Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 18151830

The third part of the epic autobiography of Chateaubriand, the aristocratic Frenchman who lived through the beginning of the French Revolution and who would become the founder of the Romantic movement in Europe, now in a new, unabridged English translation—the first in a century. In 1815—with Bonaparte on the isle of Elba and the Napoleonic era at an end—François-René de Chateaubriand seemed poised, like the Bourbon royal family he’d so long supported, to wield unprecedented power in France. Already one of the country’s most celebrated writers, he now became an ambassador (with posts in Berlin, London, and Rome) and, for a time, minister of foreign affairs. Yet as passionate as Chateaubriand was about the cause of the Bourbons in theory, in reality he was a recalcitrant subject.