious lesson to be drawn from Bonaparte’s life.” He was ruined by two bad actions whose consequences only turned unfavorable years later. The first was the murder of d’Enghien, which marked him as a dangerous man in the eyes of Europe; the second, in 1807-08, was his betrayal of his ally, Spain, a year into the Peninsular War, which eventually drew British intervention. It is true that he prevailed initially after both crimes, rolling up victories against Spain, Prussia, and Russia in that decade, but ultimately “it did no good for him to ride over [these crimes] in glory; they remained, and they ruined him.” With them, “he violated the laws of morality while neglecting and scorning his true strength, which is to say his superior capacity for order and equity. As long as he concentrated his attacks on anarchy and the foreign enemies of France, he was victorious; he found himself robbed of his vigor only when he entered upon the paths of corruption.” A crime always “bears within it a radical incapacity and a germ of tragedy,” a flaw or crack in the soul that weakens the criminal. Proof of this may be seen not only in the response of the King of Sweden, but the Russian cabinet’s protests, prefiguring later wars, and the Prussian campaign of 1806, the War of the Fourth Coalition, which Frederick William III called an act avenging the Duc’s murder. To be sure, France won that war, going on to defeat Russia, too, in 1807, but the animosities that brought on Napoleon’s eventual ruin began with the murder and subsequent war with Spain. “These historical details, which are rarely noted, deserve to be for they explain enmities whose first cause would be very difficult to locate elsewhere, and at the same time they reveal those steps by which Providence leads the destiny of a man from the crime to the punishment.”
Bonaparte’s soul became progressively disfigured. “He became suspicious; he inspired fear; people lost confidence in him and in his destiny; he was compelled to see, if not to seek out, men he would never have seen before, and who, because they had been admitted into his company, believed they had become his equals. Their defilement infected him. His nature began to deteriorate.” It is Chateaubriand’s answer not only to Bonaparte but to Machiavelli and his attack on Christianity.
Note
- In this, André Malraux takes Chateaubriand, not Rousseau, as his model. See his Anti-Memoirs (Terence Kilmartin translation, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).
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