Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1800-1815

by François-René de Chateaubriand, Alex Andriesse (Translation)

The second part of an infamous memoir about life in the time of Napoleon by a rebellious literary celebrity.

In 1800, Fran�ois-Ren� de Chateaubriand sailed from the cliffs of Dover to the headlands of Calais. He was thirty-one, and had been living as a political refugee in England for most of a decade, at times in such extreme poverty he subsisted on nothing but hot water and two-penny rolls.

Over the next fifteen years, his life changed utterly. He published Atala, Ren�, and The Genius of Christianity to acclaim and epoch-making scandal. He strolled the streets of Jerusalem and mapped the ruins of Carthage. He served Napoleon in Rome, then resigned in protest after the Duc d'Enghien's execution, putting his own life at tremendous risk. For these were also the years of Bonaparte's secret police, censorship, and warmongering--all of which Chateaubriand would come to oppose.

Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815--the second volume in Alex Andriesse's new and complete translation of this epic French classic--is a chronicle of triumphs and sorrows, narrating not only the author's life during a tumultuous period in European history but the "parallel life" of Napoleon, from his birth on Corsica to his death on Saint Helena. In these pages, Chateaubriand continues to paint his distinctive self-portrait, in which the whole history of France swirls around the sitter like a mist of dreams.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir, France, Biography Memoir, Classics

800 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1850

About the author

François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician and diplomat. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.

He has also been mistakenly given the forename François-Auguste in an 1811 edition, but signed all his worked as just Chateaubriand or M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand.

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this slightly less absorbing than Andriesse’s first volume, because Napoleon bores me and I prefer Chateaubriand the poet to the political memoirist, however endowed he was in that role with aphoristic glamour and a ringside seat. So, I really enjoyed the last chapters, when the full-throated bard I love joins the politician in scorning the exhumation and return of Napoleon’s remains. The story was artistically complete at St Helena, he insists,

Lord Byron believed that the dictator of kings had abdicated his fame along with his sword and that he would die forgotten. The poet should have known Napoleon’s destiny was a Muse, like all lofty Destinies. This Muse was able to change an abortive conclusion into a tragedy that gave her hero new life. The solitude of Napoleon’s exile and tomb has added another layer of prestige to his brilliant memory. Alexander did not die under the eyes of the Greeks; he vanished into the faraway beauties of Babylon. Bonaparte did not die under the eyes of the French; he disappeared into the sumptuous horizons of the torrid zones. He sleeps like a hermit or a pariah in a valley, at the end of a deserted trail. The grandeur of the silence that presses in upon him is equal to the immensity of the noise that surrounded him. The nations are absent, their crowds gone.

A characteristic passage. Muse, Hero. Chateaubriand is imbued with the epics, especially Virgil, Aristo, and Milton, whom he translated. He continues: “The transit of Napoleon’s remains is an offense against fame. No sepulchre in Paris will ever be as good as the Slane Valley.” (When I recall the pseudo-antique biographical frieze around the base, I have to agree.) The reburial is also a political mistake, for “Napoleon’s bones will not reproduce his genius, they will teach his despotism to mediocre soldiers.” Ulysses Grant understood that and, visiting Paris after the defeat of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War, echoed Chateaubriand when he refused to enter Les Invalides, telling a reporter that the Bonapartes were vainglorious adventurers who had bled and abused France, and he would not pay them homage. Grant, like all West Pointers of his generation, knew Napoleon’s victorious campaigns down to the details; but as a republican and a statesman, he could not but deplore almost everything else.*

Andriesse made an inspired choice of Julian Gracq for the Afterword. Gracq’s essay is of course brilliant; but I don't think Gracq fully understood Chateaubriand’s relationship with Napoleon.

The life of Napoleon is enshrined in the middle of his book not, as people spitefully say, to suggest a parallel but rather, I think, as his talisman. God knows he was aware of his powers, but he was also aware of his luck; he knew how much uniqueness the time in which he lived had added to his genius; he looked at mankind and the world from Bonaparte’s shoulders. Hence that unquestionable but hard-to-grasp prestige, that indescribable something that isolates him from all the romantics, a sort of intimate contact - a prestige in which his social and political career hardly signify but in which literature isn’t everything either. Whereas Benjamin Constant, who had much more to do with Bonaparte, derived from that no increased prestige, Chateaubriand, on almost every page, catches a glint of the Imperial sun. His genius sufficed to set him apart from his own generation, but thinking that perhaps he’d be submerged in those to follow, he knew he would be seen more clearly, and for a longer time, hoisted around Napoleon’s neck.

I think it’s obvious that “literature” was, for Chateaubriand and for Napoleon, indeed “everything,” the source of prestige. Chateaubriand’s opposition mattered because of his spiritual authority as a poet. I think Chateaubriand did view Napoleon as a parallel power, rightly; an epic rival who had been able to arrogate part of France - its military “glory,” to which Chateaubriand was sensitive as a patriot and former soldier - but who had still to dispute with Catholicism, Legitimacy, and Republican Liberty as poetically enshrined for the French public in Chateaubriand’s books. Gracq reveals himself, in the Afterword, when he says that Russia’s poets did not summon a response to the consequences of their Revolution until…Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago (1957) !!! Gracq might have understood Chateaubriand’s stance a little better if he had known of Mandelstam or Akhmatova - his essay dates from 1960 - among other Russian poets who long before Zhivago challenged their tyrants and torturers and produced their own versions of “this voice suffering from heavy losses of blood, this pallor on the brow, these dead-leaf quaverings, this accent of chill, erratic, autumnal religiosity” that we find on every page of Chateaubriand.

------
* The contrast can be read in their respective tombs, as Henry James notes in The American Scene :

The tabernacle of Grant’s ashes stands there by the pleasure-drive, unguarded and unenclosed, the feature of the prospect and the property of the people, as open as an hotel or a railway-station to any coming and going, and as dedicated to the public use as builded things in America (when not mere closed churches) only can be. Unmistakable its air of having had, all consciously, from the first, to raise its head and play its part without pomp and circumstance to “back” it, without mystery or ceremony to protect it, without Church or State to intervene on its behalf, with only its immediacy, its familiarity of interest to circle it about, and only its proud outlook to preserve, so far as possible, its character. The tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides is a great national property, and the play of democratic manners sufficiently surrounds it; but as compared to the small pavilion on the Riverside bluff it is a holy of holies, a great temple jealously guarded and formally approached. And yet one doesn’t conclude, strange to say, that the Riverside pavilion fails of its expression a whit more than the Paris dome; one perhaps even feels it triumph by its use of its want of reserve as a very last word. The admonition of all of which possibly is — I confess I but grope for it— that when there has been in such cases a certain other happy combination, an original sincerity of intention, an original propriety of site, and above all an original high value of name and fame, something in this line really supreme, publicity, familiarity, immediacy, as I have called them, carried far enough, may stalk in and out of the shrine with their hands in their pockets and their hats on their heads, and yet not dispel the Presence. The question at any rate puts itself — as new questions in America are always putting themselves: Do certain impressions there represent the absolute extinction of old sensibilities, or do they represent only new forms of them?

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice quote in the footnotes from Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis (1764-1830), whose Maxims and Reflections were published in 1808: "Man is bored by the good, seeks out the best, finds the bad and gives in to it, for fear of the worst.'

Will have to come back to this one (or its companion volumes) in a few years: the tedium of waxing poetic and dropping sardonic asides grows tiresome but the translation work by Alex Andriesse and the afterword by Julien Gracq shape the path for what could have been an even more exhausting hike into a trip that has pleasant switchbacks and a view worthy of the climb.

[Martin Wauck · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting coincidence that I finished this book three years to the day after I started it, but it was well worth persevering to the end of the 600+ pages of the second volume of Chateaubriand's memoirs. An eye witness account of the rule of Napoleon from a monarchist exile with a romantic literary flair. The asides and parenthetical comments are often just as interesting as the events themselves.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Perhaps I would have succeeded in preserving a few ideas of liberty and moderation in the great man’s head; but my life, classed among those called “happy,” would have been deprived of what has given it character and honor: poverty, struggle, and independence.”