Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 18151830

The third part of the epic autobiography of Chateaubriand, the aristocratic Frenchman who lived through the beginning of the French Revolution and who would become the founder of the Romantic movement in Europe, now in a new, unabridged English translation—the first in a century.

In 1815—with Bonaparte on the isle of Elba and the Napoleonic era at an end—François-René de Chateaubriand seemed poised, like the Bourbon royal family he’d so long supported, to wield unprecedented power in France. Already one of the country’s most celebrated writers, he now became an ambassador (with posts in Berlin, London, and Rome) and, for a time, minister of foreign affairs. Yet as passionate as Chateaubriand was about the cause of the Bourbons in theory, in reality he was a recalcitrant subject. Part liberal, part ultraconservative, a warmonger with his head in the clouds, he quarreled with both Louis XVIII and Charles X and eventually tendered his resignation altogether, just in time for the July Revolution, which brought the Restoration to a close and allowed Chateaubriand to go back to praising the Bourbons, now safely exiled in the realm of the ideal.

As always in Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Chateaubriand narrates the events of his era unforgettably. His accounts of international politics, and the papal conclave, and the revolutionary strife of 1830 (so different from the revolutionary strife of his youth) are gripping. His digressions, however, are the main event, and readers will be glad to find him wandering around Paris and Rome, reflecting on storms and ruins, moonlight and mortality.