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夏多布里昂貢堡的童年
弗朗索瓦-勒內.德.夏多布裏昂子爵出生於聖馬洛一個古老的沒落貴族家庭。父親曾是船長。幼年時與父母分開，3歲時，父親在布列塔尼購回傢族曾經的領地貢堡（le château de Combourg），夏多布裏昂便在這裏度過剩餘的童年時光。夏多布裏昂的父親性情陰鬱，沉默寡言，因此夏多布裏昂的童年是在一種壓抑和沉悶的氣氛中度過的。他和他的姐姐呂西兒的關係很好。
到美洲旅行
夏多布裏昂在多爾和雷恩的學校中修完中學學業。之後到布雷斯特海軍學校考試，但因為招生問題未被錄取，不久又回到貢堡，並到迪南的中學繼續進修。1784年到1786年間，夏多布裏昂出於譫妄狀態，癡情於自己虛構的"文學的女精靈"。他曾經在成為海軍軍官和神父之間猶豫，甚至想去印度(被父親阻止)，但最後還是選擇了從軍。1786年，他父親去世，同年，他在納瓦爾團得到了一個少尉的職務，不到兩年便晉升為上尉。1787年，他遵從哥哥的意願來到巴黎，被引薦入宮廷，並當上路易十六的狩獵侍從，但他對此並不熱心。但在巴黎的沙竜裏，他見到了當時文學界出名的人物，。不久法國大開始。夏多布裏昂一開始對持同情的態度，但當巴黎的越來越嚴重時，他决定遠離法國，到美洲旅行。他花了一年在北美南部的叢林中歷險，和當地人生活在一起。這次旅行為他後來的創作提供了豐富的素材，他的詩歌《納切茲》（《Les Natchez》）也在此期間初步成型。
時期
1792年，夏多布裏昂回到巴黎，在家庭方面的壓力下，他娶了一位他從未謀面的同樣來自聖馬洛的一個小貴族家庭的少女塞蕾絲特（Céleste Buisson de la Vigne）為妻。夏多布裏昂與塞蕾絲特之間關係並不密切，數度與其他女子發生風流韻事，但塞蕾絲特始終對他保持忠誠，兩人一直沒有離婚，一同度過晚年。接着，夏多布裏昂到科布倫茨參加了由保皇黨者組成的軍隊。為此，塞蕾絲特以"保皇黨人的妻子"的罪名被逮捕，關押在雷恩，直到熱月9日纔被釋放。在Thionville戰役（法國軍和保皇黨軍隊的一場遭遇戰）中，夏多布裏昂負傷，被送到澤西島療養，他的行伍生涯到此結束。
此後，從1793年起，夏多布裏昂一直生活在倫敦，與居住在布列塔尼的塞蕾絲特隔絶音信。因為生活窘迫，他開始靠給人上法語課和為書商翻譯作品為生。1797年，他出版了《論古今以及它們與法國的關係》(簡稱《論》)。在這本書中，夏多布裏昂闡述了他對和宗教的見解。這些理念與他以後的實踐並不一致，但展現了他作為作傢的才能。
回到巴黎
1798年和1799年，夏多布裏昂的母親和姐姐朱莉先後去世，這使得夏多布裏昂重新燃起對宗教的熱誠。1800年5月，由於執政府對保皇黨人的大赦，夏多布裏昂得以回到法國。他擔任了雜志《法國莫丘利》（Mercure de France）的編輯。在這本雜志上，1801年，他發表了小說《阿達拉》（Atala），大受歡迎。不久他又發表了《勒內》（René），這是一部帶有憂鬱色彩的幻想式的作品，成為後來浪漫主義的榜樣。1802年4月14日，他的抒情散文集《教真諦》發表，《阿達拉》與《勒內》是其一部分。這本書發表在拿破侖與羅馬教皇簽訂"政教協議"之際，符合拿破侖復興天主教的意圖，抓住了法國人民在大之後希望恢復宗教的社會心理。1803年，拿破侖派夏多布裏昂以大使秘書的身份隨紅衣主教約瑟夫-費什到羅馬。不久兩人發生爭執，夏多布裏昂被改派到瑞士的瓦萊州。1804年，他聽到了昂基安公爵被處死的消息。這使得他立刻辭去了職務，並公開反對拿破侖。
東方之旅
辭職後的夏多布裏昂重新投入文學創作，他打算寫一部教興起時期的史詩(即《殉道者》)。為此，1806年，夏多布裏昂遊歷了希臘、小亞細亞、巴勒斯坦、埃及和西班牙。1811年，《巴黎到耶路撒冷紀行》發表。他在西班牙的見聞也促成了他的第三部小說:1826年出版的《最後的薩拉衹傢族的傳奇》。回到巴黎之後，他發表了一篇尖銳的對拿破侖的批評，將後者比作古羅馬皇帝尼祿，並預言記錄他的暴行的新的"塔西佗"必將出現。拿破侖立刻將他驅出了巴黎。
狼𠔌
遭驅逐的夏多布裏昂開始在巴黎西郊的一處他稱為"狼𠔌"的地方和塞蕾絲特一起隱居。在狼𠔌，他完成了散文體史詩《殉道者》，1809年發表。同時，他開始着手編寫自己的回憶錄。
1811年，夏多布裏昂當選法蘭西學院院士。但他在就職演說中強烈批評大中的某些暴行，結果被禁止坐上交椅，直到王朝復闢之後纔正式入選。
輝煌時期
1814年，波旁王朝復闢。夏多布裏昂對此十分歡迎。百日王朝期間，夏多布裏昂隨路易十八出逃至根特，這使得他擔任了路易十八的內務大臣一職。拿破侖下臺後，他成為貴族院議員、內閣部長。然而不久後他發表的對路易十八的批評使他失寵，衹得轉投極端保皇黨，支持未來的查理十世。
1820年，貝利公爵的謀殺案使夏多布裏昂再次站到了朝廷一邊。同年，他出任法國駐柏林公使。1822年，他出任法國駐大不列顛大使，接着，又任維羅納會議的全權代表，並不顧英國的反對，决定西班牙。回國後，他就任外交大臣。西班牙取得了成功，但由於與內閣部長德維列不和，他在1824年被解職。
自由主義的反對派
下臺後的夏多布裏昂又一次站到了朝廷的反面，但這一次是作為自由主義者。他在巴黎議會和辯論報上猛烈抨擊德維列。這個時期的他以捍衛報章自由和希臘獨立的形象而大受歡迎。德維列下臺後，他被查理十世指派為羅馬大使，但在波利尼亞剋親王任首相後，夏多布裏昂又一次辭職。他的生涯從此結束。
退出
1830年的法國七月後，對君主製不再抱有幻想的夏多布裏昂拒絶對路易-菲利普效忠，退出了界。之後的他重新開始文學創作，偶爾對新政權發表一點尖刻的評論。夏多布裏昂的晚年是在完全隱居的狀態下度過的，塞蕾絲特一直陪伴着他。1831年他發表了《歷史研究》，想說明教對社會的改革作用。1833年他發表的《對貝裏公爵夫人的監禁的回憶錄》使他被告上法庭，儘管最後被宣告無罪。
夏多布裏昂的墓碑。格朗貝島是潮汐島，退潮時可以沿約200米的橋道來到島上。
夏多布裏昂的墓碑。格朗貝島是潮汐島，退潮時可以沿約200米的橋道來到島上。
夏多布裏昂從1811年起就準備開始寫自己一生的回憶錄，直到去世前不久，他仍在繼續這項工作。他把這本自傳性的巨著題名為《墓畔回憶錄》（或譯《墓外回憶錄》，法文：Mémoires d'outre-tombe，直譯為"墳墓外的回憶"）。《墓畔回憶錄》不僅描述了夏多布裏昂坎坷多舛的一生，也記錄了他所處的變化巨大的時代，記錄了他對這個時代各個事件和人物的評價，對於當時文學的看法。這本回憶錄原計劃在他死後出版，但是一直糾纏着夏多布裏昂的貧睏使他不得不提早出賣版權。
1848年，塞蕾絲特去世18個月後，夏多布裏昂在巴黎去世。他的遺體按他的遺願，葬於聖馬洛港口的格朗貝島（Grand Bé）上。
影響
夏多布裏昂可以說是浪漫主義文學的奠基人。他對大自然的描寫和對自身情感的抒發成為了一代浪漫主義作傢的榜樣。他首創的"情感浪潮"的寫作方法成為了浪漫主義作傢常用的濫觴。他的思想和行動多有矛盾，一方面推崇王政主義，一方面又崇尚自由，就連他自己也感到睏惑。
作品
* 《阿達拉》(1801)
* 《勒內》(1802)
* 《殉道者》(1809)
* 《最後的薩拉衹傢族的傳奇》（1826）
* 《教真諦》（1802）
* 《巴黎到耶路撒冷紀行》（1811）
* 《波拿巴和波旁》（1814）
* 《納切茲》（1826）
* 《美洲遊記》（1827）
* 《回憶錄》（1809）
* 《朗賽的一生》（1844）
* 《墓畔回憶錄》（1848-1850）
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.