Mémoire sur la captivité de Mme la duchesse de Berry (French Edition)

After a short visit to Paris he joined his regiment at Cambrai, and early in the following year was presented at court. In he received the tonsure in order to enter the order of the Knights of Malta. In Paris — he made acquaintance with the Parisian men of letters. Chateaubriand was not unfavourable to the Revolution in its first stages, but he was disturbed by its early excesses; moreover, his regiment was disbanded, and his family belonged to the party of reaction.

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His political impartiality, he says, pleased no one. These causes and the restlessness of his spirit induced him to take part in a romantic scheme for the discovery of the North-West Passage, in pursuance of which he departed for America in the spring of The passage was not found or even attempted, but the adventurer returned enriched with the—to him—more important discovery of his own powers and vocation, conscious of his marvellous faculty for the delineation of nature, and stored with the new ideas and new imagery,.

That he actually lived among the Indians, however, is shown by Bedier to be doubtful, and the same critic has exposed the untrustworthiness of the autobiographical details of his American trip. His knowledge of America was mainly derived from the books of Charlevoix and others.

The news of the arrest of Louis XVI. This enabled him to join the ranks of the emigrants, a course practically imposed on him by his birth and his profession as a soldier. His brother succeeded in obtaining some shelter for him, and sent him to Jersey. The captain of the boat in which he travelled left him on the beach in Guernsey. He was once more rescued from death, this time by some fishermen.

In England he lived obscurely for several years, gaining an intimate acquaintance with English literature and a practical acquaintance with poverty. His own account of this period has been exposed by A. London, , which the author subsequently retracted, but took care not to suppress. In this volume he appears as a mediator between royalist and revolutionary ideas, a free-thinker in religion, and a philosopher imbued with the spirit of Rousseau. A great change in his views was, however, at hand, induced, according to his own statement, by a letter from his sister Julie Mme de Farcy , telling him of the grief his views had caused his mother, who had died soon after her release from the Conciergerie in the same year.

His brother had perished on the scaffold in April , and both his sisters, Lucile and Julie, and his wife had been imprisoned at Rennes. Mme de Farcy did not long survive her imprisonment. Exquisite style, impassioned eloquence and glowing descriptions of nature gained indulgence for the incongruity between the rudeness of the personages and the refinement of the sentiments, and for the distasteful blending of prudery with sensuousness. Alike in its merits and defects the piece is a more emphatic and highly coloured Paul et Virginie ; it has been justly said that Bernardin Saint-Pierre models in marble and Chateaubriand in bronze.

No coincidence could have been more opportune, and Chateaubriand came to esteem himself the counterpart of Napoleon in the intellectual order.

In composing his work he had borne in mind the admonition of his friend Joseph Joubert, that the public would care very little for his erudition and very much for his eloquence. It is consequently an inefficient production from the point of view of serious argument. The considerations derived from natural theology are but commonplaces rendered dazzling by the magic of style; and the parallels between Christianity and antiquity, especially in arts and letters, are at best ingenious sophistries. The less polemical passages, however, where the author depicts the glories of the Catholic liturgy and its accessories, or expounds its symbolical significance, are splendid instances of the effect produced by the accumulation and judicious distribution of particulars gorgeous in the mass, and treated with the utmost refinement of detail.

The work is a masterpiece of literary art, and its influence in French literature was immense. Its immediate effect was very considerable. When his insubordinate and intriguing spirit compelled his recall he was transferred as envoy to the canton of the Valais. The murder of the duke of Enghien 21st of March took place before he took up this appointment. Chateaubriand, who was in Paris at the time, showed his courage and independence by immediately resigning his post. In he gave great offence to Napoleon by an article in the Mercure de France 4th of July , containing allusions to Nero which were rightly taken to refer to the emperor.

Although his contemporaries celebrated the present and future as an extension of the past, Chateaubriand and the new Romanticists abandoned this nostalgic outlook. Instead he foresaw chaos, discontinuity, and disaster. His diaries and letters often focused on the upheavals he could see every day--abuses of power, excesses of daily life, and disasters yet to come.

His melancholy tone suggested astonishment, surrender, betrayal, and bitterness. He became a harsh critic of the "bourgeois king" and the July Monarchy , and his planned volume on the arrest of the duchesse de Berry caused him to be unsuccessfully prosecuted.

Far from being at its term, the religion of the Liberator is now only just entering its third phase, the political period, liberty, equality, fraternity. The parallels with Chateaubriand's own life are striking. His descriptions of Nature and his analysis of emotion made him the model for a generation of Romantic writers, not only in France but also abroad. The young Victor Hugo scribbled in a notebook, "To be Chateaubriand or nothing.

Stendhal , who despised him for political reasons, made use of his psychological analyses in his own book, De l'amour. Chateaubriand was the first to define the vague des passions "intimations of passion" that later became a commonplace of Romanticism: His political thought and actions seem to offer numerous contradictions: This is certainly true of Chateaubriand himself.

All his works have strong autobiographical elements, overt or disguised.

• François-René de Chateaubriand - Wikipedia.
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George Brandes , in , compared the works of Chateaubriand to those of Rousseau and others:. The year was the first to produce a book bearing the imprint of the new era, a work small in size, but great in significance and mighty in the impression it made. Atala took the French public by storm in a way which no book had done since the days of Paul and Virginia. It was a romance of the plains and mysterious forests of North America, with a strong, strange aroma of the untilled soil from which it sprang; it glowed with rich foreign colouring, and with the fiercer glow of consuming passion.

Chateaubriand was a food enthusiast; Chateaubriand steak is most likely to have been named after him.

Chateaubriand was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Chateaubriand disambiguation. Chateaubriand as a Peer of France French Revolutionary Wars Siege of Thionville. Christian right Christian fundamentalism Jewish right Islamic fundamentalism Traditionalist Catholic. Conservatism portal Brittany portal Biography portal. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Journal des Savants, 1,1 from http: Loss and Memory after the French Revolution.

On nostalgia, exile, and modernity. The Emigrant Literature p.

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Significant civil and political events by year. What Is the Third Estate? Treaty of Amiens 25 Mar William V, Prince of Orange. Alexander Korsakov Alexander Suvorov.

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Luis Firmin de Carvajal Antonio Ricardos. Other significant figures and factions. Foreign Ministers of France. Talleyrand Champagny Bassano Caulaincourt. Richelieu Dessolles Pasquier M. Broglie Rigny Bresson Rigny V. Baudouin Laval Flandin Darlan Laval. Abovian Alencar Alfieri Andersen A. Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource. This page was last edited on 17 October , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Auguste de La Ferronays.