“I Landed in France with the Century”: An Excerpt from François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800–1815

Abstract

In the spring of 1800, François-René de Chateaubriand sailed from the cliffs of Dover to the headlands of Calais. He was thirty-one and had been living as a political refugee in England for more than seven years, at times in such extreme poverty he subsisted on nothing but hot water and two-penny rolls. As a nobleman and a veteran of the counterrevolutionary Army of Princes (in which he had briefly laid siege to Thionville before contracting smallpox), he was down on the Republic’s blacklist of émigrés, which meant he could be put to death if he set foot in France. Thus it was not exactly François-René de Chateaubriand who made the trip south across the Dover Strait; it was, according to the passport he obtained from the Prussian ambassador to England, a fictional Swiss subject named Monsieur Lassagne. Despite the dramatic circumstances, there seems to have been little passion behind Chateaubriand’s decision to return incognito to his native land. His brother and sister-in-law had been guillotined in 1794; his mother and one of his sisters had died in 1798 from the poor treatment they received while in Republican prisons. “Although I remembered my country,” Chateaubriand writes in his epic-length Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, “I felt no desire to see it again. [It] had become for me a stone bosom, a breast without milk.”1 Only when his French friends began to leave England for the continent—after Napoleon had declared himself First Consul and loosened the restrictions against émigrés returning—did Chateaubriand reluctantly make up his mind to head homeward. He packed up some manuscripts and the unfinished proofs of a book called The Genius of Christianity, crossed to Calais with his friend Madame d’Aguesseau, and by stages made his way to Paris.