The Rise of the Romantic

...After generations of liberal apologetics that minimized the crimes of the Revolution, the evidence now seems to support Painter's stance...

...His romantic novel, Reni, and his autobiography, Me-moires d'outre-tombe (published after his death through the faithful friendship of Madame Recamier), helped establish the dual traditions of autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography that Proust eventually united so splendidly in A la recherche du temps perdu...

...Instead, they lie with the philosophic aristocrats whose ideals were genuinely humanitarian, yet who were sacrificed in the orgy of cruelty that the Revolution degenerated into...

...Painter gives the first sensible interpretation we have had of Chateaubriand's own account of the trip by tracing very convincingly the route he must have taken from Philadelphia to Niagara, from there to Pittsburgh and on to the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi, whence he returned by a southerly route to Philadelphia, having encountered enough Indians on the way to acquire at least the illusion of brotherhood with them...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock author, "The Writer and Politics" Chateaubriand lived as a liberal aristocrat through the destruction of France's ancien regime...

...He subjects Chateaubriand's own accounts (both fictional and purportedly autobiographical) to a shrewd critical assessment supported by ample outside evidence, without destroying our sense of the personality that the writings, for all their extravagance, project...

...Chateaubriand knew the world of the French aristocracy during its meretricious glory under Louis XVIII...

...So, in a way, did Chateaubriand, for he was a Breton rather than a French nobleman, strikingly Celtic in appearance as well as disposition...

...And while it is not easy to say something new about a man so extravagantly autobiographical as Chateaubriand, or to interest English-speaking readers in a French writer whose works go virtually unread (there is, so far as I know, no complete English translation of Memoires d'outre-tombe), Painter succeeds admirably in both tasks...

...Natchez and of course Rene-and it provides what is in some respects the most admirable part of this book...

...But to his death (in 1848, the year of another revolution), he remained true to the ideal of natural nobility he had served in his youth, and no one was more responsible than Chateaubriand in works like Le genie du Christian-isme for renewing the intellectual respectability of conservatism in 19th-century France...

...The volume ends with the ominous years of the Revolution...

...If they are as good as this one, Chateaubriand will rank among the great biographies of our generation...

...His solitary and rebellious boyhood, his priest-ridden education, his apprentice days in the shabby literary world of pre-Revolu-tionary Paris, belong to this period, as does the journey to George Washington's America...

...He fled the Revolution to fight at Thionville in the emigre army of the Bourbon princes who were seeking, with the aid of the German kings, to destroy the Republic...

...Moreover, he is not only extremely interesting in describing the mind's painful metamorphosis from 18th-century pupation to a flight on romantic wings into the 19th-century, but he presents a full picture of the times: the small world of the Breton nobility to whom Chateaubriand belonged and also the wider world of a France marching blindly into the horrors of what would become the prototypical bloody revolution, where by their excesses the destroyers eventually destroy each other...

...A Tale of Two Cities may not have been so false a picture after all, and those who wonder why revolutions go wrong might go back to consider what really happened in Paris in 1789-93...

...Proust, as a middle-class Jew, saw that world as an outsider...

...As The Longed-for Tempests ends, we see Chateaubriand, almost dead from wounds inflicted at Thionville, going into the exile from which, after meditating on his experiences, he will return to a romantic conservatism and eventually to his reconciliation with Catholicism...

...Painter leaves no doubt of his own sympathies, which lie neither with the royal folly that failed to make reforms in time, nor with the revolutionaries who destroyed the freedoms they claimed to establish...

...Today, however, when we think of Chateaubriand, it is not as a political figure...

...and he was well aware of the errors that had brought the monarchy to disaster even when he risked his life fighting in a company of Breton country gentlemen for the already-doomed Louis XVI and his proud, stupid Hapsburg wife...

...it is as the great pre-Romantic -the man who made his escape, aided by the writings of Rousseau and the conversations of Malesherbes, from the twilight world of feudalism and the dry intellectualism of the Enlightenment, into the exalted contemplation of nature, the natural man and the suffering self...

...Proust knew it and was fascinated by it when its last pretensions were being shattered in the Dreyfusard conflict that splintered the society of la belle epoque...

...For a fuller discussion, we shall have to await the next two volumes...

...He went into opposition against Napoleon, offended the Bourbons who sought to patronize him, and withdrew entirely from public life during the July monarchy of Louis-Philippe...

...Given these similarities, perhaps there is no one more qualified to write about Chateaubriand's life than George D. Painter, who is the author of the best biography of Proust in English and possibly in any language...

...This intellectual voyage, Painter suggests, will prove to be a necessary one, considering the catastrophic events of the time...

...It covers Chateaubriand's first 25 years, from his birth in 1768 to his flight to England in 1793...

...This-the initial volume of a three-part biography-Is appropriately sub-titled The Longed-for Tempests...

...Chateaubriand, Proust acknowledged, had foreshadowed his own fictional speciality, the involuntary memory...

...The last was to inspire many of his later writings-notably Atala, Les...

...Indeed, the links between the two men are many and strong...

...Nevertheless, there was an abiding dissentience in his nature that made it impossible for him to fit into the official world of either the Empire or the restored kingdom of 1815-1848...