Chateaubriand, FRANÇOIS RENÉ, VICOMTE DE, a distinguished French writer and politician, was born at St Malo, in Brittany, on September 4, 1768. He belonged to a noble Breton family, and was the youngest of ten children. His early years were spent partly by the sea at St Malo and partly in the seclusion of the woodland château of Combourg. He was educated at Dol and Rennes, and served for a short time as an ensign in the regiment of Navarre. In 1791 he sailed to North America, and spent eight months there in the travels which are recounted in his Voyage en Amérique. On hearing of the arrest of Louis XVI, he returned to France and joined the army of the émigrés. During the Prussians' retreat he was left behind for dead near Namur, but contrived to make his way to that town, and thence, with no little difficulty, to England. For some years he maintained himself in London by teaching and writing translations; in 1797 he published an Essai sur les Révolutions, and in 1800 he was enabled to return to France. Atala, a love-story of savage life, the scene of which is laid in the American forests and prairies, appeared in 1801, and established Chateaubriand's literary reputation. The Génie du Christianisme (1802), a vindication of the Church of Rome, raised him to the foremost position among the French men of letters of the day. He was neither a sound thinker nor a skilful controversialist, and the merit of his famous treatise lies almost entirely in its brilliant passages of description. These, however, are often curiously out of place in a work of the kind. Sainte-Beuve, who spoke of the Génie as a coup de théâtre et d'autel, declared that many of them would have been more warrantably included in a Génie du Paganisme. But the book appeared when there was a widespread reaction against scepticism, and its eloquent pleadings were favourable to the conciliatory policy which Napoleon had adopted in regard to the pope. Its success in consequence was enormous. Its author was in 1803 appointed secretary to the embassy at Rome, where he wrote his Lettres sur l'Italie, and in 1804 was sent as ambassador to the little republic of Valais. But on the murder of the Due d'Enghien, Chateaubriand refused to hold office under Napoleon. He set out to the East in 1806, visited Greece, Palestine, and Egypt, and returned to France in 1807. Two years later he issued Les Martyrs, a prose epic, of which the action passes in the days of Diocletian. There is much that is false, much that is extravagant in this singular book, and the borrowed epical machinery works clumsily throughout. But there is genuine passion in the episode of Velleda; and in calling up a vision of the beauty of the ancient world the writer exhibits an almost unsurpassable mastery of ornate prose. In 1814 Chateaubriand published a pamphlet, De Bonaparte et des Bourbons, which Louis XVIII. declared to be worth an army to the Legitimist cause. From 1814 to 1824 he gave a thorough-going support to the Restoration monarchy. He was made a peer and a minister of state, and from 1822 to 1824 held the post of ambassador extraordinary at the British court. It was his ambition to become the guiding power in French politics; he believed that it lay in him to reconcile Legitimism and liberty. He was disappointed, however, in his hope of becoming prime-minister, and from 1824 to 1830 he figured as a Liberal politician. On the downfall of Charles X. he refused to swear allegiance to Louis-Philippe, and went back to the Royalist party. His changes of front were not due to mere selfish ambition. A Breton noble, he was by his birth and associations a Royalist; his writings prove that he was deeply imbued with the anti-social sentimentalism of Rousseau (he claimed Byron as his pupil); he had almost no logical faculty, and he was by temperament imperious and rebellious. 'In natural disposition,' he wrote in 1831, 'I am still a Republican.' His politics were thus a tissue of inconsistencies, but to regard him as a mere time-server is to misunderstand his character. During the reign of Louis-Philippe he withdrew from public affairs, and occupied himself in preparing his Mémoires d'outre Tombe for posthumous publication. Parts of this eloquent autobiography appeared, however, before his death, which occurred on July 4, 1848. Besides those mentioned above, his writings include the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem; Les Natchez, a prose epic dealing with savage life in North America; and two works of fiction, René and Le Dernier des Abencérages.
Chateaubriand is a writer whom it is difficult to criticise justly. He was not a thinker, and he produced no book which has the unity and sustained excellence of an enduring work of art. He dealt in false sentiment and extravagant imagery; he was blind to the virtues of simplicity and restraint. Sainte-Beuve said he transferred the capital of prose from Rome to Byzantium and introduced the style of the lower empire. But when he is at his best his brilliant and glowing diction acts on the reader like an enchantment. His writings revealed new capabilities in the French language. There is no French author of earlier date whose prose can compare with Chateaubriand's in the power of conveying the beauty and mystery of nature. His style, with its magical play of colour, its cunning felicity of descriptive phrase, was a new thing in French literature. It fascinated readers accustomed to the cold and polished prose of the classical school, and marked the beginning of a new literary epoch. Chateaubriand has been justly called the father of the romantic school, and the beauty and grandeur of his finest descriptive passages have been surpassed by none of his followers. See Sainte-Beuve's Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire (2 vols. 1877).