Lord Byron and Mr Canning have died young; Walter Scott has gone; Goethe has left us, loaded with glory and years. France has almost nothing left of her rich past and is entering on a new era; I remain to bury my times, like the old priest who, in the sack of Béziers, had to go on ringing the bell until he himself fell, after the last citizen had died.

When death rings down the curtain between me and the world, it will be found that my life’s drama is divided into three acts.

From my early youth until 1800, I was a soldier and traveller; from 1800 until 1814, under the Consulate and the Empire, my life was devoted to literature; from the Restoration down to the present day, my life has been political.

In each of my three successive careers I have set myself a great task: as a traveller, I have endeavoured to open up the polar regions; as a writer, I have tried to rebuild religion on its own ruins; as a statesman, I have striven to give the nations the true system of constitutional monarchy with its various freedoms: I have at least helped to win that freedom which is equal to all others, can take their place, and can stand instead of any constitution – the freedom of the Press. If I have often failed in my enterprises that has been the fault of destiny. Foreigners who have succeeded in their projects have been helped by good fortune: they had powerful friends behind them and a peaceful homeland. I have not had that advantage.

Of the modern French writers of my time, I am almost the only one whose life resembles his works: a traveller, soldier, poet, and publicist, it was in the forest that I sang of the forests, on board ship that I depicted the sea, in camp that I spoke of war, in exile that I learnt the lessons of exile, at court, in assemblies, or in public affairs that I studied princes, politics, law, and history. The orators of Greece and Rome were implicated in public life and shared its destiny. In the Italy and Spain of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the great geniuses of literature and the arts took part in the evolution of society. How stormy and beautiful were the lives of Dante, Tasso, Camoëns, Ercilla, and Cervantes!

In France our ancient poets and historians sang and wrote in the midst of pilgrimages and battles; Thibault, Comte de Champagne, Villehardouin, and Joinville owe the felicities of their style to the adventures they lived through; Froissart went looking for history on the high road, and learnt it from the knights and priests whom he encountered and with whom he rode along. But as from the reign of François I, our writers have been isolated individuals whose talents might be the expression of the spirit, but not the events, of their period. If I were destined to survive, I should represent in my person, as depicted in my memoirs, the principles, the ideas, the events, the catastrophes, the epic of my time, all the more so in that I have seen the beginning and the end of a world, and that the opposite characteristics of that end and that beginning are combined in my opinions. I have found myself between two centuries as at the junction between two rivers; I have plunged into their troubled waters, regretfully leaving behind the ancient strand where I was born and swimming hopefully towards the unknown shores where the new generations will land.

The Memoirs, divided into books and chapters, have been written at different times and in different places: these divisions naturally give rise to kinds of prologue which recall the incidents which have occurred since the last dates, and depict the places where I pick up the thread of my story. The varied events and the changing forms of my life thus enter into one another: at moments of personal prosperity I may talk of times when I was poor, and in days of tribulation I may recall days of happiness. The various feelings of my various times of life, my youth encroaching on my old age, the gravity of my years of maturity saddening my green years; the rays of my sun, from its rising to its setting, crossing and merging like the separate reflections of my existence, impart a sort of indefinable unity to my work: my cradle has something of my grave about it, my grave something of my cradle, my suffering becomes pleasure, my pleasure pain, and one cannot tell whether these Memoirs are the work of a young head or an old.

I am not saying this to justify myself, for I do not know whether this is a good thing: I am relating the facts, recounting what has happened, without my thinking about it, through the very inconstancy of the storms unleashed against my craft, storms that have often left me with nothing on which to write about certain episodes of my life but the rock on which I have come to grief.

I have lavished a positively fatherly care on the preparation of these Memoirs, and I wish that it were possible for me to come to life again at the witching hour in order to correct the proofs of the finished work: the dead, so they say, waste no time.

Several of my friends have urged me to publish part of my story now, but I have been unable to agree to this. If I did so, in the first place I would be bound, despite myself, to be less frank and truthful, and secondly I have always imagined that I was writing these Memoirs in my coffin. This has lent the work a certain religious quality which I could not subtract from it without seriously impairing it; I would find it painful to stifle this far-off voice from beyond the grave which can be heard throughout my story. I trust it will not be considered strange that I should be preoccupied with the fate of the poor orphan destined to survive me. If I have suffered enough in this world to be a happy shade in the next, a little light from the Elysian Fields, falling on my last picture, may help to make the painter’s failings less obvious. Life becomes me ill; perhaps death will suit me better.

Introduction

Memoirs From Beyond the Tomb combines the autobiography of a great Romantic with the history of a great revolution. The result is a masterpiece.

François-René de Chateaubriand was born in 1768 and grew up in a large turreted château called Combourg, in north-east Brittany, between Rennes and Saint-Malo. His father’s passion to improve the family fortunes encouraged him to engage in the slave trade, among others. Chateaubriand himself considered that noble birth gave him a passion for liberty. He served as an officer in the French army, was presented at Versailles, travelled in 1791 for six months in America, emigrated in 1792, and fought in the Armée des Princes against the French republic. Between 1793 and 1800 he lived in London, where, in 1797, he published his first book, Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions.

When Chateaubriand returned to Paris in 1800, he was, as he wrote, ‘English in manner, in taste and up to a certain point in thoughts’. Other French émigrés who were half-English in attitude, and wrote brilliant memoirs (which deserve republication), include Madame de La Tour du Pin and Madame de Boigne. Chateaubriand contributed to the popularity of English Romantic literature in France, wrote on the Stuarts and helped translate Milton. For him the sight of thousands of ships moored in the port of London surpassed ‘all images of power’.

He soon became one of the most famous writers in Europe, with a string of best-selling works, which contributed to the Catholic revival: Le Génie du christianisme (1802: begun in London, finished in Paris); Les Martyrs (1809), about Christian martyrs under the Roman Empire; Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris (1811), about his pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Royalism, as well as Catholicism, shaped his life. He resigned from government service in 1804, when Bonaparte kidnapped and executed an exiled Bourbon prince, the Duc d’Enghien. His best-selling pamphlet attacking Napoleon I, De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, contributed to the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814. Thereafter, he was one of the leading protagonists in the attempt to establish a constitutional monarchy in France – under the brothers of Louis XVI, Louis XVIII (1814–24) and Charles X (1824–30) – as a political journalist; a peer of France; ambassador to Berlin (1821) and London (1822); Minister of Foreign Affairs (1823–4); and ambassador again, to Rome (1828–9).

Chateaubriand was liberal as well as Royalist. He resigned in 1829 on receiving news of Charles X’s appointment of Jules de Polignac as President of the Council, because of his ‘fatal and unpopular name … in revolutions a name has more effect than an army’ (Polignac was the reactionary son of a favourite of Marie Antoinette).