This book is both a very comprehensive biography of Chateaubriand and a study of his works with numerous excerpts from his novels. We are at the beginning of Romanticism; François-René de Chateaubriand, born in 1768 and died in 1848, lived a very tumultuous life.
He traveled and discovered many countries. As a writer, he was also a polemicist and journalist. His monarchist opinions under the Consulate and the Empire could have cost him; his brother was executed in 1810. Chateaubriand had a very tumultuous private life—married with many mistresses, he moved from one place to another. Always short of money, he borrowed and to repay his creditors, borrowed again.
This biography takes us into the intimacy of this author who would become an ambassador, minister, and peer of France. Ghislain de Diesbach presents us with a portrait of this society at the beginning of the 19th century, a world disillusioned, bored with life, “Life was imposed on me!”
Everything is said in this phrase. Chateaubriand’s life is an opera that seems to never end, a comedy, some of his contemporaries will say. With this biography, we have a valuable tool to understand the psychology of Romanticism, of which Chateaubriand was, if not the greatest symbol, at least its first representative with his novels, which ultimately are just one, the novel of his life.
