 夏多布里昂
贡堡的童年
弗朗索瓦-勒内.德.夏多布里昂子爵出生于圣马洛一个古老的没落贵族家庭。父亲曾是船长。幼年时与父母分开，3岁时，父亲在布列塔尼购回家族曾经的领地贡堡（le château de Combourg），夏多布里昂便在这里度过剩余的童年时光。夏多布里昂的父亲性情阴郁，沉默寡言，因此夏多布里昂的童年是在一种压抑和沉闷的气氛中度过的。他和他的姐姐吕西儿的关系很好。
到美洲旅行
夏多布里昂在多尔和雷恩的学校中修完中学学业。之后到布雷斯特海军学校考试，但因为招生问题未被录取，不久又回到贡堡，并到迪南的中学继续进修。1784年到1786年间，夏多布里昂出于谵妄状态，痴情于自己虚构的"文学的女精灵"。他曾经在成为海军军官和神父之间犹豫，甚至想去印度(被父亲阻止)，但最后还是选择了从军。1786年，他父亲去世，同年，他在纳瓦尔团得到了一个少尉的职务，不到两年便晋升为上尉。1787年，他遵从哥哥的意愿来到巴黎，被引荐入宫廷，并当上路易十六的狩猎侍从，但他对此并不热心。但在巴黎的沙龙里，他见到了当时文学界出名的人物，。不久法国大开始。夏多布里昂一开始对持同情的态度，但当巴黎的越来越严重时，他决定远离法国，到美洲旅行。他花了一年在北美南部的丛林中历险，和当地人生活在一起。这次旅行为他后来的创作提供了丰富的素材，他的诗歌《纳切兹》（《Les Natchez》）也在此期间初步成型。
时期
1792年，夏多布里昂回到巴黎，在家庭方面的压力下，他娶了一位他从未谋面的同样来自圣马洛的一个小贵族家庭的少女塞蕾丝特（Céleste Buisson de la Vigne）为妻。夏多布里昂与塞蕾丝特之间关系并不密切，数度与其他女子发生风流韵事，但塞蕾丝特始终对他保持忠诚，两人一直没有离婚，一同度过晚年。接着，夏多布里昂到科布伦茨参加了由保皇党者组成的军队。为此，塞蕾丝特以"保皇党人的妻子"的罪名被逮捕，关押在雷恩，直到热月9日才被释放。在Thionville战役（法国军和保皇党军队的一场遭遇战）中，夏多布里昂负伤，被送到泽西岛疗养，他的行伍生涯到此结束。
此后，从1793年起，夏多布里昂一直生活在伦敦，与居住在布列塔尼的塞蕾丝特隔绝音信。因为生活窘迫，他开始靠给人上法语课和为书商翻译作品为生。1797年，他出版了《论古今以及它们与法国的关系》(简称《论》)。在这本书中，夏多布里昂阐述了他对和宗教的见解。这些理念与他以后的实践并不一致，但展现了他作为作家的才能。
回到巴黎
1798年和1799年，夏多布里昂的母亲和姐姐朱莉先后去世，这使得夏多布里昂重新燃起对宗教的热诚。1800年5月，由于执政府对保皇党人的大赦，夏多布里昂得以回到法国。他担任了杂志《法国莫丘利》（Mercure de France）的编辑。在这本杂志上，1801年，他发表了小说《阿达拉》（Atala），大受欢迎。不久他又发表了《勒内》（René），这是一部带有忧郁色彩的幻想式的作品，成为后来浪漫主义的榜样。1802年4月14日，他的抒情散文集《教真谛》发表，《阿达拉》与《勒内》是其一部分。这本书发表在拿破仑与罗马教皇签订"政教协议"之际，符合拿破仑复兴天主教的意图，抓住了法国人民在大之后希望恢复宗教的社会心理。1803年，拿破仑派夏多布里昂以大使秘书的身份随红衣主教约瑟夫-费什到罗马。不久两人发生争执，夏多布里昂被改派到瑞士的瓦莱州。1804年，他听到了昂基安公爵被处死的消息。这使得他立刻辞去了职务，并公开反对拿破仑。
东方之旅
辞职后的夏多布里昂重新投入文学创作，他打算写一部教兴起时期的史诗(即《殉道者》)。为此，1806年，夏多布里昂游历了希腊、小亚细亚、巴勒斯坦、埃及和西班牙。1811年，《巴黎到耶路撒冷纪行》发表。他在西班牙的见闻也促成了他的第三部小说:1826年出版的《最后的萨拉只家族的传奇》。回到巴黎之后，他发表了一篇尖锐的对拿破仑的批评，将后者比作古罗马皇帝尼禄，并预言记录他的暴行的新的"塔西佗"必将出现。拿破仑立刻将他驱出了巴黎。
狼谷
遭驱逐的夏多布里昂开始在巴黎西郊的一处他称为"狼谷"的地方和塞蕾丝特一起隐居。在狼谷，他完成了散文体史诗《殉道者》，1809年发表。同时，他开始着手编写自己的回忆录。
1811年，夏多布里昂当选法兰西学院院士。但他在就职演说中强烈批评大中的某些暴行，结果被禁止坐上交椅，直到王朝复辟之后才正式入选。
辉煌时期
1814年，波旁王朝复辟。夏多布里昂对此十分欢迎。百日王朝期间，夏多布里昂随路易十八出逃至根特，这使得他担任了路易十八的内务大臣一职。拿破仑下台后，他成为贵族院议员、内阁部长。然而不久后他发表的对路易十八的批评使他失宠，只得转投极端保皇党，支持未来的查理十世。
1820年，贝利公爵的谋杀案使夏多布里昂再次站到了朝廷一边。同年，他出任法国驻柏林公使。1822年，他出任法国驻大不列颠大使，接着，又任维罗纳会议的全权代表，并不顾英国的反对，决定西班牙。回国后，他就任外交大臣。西班牙取得了成功，但由于与内阁部长德维列不和，他在1824年被解职。
自由主义的反对派
下台后的夏多布里昂又一次站到了朝廷的反面，但这一次是作为自由主义者。他在巴黎议会和辩论报上猛烈抨击德维列。这个时期的他以捍卫报章自由和希腊独立的形象而大受欢迎。德维列下台后，他被查理十世指派为罗马大使，但在波利尼亚克亲王任首相后，夏多布里昂又一次辞职。他的生涯从此结束。
退出
1830年的法国七月后，对君主制不再抱有幻想的夏多布里昂拒绝对路易-菲利普效忠，退出了界。之后的他重新开始文学创作，偶尔对新政权发表一点尖刻的评论。夏多布里昂的晚年是在完全隐居的状态下度过的，塞蕾丝特一直陪伴着他。1831年他发表了《历史研究》，想说明教对社会的改革作用。1833年他发表的《对贝里公爵夫人的监禁的回忆录》使他被告上法庭，尽管最后被宣告无罪。
夏多布里昂的墓碑。格朗贝岛是潮汐岛，退潮时可以沿约200米的桥道来到岛上。
夏多布里昂的墓碑。格朗贝岛是潮汐岛，退潮时可以沿约200米的桥道来到岛上。
夏多布里昂从1811年起就准备开始写自己一生的回忆录，直到去世前不久，他仍在继续这项工作。他把这本自传性的巨著题名为《墓畔回忆录》（或译《墓外回忆录》，法文：Mémoires d'outre-tombe，直译为"坟墓外的回忆"）。《墓畔回忆录》不仅描述了夏多布里昂坎坷多舛的一生，也记录了他所处的变化巨大的时代，记录了他对这个时代各个事件和人物的评价，对于当时文学的看法。这本回忆录原计划在他死后出版，但是一直纠缠着夏多布里昂的贫困使他不得不提早出卖版权。
1848年，塞蕾丝特去世18个月后，夏多布里昂在巴黎去世。他的遗体按他的遗愿，葬于圣马洛港口的格朗贝岛（Grand Bé）上。
影响
夏多布里昂可以说是浪漫主义文学的奠基人。他对大自然的描写和对自身情感的抒发成为了一代浪漫主义作家的榜样。他首创的"情感浪潮"的写作方法成为了浪漫主义作家常用的滥觞。他的思想和行动多有矛盾，一方面推崇王政主义，一方面又崇尚自由，就连他自己也感到困惑。
作品
* 《阿达拉》(1801)
* 《勒内》(1802)
* 《殉道者》(1809)
* 《最后的萨拉只家族的传奇》（1826）
* 《教真谛》（1802）
* 《巴黎到耶路撒冷纪行》（1811）
* 《波拿巴和波旁》（1814）
* 《纳切兹》（1826）
* 《美洲游记》（1827）
* 《回忆录》（1809）
* 《朗赛的一生》（1844）
* 《墓畔回忆录》（1848-1850）
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃swa ʁəne də ʃatobʁijɑ̃]) (4 September 1768 – 4 July 1848) was a French writer, politician and diplomat. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.
Born in Saint-Malo, the last of ten children, Chateaubriand grew up in his family's castle in Combourg, Brittany. His father, René de Chateaubriand (1718-86), was a former sea captain turned ship owner and slave trader. His mother's maiden name was Apolline de Bedée. Chateaubriand's father was a morose, uncommunicative man and the young Chateaubriand grew up in an atmosphere of gloomy solitude, only broken by long walks in the Breton countryside and an intense friendship with his sister Lucile.
Chateaubriand was educated in Dol, Rennes and Dinan. For a time he could not make up his mind whether he wanted to be a naval officer or a priest, but at the age of seventeen, he decided on a military career and gained a commission as a second lieutenant in the French Army based at Navarre. Within two years, he had been promoted to the rank of captain. He visited Paris in 1788 where he made the acquaintance of Jean-François de La Harpe, André Chénier, Louis-Marcelin de Fontanes and other leading writers of the time. When the French Revolution broke out, Chateaubriand was initially sympathetic, but as events in Paris became more violent he decided to journey to North America in 1791. This experience would provide the setting for his exotic novels Les Natchez (written between 1793 and 1799 but published only in 1826), Atala (1801) and René (1802). His vivid, captivating descriptions of nature in the sparsely settled American Deep South were written in a style that was very innovative for the time and spearheaded what would later become the Romantic movement in France. Later scholarship has cast doubt on Chateaubriand's claim that he had been granted an interview with George Washington or whether he actually lived for a time with the Native Americans he wrote about.
Chateaubriand returned to France in 1792 and subsequently joined the army of Royalist émigrés in Coblenz under the leadership of Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de Condé. Under strong pressure from his family, he married a young aristocratic woman, also from Saint-Malo, whom he had never previously met, Céleste Buisson de la Vigne. In later life, Chateaubriand would be notoriously unfaithful to her, having a series of love affairs, but the couple would never divorce. His military career came to an end when he was wounded at the siege of Thionville, a major clash between Royalist troops and the French Revolutionary Army. Half-dead, he was taken to Jersey and exile in England, leaving his wife behind.
Chateaubriand spent most of his exile in extreme poverty in London, scraping a living offering French lessons and doing translation work, but a stay in Suffolk was more idyllic. Here Chateaubriand fell in love with a young English woman, Charlotte Ives, but the romance ended when he was forced to reveal he was already married. During his time in Britain, Chateaubriand also became familiar with English literature. This reading, particularly of John Milton's Paradise Lost (which he later translated into French prose), would have a deep influence on his own literary work. His exile forced Chateaubriand to examine the causes of the French Revolution, which had cost the lives of many of his family and friends; these reflections inspired his first work, Essai sur les Révolutions (1797). A major turning point in Chateaubriand's life was his conversion back to the Roman Catholic faith of his childhood around 1798.
Consulate and Empire
Chateaubriand took advantage of the amnesty issued to émigrés to return to France in May, 1800 (under the French Consulate), Chateaubriand edited the Mercure de France. In 1802, he won fame with Génie du christianisme ("The Genius of Christianity"), an apology for the Christian faith which contributed to the post-revolutionary religious revival in France. It also won him the favour of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was eager to win over the Catholic Church at the time.
Appointed secretary of the legation to the Holy See by Napoleon, he accompanied Cardinal Fesch to Rome. But the two men soon quarrelled and Chateaubriand was nominated as minister to Valais (in Switzerland). He resigned his post in disgust after Napoleon ordered the execution of the Duc d'Enghien in 1804. Chateaubriand was now forced to earn his living from his literary efforts. He planned to write an epic in prose, Les Martyrs, set during the Roman persecution of early Christianity. As part of his research for the book, in 1806 Chateaubriand visited Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, Egypt and Spain. The notes he made on his travels would later form part of his Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem), published in 1811; and the Spanish stage of the journey would inspire a third novella, Les aventures du dernier Abencérage (The Adventures of the Last Abencerrage), which appeared in 1826. On his return to France, he published a severe criticism of Napoleon, comparing him to Nero and predicting the emergence of a new Tacitus. The emperor banished him from Paris.
Chateaubriand settled at a modest estate he called La Vallée des Loups ("Wolf Valley"), in Châtenay-Malabry, 11 km (7 miles) south of central Paris. Here he finished Les Martyrs, which appeared in 1809, and began the first drafts of his memoirs. He was elected to the Académie française in 1811, but, given his plan to infuse his acceptance speech with criticism of the Revolution, he could not occupy his seat until after the Bourbon Restoration. His literary friends during this period included Madame de Staël, Joseph Joubert and Pierre-Simon Ballanche.
Under the Restoration
Further information: Bourbon Restoration
After the fall of the French Empire, Chateaubriand rallied to the Bourbons. On 30 March 1814, he wrote a pamphlet against Napoleon, titled De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, of which thousands of copies were published. He then followed Louis XVIII into exile to Ghent during the Hundred Days (March-July 1815), and was nominated ambassador to Sweden.
After the defeat of France, Chateaubriand, who had declared himself shocked by the 1804 execution of the duc d'Enghien, voted in December 1815 for Marshal Ney's execution at the Chamber of Peers. He became peer of France and state minister (1815). However, his criticism of King Louis XVIII, after the Chambre introuvable was dissolved, got him disgraced. He lost his function of state minister, and joined the opposition, siding with the Ultra-royalist group supporting the future Charles X, and becoming one of the main writers of its mouthpiece, Le Conservateur.
Chateaubriand sided again with the Court after the murder of the Duc de Berry (1820), writing for the occasion the Mémoires sur la vie et la mort du duc. He then served as ambassador to Prussia (1821) and the Kingdom of Great Britain (1822), and even rose to the office of Minister of Foreign Affairs (28 December 1822 – 4 August 1824). A plenipotentiary to the Congress of Verona (1822), he decided in favor of the Quintuple Alliance intervention in Spain during the Trienio liberal, despite opposition from the Duke of Wellington. Although the move was considered a success, Chateaubriand was soon relieved of his office by Prime Minister Jean-Baptiste de Villèle, the leader of the ultra-royalist group, on 5 June 1824.
Consequently, he moved towards the liberal opposition, both as a Peer and as a contributor to Journal des Débats (his articles there gave the signal of the paper's similar switch, which, however, was more moderate than Le National, directed by Adolphe Thiers and Armand Carrel). Opposing Villèle, he became highly popular as a defender of press freedom and the cause of Greek independence.
After Villèle's downfall, Charles X appointed him ambassador to the Holy See in 1828, but he resigned upon the accession of the Prince de Polignac as premier (November 1829).
Last home of Chateaubriand, 120 Rue du Bac, Paris. Chateaubriand had an apartment on the ground floor.
The July Monarchy
Further information: July Monarchy
In 1830, after the July Revolution, his refusal to swear allegiance to the new House of Orléans king Louis-Philippe put an end to his political career. He withdrew from political life to write his Mémoires d'outre-tombe ("Memoirs from Beyond the Grave'", published posthumously 1848–1850), which is considered his most accomplished work, and his Études historiques (4 vols., designed as an introduction to a projected History of France). He also 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.
Chateaubriand, along with other Catholic traditionalists such as Ballanche or, on the other side of the political board, the socialist and republican Pierre Leroux, was then one of the few to attempt to conciliate the three terms of Liberté, égalité and fraternité, beyond the antagonism between liberals and socialists concerning the interpretation to give to the seemingly contradictory terms. Chateaubriand thus gave a Christian interpretation of the revolutionary motto, stating in the 1841 conclusion to his Mémoires d'outre-tombe:
“ 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. ”
In his final years, he lived as a recluse in an apartment 120 rue du Bac, Paris, only leaving his house to pay visits to Juliette Récamier in l'Abbaye-aux-Bois. His final work, Vie de Rancé, was written at the suggestion of his confessor and published in 1844. It is a biography of Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé, a worldly seventeenth-century French aristocrat who withdrew from society to become the founder of the Trappist order of monks. The parallels with Chateaubriand's own life are striking. Chateaubriand died in Paris during the Revolution of 1848 and was buried, as he requested, on an island (called Grand Be) near Saint-Malo, only accessible when the tide is out.
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For his talent as much as his excesses, Chateaubriand may be considered the father of French Romanticism. 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. For example, Lord Byron was deeply impressed by René. The young Victor Hugo scribbled in a notebook, "To be Chateaubriand or nothing." Even his enemies found it hard to avoid his influence. 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") which would become a commonplace of Romanticism: "One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world" (Génie du Christianisme). His political thought and actions seem to offer numerous contradictions: he wanted to be the friend both of legitimist royalty and of freedom, alternately defending which of the two seemed most in danger: "I am a Bourbonist out of honour, a monarchist out of reason, and a republican out of taste and temperament". He was the first of a series of French men of letters (Lamartine, Victor Hugo, André Malraux) who tried to mix political and literary careers.
"We are convinced that the great writers have told their own story in their works", wrote Chateaubriand in Génie du christianisme,"one only truly describes one's own heart by attributing it to another, and the greater part of genius is composed of memories". This is certainly true of Chateaubriand himself. All his works have strong autobiographical elements, overt or disguised. Perhaps this is the reason why today Mémoires d'outre-tombe are regarded as his finest achievement.
A food enthusiast, he coined the name of a dish made from a cut of tenderloin (the Chateaubriand steak).
Works
Search Wikisource French Wikisource has original text related to this article:
François-René de Chateaubriand
* 1797. Essai sur les révolutions.
* 1801. Atala.
* 1802. René.
* 1802. Génie du christianisme.
* 1809. Les Martyrs.
* 1811. Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem. English translation by Shoberl, Frederick, 1814. Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, and Barbary, during the years 1806 and 1807.
* 1814, "On Buonaparte and the Bourbons," in Blum, Christopher Olaf, editor and translator, 2004. Critics of the Enlightenment. Wilmington DE: ISI Books. 3-42.
* 1820. Mémoires sur la vie et la mort du duc de Berry.
* 1826. Les Natchez.
* 1826. Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage.
* 1827. Voyage en Amérique.
* 1831. Études historiques.
* 1844. La Vie de Rancé.
* 1848–50. Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe. |