CHATEAUBRIAND, François René, Vicomte de (1768–1848), French Romantic writer. He was a native of St-Malo. In 1791 he crossed to America, but soon returned, and lived from 1793 to 1800 in England. In his later life he had a distinguished career as a politician, becoming a peer, ambassador, and foreign minister. He was buried at his own request on the island of Grand Bé, near St-Malo.

His principal religious work is his Génie du christianisme, ou beautés de la religion chrétienne, a brilliant rhetorical defence of Catholic Christianity, which he published in 1802 on the morrow of the Concordat. He had been converted to a living faith in Christianity by a deep emotional crisis that followed the deaths of his mother and sister (ma conviction est sortie du cœur; j’ai pleuré et j’ai cru). In the Génie he sought to lift Christianity from the discredit into which the destructive work of the 18th-cent. rationalist philosophers had brought it by transferring the debate from the plane of reason to that of feeling. He argued that the study of history proved the Christian faith to have been the main fountain of art and civilization in Europe, by the recurrent stimulus it gave to the intellectual and spiritual aspirations of mankind. His other writings of religious significance include his novel Les Martyrs, ou le triomphe de la religion chrétienne (1809) and a Life of de Rancé (1844).

The edn. of his Œuvres complètes (12 vols., Paris [1861]) contains numerous texts not easily available elsewhere. That of his Correspondance générale by L. Thomas (5 vols., Paris, 1912–24) is being replaced by the edn. of B. d’Andlau and P. Riberette (ibid., 1977 ff.). There is much autobiographical material in his Mémoires d’outre-tombe (MS completed 1846; 20 vols., Brussels, 1848–50; 12 vols., Paris, 1849–50; Eng. tr., 6 vols., 1902), but edns. vary considerably in their text; recent ones by M. Levaillant and G. Moulinier (2 vols., Paris, 1946) and by J.-C. Berchet (4 vols., ibid., 1989–98). C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l’empire (2 vols., 1861), despite its personal views, remains a classic. The innumerable modern studies include J. Lemaître, Chateaubriand (Paris, 1912), G. Collas and others, Chateaubriand: Le Livre du Centenaire (ibid. [1949]; summarizing articles), P. Moreau, Chateaubriand, l’homme et l’oeuvre (ibid., 1956), and G. D. Painter, Chateaubriand: A Biography, 1 (London, 1977 [no more pub.]). G. Bertrin, La Sincérité religieuse de Chateaubriand (1900); V. Giraud, Le Christianisme de Chateaubriand (2 vols., 1925–8). P. Moreau in NCE 3 (1967), pp. 519–21.

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