- This article is about the French writer. For the steak, see Chateaubriand steak.
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (September 4, 1768 – July 4, 1848) was a French writer and diplomat considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.
He was born in Saint-Malo and grew up in his family's castle in Combourg, Brittany. In 1791, he visited North America, which provides the setting for his exotic novels Les Natchez (written in 1800 but published only in 1826), Atala (1801) and René (1802). His vivid, captivating descriptions of nature in the sparsely settled American Deep South were written in a style that was very innovative for the time and spearheaded what would later become the Romantic movement in French literature.
Chateaubriand's forced exile during the Reign of Terror inspired his first work, Essai sur les Révolutions (1797).
In 1802, he acquired fame with Le Génie du christianisme (The Genius of Christianity), an apology of the Christian faith which contributed to the post-revolutionary religious revival in France.
Appointed secretary of the legation to Rome by Napoleon and then minister to Valais, Switzerland, he resigned after the execution of the duc d'Enghien in 1806. He was elected to the Académie française in 1811.
After the fall of the Empire, Chateaubriand rallied the Bourbons, but his liberal views soon made him many enemies. Under Louis XVIII, he became peer (1815), served as ambassador to Berlin (1821) and London (1822), and even rose to the office of Minister of Foreign Affairs (December 28, 1822 - August 4, 1824). Charles X appointed him ambassador to Rome in 1828, but he resigned upon the accession of Polignac as Premier.
In 1830, his refusal to swear allegiance to Louis Philippe put an end to his political career. He withdrew from political life to write his Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, published posthumously 1848–1850), which is considered his most accomplished work.
A food enthusiast, he coined the name of a cut of tenderloin (Chateaubriand) and was involved in the creation of recipes for Hamburger Chateaubriand and Meat Loaf Chateaubriand. [1]
He died in Paris during the Revolution of 1848 and was buried at Saint-Malo.
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