On 7 August 1830, after Parisians fighting in the July Revolution had overthrown Charles X and placed his cousin, Louis-Philippe, on the throne, Chateaubriand made a speech in the Chamber of Peers, calling himself a ‘useless Cassandra’: ‘all I have left to do is to seat myself on the debris which I have so many times predicted. I acknowledge that misfortune has every kind of power, except that of releasing me from my oaths of loyalty.’ Leaving these memoirs to be published after his death – hence the title ‘d’outre-tombe’ – he died in Paris in 1848.

Memoirs From Beyond the Tomb is part of the flood of memoirs – over 1, 000 in all – in which, after the event, Frenchmen and -women tried to make sense of the Revolution and the Empire. It is distinguished from the others by the originality of its construction and the seduction of its style. Chateaubriand includes physical details of the events and people he witnessed, such as the smile on the face of Marie Antoinette, the sheets used by his wife as white Royalist flags in 1814, and the appearance and manners of Louis XVIII.

In addition, more than other autobiographers, he supports his own narrative with excerpts from others. He includes extracts from the official account of the trial of the Duc d’Enghien; from the diary of his servant Julien during their journey in the Levant in 1806; and letters from friends and diplomatic despatches from his time as ambassador and minister. A poet with a sense of history, he also includes quotations from the Bible, from the Greek and Latin classics, and, for comparison with contemporary revolutions, from a sixteenth-century chronicle of the wars of religion by Pierre de l’Estoile. Thus readers enjoy a constant change of perspective, and narrator, which enlivens and authenticates the memoirs. Even Chateaubriand’s own perspective changes, both in time and space, in the course of his memoirs: some parts were written outside Paris in 1811, others in London in 1821 and Prague in 1833.

Another change in tone occurs when Chateaubriand breaks his narrative to provide detailed portraits of, among others, the famous beauty Madame Récamier, who became his muse, although not his mistress; and Napoleon, whose genius he admired but whose despotism he detested. He saw that the Empire led to exile for the Bonapartes and diminution for France. Bringing a second European invasion and poisoning French politics, the Hundred Days – during which Chateaubriand served as Louis XVIII’s Minister of the Interior in exile in Ghent – was Napoleon’s ‘unredeemable crime and capital error’. France never recovered the place it had held in Europe before 1789, due to the hecatombs caused by the wars of the revolution and the Empire, and its failure to keep its ‘natural frontiers’ of the Rhine.

Memoirs From Beyond the Tomb is distinguished by its royalism. Chateaubriand was Royalist by birth, by conviction and by revulsion. In July 1789 he had seen paraded on pikes the heads of some of the revolution’s earlier victims: two royal officials called Foulon and Bertier (whose murders, like almost all others, went unpunished). He never varied in his feelings of disgust and fear – which were more widely shared than is generally realized. He claims that, after the restoration of order by Bonaparte in 1799, the people of Paris shunned those who had participated in massacres. He could have said of French revolutionaries what Ivan Bunin would say of Russian ones a hundred years later: ‘what a bunch of criminals!’ When Lamartine wrote a defence of the Girondins, Chateaubriand commented: ‘he is gilding the guillotine’.

His political creed was: ‘legitimate, constitutional monarchy has always seemed to me the gentlest and surest path to complete liberty’. Helping to give him a critical distance from his own epoch, royalism defined his life. He spent part of his old age looking after aged priests and other victims of the revolution, with his unloved wife, in the Infirmerie Marie-Thérèse, which she had founded and named after the daughter of Louis XVI (today it is still a home for retired priests). After 1830 he visited the exiled Bourbons in Prague, London and Venice, wrote pamphlets in their favour, and received financial help from them.

His royalism did not, however, blind him to their faults. He admired Louis XVIII’s ‘veritable empire’; he was ‘king everywhere, as God is God everywhere’. Yet he also half despised the king, who, despite his promise to die in the defence of his constitution, bolted from Paris on 19 March 1815, a few hours before the arrival of Napoleon. Opposing Louis XVIII’s liberal ministries in 1816–20, he supported the reactionary policies of the Comte d’Artois, the future Charles X; but he also admitted that some of this king’s decisions were ‘enough to make one despair of the race’. The July Revolution was the fault of the king, who had issued ordonnances restricting the freedoms granted by Louis XVIII, not that of the institutions of France. Similarly, the revolution of 1789, in Chateaubriand’s opinion, was due to the weakness of Louis XVI.

Chateaubriand detested Talleyrand, in part because of Talleyrand’s revolutionary past as an apostate bishop who supported the execution of the Duc d’Enghien. Hence his celebrated description – confirmed by the recently published memoirs of another eye-witness, the Marquis de La Maisonfort – of seeing Talleyrand and Fouché (a mass murderer who had become Minister of Police). They are on their way to an audience with Louis XVIII at Saint-Denis in July 1815, as the king returns to Paris after the allied victory at Waterloo:

Suddenly a door is opened: vice leaning on the arm of crime silently enters, M. de Talleyrand supported by M. Fouché; the infernal vision passes slowly before me, enters the King’s study and disappears. Fouché had come to swear allegiance and fidelity to his lord. The loyal regicide on his knees put the hands which condemned Louis XVI’s head to fall between the hands of the brother of the martyr king.