Sunday Morning! Revisiting François-René de Chateaubriand

This week, I’m going to break a few of the unofficial rules of these Sunday posts. First off, I’m going to write a bit about “politics,” which we try to keep out of the “mindless diversions” end of the pool as much as possible. However, I’ll be talking about some heated political issues from 230 years ago or so, which might be less contentious today. I don’t see anyone wanting to ban discussions of the French Revolution in American high schools anyway!

Also, I usually keep “work” and “entertainment” separate with these posts, focusing on the, well, “diversions” in my life, rather than the material I’m working with for my “scholarship,” such that it is. At the moment, I’m finishing up a long chapter for what I hope will be my second book, and I am “in the tunnel,” as I once heard a film director put it. So, I’d like to work through some of my thoughts about the subject of that chapter: François-René de Chateaubriand.

Chateaubriand is not the easiest writer to like; one of the fathers of French Romanticism, his writing can be somber, stygian, and severe. In his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, he actually singles out wit as the character trait he most dislikes in others. He’s also a bit of a moral scold, which makes it very easy to point out Chateaubriand’s own failings: his serial love affairs, tendency to borrow heavily from other writers, and stretch the truth greatly. All of these are, of course, very typical flaws for a writer, but when the writer is remembered as a Catholic and proto-conservative- likely the first person to use the word “conservatism” in a political context- it becomes all the more tempting to point out his supposed hypocrisies.

Nevertheless, it’s pretty hard to pin Chateaubriand down. His politics, and even his conservatism, are really all over the place. At times, he was a liberal; at others, a royalist. He mourned the falling of the old world that divided his life in two; but he also saw its collapse as the inevitable workings of Providence. He wrote his political theories between the lines of many of his books; but is remembered most for highly Romantic novels and works of autobiograhy characterized by outpourings of emotion. Victor Hugo wanted to be him, and I suspect Proust did too. More than anything, he captured a very relatable experience of being caught between two worlds: one that vanished, which “had no stability,” and a Modern world that “had no beauty.” That is to say he captured an experience I suspect is inescapable within Modernity.

Which isn’t to say his childhood was exactly happy. He was born in Combourg, in Brittany, a somewhat dirty and rundown village, and his family lived in a castle, where his mother was lost in religious study, while his gloomy father obsessed over the diminished family name. History was the coin of the nobility and Chateaubriand grew up with ideas of honor and valor that did not exactly serve him well in his adult life, but they never really left him either. Like Proust, he grew up embedded in a society that he saw “disappear before my eyes”; he mused “I am perhaps the only person to remember or to know that these people existed.” I suspect that many of us who grew up in small-town America decades ago have felt the same.

And yet, he acknowledged that, by the time he was a boy, an “age of privileges” had passed into an “age of vanities.” When he was introduced at Versailles, Chateaubriand found it “more dead than alive,” and believed it had outlived its usefulness. He started writing after the Revolution, so we can take this with a grain of salt; yet, it’s totally plausible when Chateaubriand says he was likely too passionate and gloomy for the life as a knight in the Order of Malta that his family had planned for him.

In other words, his life in Old Regime France was not exactly one of comfort, but it provided certain guideposts through life that made sense of the world. The problem was Enlightenment liberalism had already undermined all of this. Most political philosophies have at least one important insight at their core and I think we forget how revolutionary it was, in a society of hierarchical orders, to argue that a peasant has the same potential abilities as a nobleman, if they are not limited by that hierarchy. Social structures always take their hierarchies as reflections of something “natural,” which is probably why they’re all doomed to entropic collapse. Chateaubriand, at any rate, believed they were all doomed to collapse.

Which reflected his experience; Chateaubriand was 21 when the Estates General was called and, while initially sympathetic to the aims of the Revolution, he fled to America only a few years later. After three months at sea on a ship packed with priests, he arrived in Philadelphia and set about on a somewhat absurd plan to find a Northern route from the East. As he recalls it, sleeping in the woods, he felt that he was “living and breathing with nature in a sort of pantheism.” Standing before Niagara Falls, he felt the correspondences between “a cascade falling eternally over its precipice in the silent unfeeling presence of earth and sky” and “human nature… with its destinies and unhappiness.” It was a profound experience of “sublime chaos.” He sounds like a mystic.

In fact, in such passages, Chateaubriand sounds more like a Neoplatonist than a Catholic- he writes often about the physical world as the outward expression of a “spiritual arch” in terms that also recall Jacob Boehme or Emmanuel Swedenborg. Which is to say his religious writing is more sensualist and less doctrinaire than one would expect.

After the King was executed, Chateaubriand returned home to a country that had “marched into the abyss” as he saw it. The family chateau was trashed, the mob was marching in the streets with heads on pikes, and members of his own family were arrested and later executed. He would call the Revolution a “river of blood” separating the old world from the new.

He fled again to exile in England, where he was desperately pooor and reduced, at one point, to eating paper and grass. Nevertheless, here he bacame a writer. And this is common of the Romantic I suspect: exiled by traumatic experiences which they cannot handle, the Romantic creates a mytho-poetic space in order to hide, but remains forever locked outside, betwixt and between. As a writer, Chateaubriand retains the perspective of an exile. I think anyone who has experienced a traumatic event recognizes that moment after the old world ceases to exist and the new has not yet come into being; this is where most of his writing, and really his “conservatism” came into being; sliding in all directions, looking for something familiar to hang onto.

It was in this space that he began drafting the novels that would make him famous: Atala and René. Of the two, René is stronger, telling of a passionate young man who flees his home in France for the wilds of America and lives with the Natchez Indians. He feels alienated and lost in Europe, unable to fit his soul into society. This is a common cliche after Rousseau- the disconnect between one’s social selhood and an inate, expressive inner self. It is not too much to say that the modern Self is a creation of the late nineteenth century. Romantic identity is always fraught and impossible.

René is supposedly a Christian work, but this is somewhat at odds with the sensualism of the prose, where as Philip Rahv puts it, “one finds an alligator on every page.” It was part of a larger work, The Genius of Christianity, in which the rituals and art of Catholicism are all depicted in an effusive, passionate sort of way- felt rather than mediated on, and championed for the overwhelming, sublime effect they have on the individual. It was meant to be a religious work, and was a part of the Catholic revival of the early 1800s; but it is both Romantic and Catholic. Chateaubriand is remembered often for having tried to “revive the Gothic cathedral” in the Modern Era. He was of a type, still common today, that is called “conservative,” but might just be called a “nostalgicist.”

An affection for obsolete aesthetics is always a bit ironic, a little impossible.

Finally, Chateaubriand tried to do the same for the Medieval pilgrimage- he was one of the first French writers to travel in the Eastern Mediterranean for reasons of personal exploration; in 1806, he went on a spiritual quest in the Ottoman Levant. His Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem reads like a cross between a travel narrative and a religious initiation ritual. When he arrives in the ruins of Athens or the desert outside Jerusalem, he describes a transcendent, quasi-mystical experience of place, in which he seems to tap into energies long stored there. Leaving behind social selfhood, he is overwhelmed and revitalized by simply being in the liminal space between imminence and transcendence. One wonders if doctrine isn’t beside the point.

One scholar has called this French Romantic travel writing a “bridge” between the Grand Tour and modern tourism. It might be more accurate to say Chateaubriand tried to revive the pilgrimage and inadvertently pioneered tourism. His travel practices are spiritual practices, and vice-versa.

Of course, many have complained that Chateaubriand talks only about himself wherever he goes. But, I think this minimizes what French Romanticism actually was; I would call it a recorded inquiry, a struggle waged by the writers and thinkers of the post-Revolutionary era to understand the individual’s place in the social world, the divine order, and himself. They were trying to find their way after a sociopolitical collapse, in a social world where the old guideposts were gone. Chateaubriand remains compelling because he never quite works this out. And, I suspect, we haven’t either.

So, what are YOU watching, playing, pondering, reading, exploring, or reviving this weekend?

*Note: because someone may ask, Chateaubriand was remembered as a food-lover and most likely the “Chateaubriand” steak is named for the way he had his prepared.