Chateaubriand and Napoleon
In his memoirs Chateaubriand denounces Napoleon. But, asks Douglas Hilt, is it not a figure of grandeur and vision that emerges?
‘I arrived in this world twenty days after Bonaparte; he brought me with him.’
Factually, Chateaubriand’s statement is incorrect; he was born in 1768 and the future Emperor a year later; but there was literary if not literal truth in his assertion.
An enemy of despotism but a venerator of grandeur, Chateaubriand was unable - indeed, unwilling - to break away from the figure whose all-encompassing power at once repelled and entranced him.
In his autobiographical Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, a vainglorious literary monument to himself, Chateaubriand wistfully recalls: ‘Descending from Bonaparte and the Empire to those who followed them, is like falling from reality into the void, from the summit of a mountain into an abyss.’
Such is the homage of the greatest French writer of the age to its dominating personality.
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