Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb Paperback – July 29, 2014

For years I treasured Penguin's 1965 edition (priced in shillings and pence) of the vivid memoirs of Rene de Chateaubriand. a French nobleman active in the events of his times and widley travelled. It featured Robert Baldick's intelligent selections from the extended memoirs, and a splendid translation from the French original, itself a model of French style. That 1965 edition I seem to have lost, and, preparing lecture series on 19th century France, I ordered this latest edition. It retains Baldick's fine selections and translation, and carries an excellent new introduction by Philip Mansel. I recommended it to anybody interested in the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Restoration of Monarchy and July Revolution of 1830. Most of 1791 Charteaubriand spent in the United States, and offers fascinating observations, including time spent with the Iroquois.

Perhaps Chateaubriand is not an "amazing genius" or an "amazing literary figure," but the observations that he made throughout his life seem true to the life of an everyday person, and yet told with a literary talent that gives substance and significance to our observations and comments on our own contemporary surroundings.. Our thoughts (our well-considered thoughts) matter! Whether he is being pessimistic, naively optimistic, regretful, hopeful, or resigned, I found myself saying often "That's the way I think I would have thought about that situation." One small incident in the book was an account of his first view of Niagara Falls in the late 19th century. I've seen the Falls myself, but I will never think of them again without hearing his insightful words "in my ears." He had the fortune -- fortune, I think -- of living through one of the periods of greatest changes in Europe. There is lots of action in this book!

brilliantly told life of man who lived through world events in 18th century

Chateaubriand’s Introduction is rather flamboyant as he mentions the great variety of his life and fortunes: the places on various continents he has visited, all the famous people he has met, the exiles he has suffered and the offices he has held, and he tells us that he had written the memoir in instalments, separated by many years, and that they were to be published only after his death. The first lines were penned in 1811, the last in 1841, seven years before his death. He begins several instalments with thoughts set off by the circumstances under which he wrote it; so he moves backward and forward in time.

I did not find the earliest chapters very interesting as he describes his aristocratic descent and his childhood years, throwing in the occasional sententious and melancholic reflection. Melancholia will be the hallmark of his Memoirs throughout; musings of death are never far away, and the death of relatives and friends are described at length and with much pathos.

After the childhood chapters the book comes alive, and he shows his mastery of a full-blown romantic style (beautifully translated by Robert Baldick), and if you like that style - as I do - it is rather captivating, even if occasionally somewhat overblown.

He had a forbidding, taciturn father who intimidated all around him; he was closer to his piously Christian mother and to his melancholic sister. He himself was solitary by choice. He describes the nights in the family’s rather isolated chateau at Combourg - his mother and sister terrified of ghosts, and he himself responding to all the nocturnal sights and sounds. There is then some fine writing about his shyness with women which leads him, here as throughout the book with many classical allusions, to construct in his mind an imaginary beauty who accompanies his existence for two years of delirium. He takes pleasure in his suffering because this phantom is unattainable.

His father ordered him to join the Army; after his father’s death, François-René’s elder brother secured him presentation at the Court of Versailles - with the shy younger man protesting ineffectually; and indeed he makes no attempt to take any advantage of that opportunity. He despised the Court, but was horrified by the scenes he witnessed in Paris during the Revolution. In 1791 he set sail for the United States “to discover the North-West Passage”.

When he got to America, he initially moved towards Canada, meeting and bivouacking with Iroquois Indians, but, having reached the Niagara Falls and described them with suitably romantic rapture, he changed course (without explanation) for the south, whose graceful Indians appealed to him even more than had the Iroquois. Two of the Indian women became the models of his novels “Atala” and “René”.

Reading of the captivity of Louis XVI, he felt his place should be back in France to support the Bourbon cause. He returned to France and allowed his family to pressure him into marrying a woman he had never met. He then joined the army of the émigré princes in Germany, for which his brother and sister-in-law were soon to be executed, his mother, wife and sister imprisoned until they were set free after the fall of Robespierre. Chateaubriand was wounded at the siege of Thionville, discharged as an invalid, and made his way to England, where for a long time he was destitute.

He had long been a free thinker; but when in 1798 he heard of the deaths of his pious mother and equally pious sister, he not only returned to Christianity but started work on the book which would make him famous: “Le Génie du Christianisme”. It was published, along with “Atala” and “René” soon after Chateaubriand returned in 1800 to a France now ruled by Napoleon, who welcomed the book and its author as supporting his policy of restoring Christianity. Indeed in 1803 he appointed him secretary to the French Legation in Rome, Chateaubriand’s first diplomatic post. But he resigned it in the following year in protest against the kidnapping and execution of the Bourbon Duke of Enghien. Henceforth he would be a critic of Napoleon’s despotism and of his lust for conquest. When the time comes, he will welcome the constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII and his diplomatic career will resume.

In fine set pieces he describes, as if he had been there, Napoleon’s invasion and retreat from Russia; the modest gentleness which Tsar Alexander displayed in conquered Paris; Napoleon’s leave-taking as he departed to Elba and his brief sojourn there; his own adherence to the restored Bourbon monarchy about which he makes many splendidly sardonic comments; he pours contempt on the turncoats who swore allegiance successively to Napoleon, the Bourbons, Napoleon again during the Hundred Days, and then once more to the Bourbons. After Napoleon’s fall Chateaubriand has many fine pages, fairly assessing the merits and demerits of his reign and giving a very detailed and reflective account of his life, death, burial and later exhumation on St Helena. Writing after his body had been brought back to France in 1840 (“robbed of his rocky catafalque, Napoleon had come to be buried in the grime of Paris”), Chateaubriand is conscious how he is still such a potent presence: “after enduring the tyranny of his person, we have to endure the tyranny of his memory.” In the end he feels reconciled with Napoleon - not least, perhaps, because the latter professed his belief in God.

Throughout the book Chateaubriand disingenuously disclaims fame, honours or political ambition, but you do not become ambassador to Prussia, then to Great Britain and then (1822 to 1824) Foreign Minister without such ambitions. He talks proudly of “my Spanish War”, which he won in six months where Napoleon had failed in a war of seven years. He was dismissed immediately afterwards, but does not tell us that this was because he was does not tell us that he was now pressing for the Rhine frontier which Villèle, the cautious prime minister, though too dangerous. Chateaubriand returned to favour under Charles X, in 1828 appointed him ambassador the Holy See - an ideal posting for such a lover of earlier centuries. But he resigned his post in 1829 when Charles X appointed the arch-reactionary Polignac as Prime Minister. Eight months later that foolish politician precipitated the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, which again is vividly described.

Characteristically for a writer obsessed with mortality, he ends his story with the cholera epidemic which hit Paris in 1832. In his Conclusion he speculates on the future, and some of his predictions are remarkably prescient.

Chateaubriand had an extraordinary sense of mob contagion. I quote:

a man would cry: Off with my head!
if he heard his neighbor cry the same. (p. 275).

The index has only three pages listed for Josephine, who died at the age I am now, about 70. Page 234 has some brilliant insights on a man with human feelings addressing himself to a hyena. The author's letter given to Josephine to beg for mercy for someone who had been condemned was given to the Emperor:

he seemed to hesitate as he read it,
then, coming across some words
which offended him, he flung it
impatiently into the fire. (p. 234).