13 Emo Lessons from the Founder of French Romanticism

Chateaubriand: Writer, whiner, wanderer

“What is this optimism?" said Cacambo.

"Alas!" said Candide, "it is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong."

-Voltaire, Candide (1759)

My unapologetic addiction to French literature started with Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I read Tocqueville’s incontestably brilliant analysis of American politics in Volume 1 (1835) and Volume 2 (1840) and took away some insights into the fatal flaws of democracy when the nobles of society stop acting like nobles As I wrote in a shamelessly clickbaited essay:

French philosopher and politician Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), at age 26, visited the United States of America for nine months in 1831 and produced two volumes of Democracy in America (1835, 1840).

Tocqueville, an aristocrat’s aristocrat whose great-grandfather was guillotined, analyzes democracy in muted wonder and notes that when everyone is equal, expertise is seen as both a threat and a new form of bondage. Americans are uncomfortable accepting any critic’s interpretation of events as superior to their own. This problem has only gotten worse as the internet has unlocked infinite interpretations. Americans don’t want to wrestle with nuance. We want to get to the conclusion, because we have careers to attend.

As he notes:

Equality extends to some degree to intelligence itself. I do not think that there is a single country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few ignorant and, at the same time, so few educated individuals as in America…. Almost all Americans enjoy a life of comfort and can, therefore, obtain the first elements of human knowledge. In America there are few rich people; therefore, all Americans have to learn the skills of a profession which demands a period of apprenticeship. Thus America can devote to general learning only the early years of life. At fifteen, they begin a career; their education ends most often when ours begins. If education is pursued beyond that point, it is directed only towards specialist subjects with a profitable return in mind. Science is studied as if it were a job and only those branches are taken up which have a recognized and immediate usefulness.

From Tocqueville, I gaped my way through Rosseau’s Confessions (1783), in which he touches himself in a courtyard and gets chased away, before wandering through the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) before realizing it would obviously be the best literature I ever read and, squirrel-like, burying the other two volumes. From there, I passed through Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932) in a state of shock at the otherworldly prose that made most readers at the time claim he was as good as Joyce, aside from the unfortunate Nazism. Then came Voltaire’s Candide, which eviscerates society norms before concluding with the saddest possible ending for any French protagonist: Candide arrives home to find that the love of his life has become ugly and old.

It was my admiration for the seven autofiction books from Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2009-2011) that made me retrace my steps to Montaigne’s Essays (1588) and Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) as I looked for the origin of autofiction as an art. I’ve kept a journal since middle school. It’s almost a thousand pages. In reading indulgent French Romantics, I wondered one thing: What if I published my journal? Is confession art or indulgence? Years ago, Knausgaard proved that confession is not gossip, but genius and, maybe, confession as art is currency. Call it the Swiftie model: talking about yourself is an in-demand art style. Shouldn’t we all cash in?

Knausgaard’s naked confessional chronicles showed me autobiography could be literary. Montaigne invented the essay. Rousseau invented shameless self-exposure as literature. But none of my readings answered the biggest question: why was French literature so tragic and emo and self-effacing but still so powerfully arrogant in the first place?

I arrived at the answer when I discovered the man universally recognized as the founder of romanticism and French romanticism in particular: François-René Chateaubriand (1768-1848) dominated French literature in the 1800s and, according to historians, saw himself as the greatest lover, the greatest writer, and the greatest philosopher of his age. In Memoirs from the Grave (1849), a book that he demanded shouldn’t be published until after his death, Chateaubriand stomps the grapes of his self-hate into a life story in which nearly his entire family is beheaded during the French Revolution as he almost starves to death as a refugee fleeing from the country. Before he starts working for Emperor Napolean III as an eminent ambassador, Chateaubriand even writes about serving as a Royalist soldier shooting at the Republicans of the French Revolution who murdered his family… and he writes about failing, about ending up in London as an oddity, eating a piece of bread a day. He writes how he really feels: and it is beautiful.

Chateaubriand, heartthrob

How should we measure the force of Chateaubriand’s influence? Victor Hugo (1802-1885), author The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Miserables (1862) the next untouchable French writer, wrote a mission statement to himself as he began his own literary journey:

"To be Chateaubriand or nothing."

What makes Chateaubriand’s prose so special? It’s easy: you feel something in your heart and in that feeling you feel some kind of forever across centuries. The raw honesty is as emo and empowering as if it had been written by Blink-182 or that band that made a song about some surfer dying or Jimmy Eat World when singing about being in the middle of a ride or Kurt Cobain transcribing random words from his journal. The point is: in Chateaubriand’s legacy, we can see the entire movement of Romanticism shine like a new star and see where the light hit later. The unparalleled romanticism of Chateaubriand lingers in lyrical light years.

Here are thirteen lessons from Memoirs From Beyond the Grave (1849) to prove it:

1. Feelings: Hide from them until you die.

Most of my feelings have hitherto stayed hidden in the depths of my soul or shown themselves in my work in the guise of imaginary beings. I still miss my chimeras today, but I shall not pursue them. I want to climb back up the slope of my better years. These pages shall be a funeral shrine raised to the light of my memories.

-François-René Chateaubriand

2. No one stays at the top for long.

Aristocracy has three successive ages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity. Once through with the first, it degenerates into the second and dies out in the last.

- François-René Chateaubriand

3. Your reality disappears as you age.

This society, which was the first I knew, was also the first to have disappeared from my sight. I saw death enter that dwelling of peace and benediction, and make of it a lonelier and lonelier place, closing one room after another that would never be opened again.

-François-René Chateaubriand

4. To be forgotten is mercy.

The profound forgetfulness that follows us wherever we go, the invincible silence that fills our graves and stretches from there to our homes, puts me constantly in mind of our inexorable isolation. Any hand will do to give us the last glass of water we will ever need, when we lie sweating on our deathbed. Only let it not be a hand that we love… For how, without despair, can we let go of a hand that we have covered with kisses, a hand that we would like to hold forever to our heart?

-François-René Chateaubriand

5. Monuments become dust before memories.

I have often seen castles built for eternity crumble more swiftly than my palaces of sand.

-François-René Chateaubriand

6. Nineteenth-century parents spoil their kids and make them soft, unlike parents from the eighteenth-century.

[Child-rearing] is a long way from these strict parents to the child-spoilers of today… But if I had sorrows that children now cannot imagine, I also had some pleasures of which the new breed knows nothing.

-François-René Chateaubriand

7. Emotional baggage is for dummies, but memory is an anchor.

Memory is often a quality associated with stupidity. It usually belongs to slow-witted souls whom it renders still slower by the baggage it loads on them. And yet, without memory, what would we be? We would forget our friendships, our loves, our pleasures, our affairs; the genius would not be able to collect his thoughts, and the most affectionate heart would lose its tenderness,... Our existence would be reduced to the successive moments of an endlessly flowing present, and there would be no more past. What a misery is man! Our life is so vain that it is no more than a reflection of our memory.

-François-René Chateaubriand

8. Fulfillment is suffocating.

If happiness ever took me in its arms, I would suffocate.

-François-René Chateaubriand

9. Work hard on obsessions and be arrogant in your abilities.

All in all, I was born with a natural aptitude for almost everything… Although quick to become bored by everything, I am always patient with the smallest details; I am endowed with the fortitude to face every impediment and, even when I grow weary of my object, my persistence is always greater than my boredom.

-François-René Chateaubriand

10. Passions are unpredictable.

The human heart is anything’s toy, and no one can anticipate what frivolous circumstance may cause it pleasure or sorrow.

-François-René Chateaubriand

11. Old age turns us into shadows.

An old man is but a shadow wandering in her light of the day.

-François-René Chateaubriand

12. Be grateful for the grays and the gloom.

The sadder the season, the more in tune with my nature. Snowy weather, by making travel more difficult, isolated the inhabitants of the countryside. One felt better inside human shelter. A moral character clings to autumn scenes. Those leaves that fall like our years, those blossoms that fade like our hours, those clouds that flee like our illusions, the light that grows weak like our wits, the sun that cools like our passions, the waves that freeze over like our lives: these things have some secret rapport with our destinies… I looked forward to the return of the stormy season with unspeakable pleasure.

-François-René Chateaubriand

13. Don’t sink so deep in the hustle you don’t see what you’re missing.

My friend’s death came unexpectedly, at the very moment when my memories were leading me to retrace the beginning of his life. Our existence is so fleeting that if we do not record the events of the morning in the evening, the work overburdens us and we no longer have the time to bring it up to date. This doesn’t prevent us from wasting our years and scattering to the winds those hours that for man are the seeds of eternity.

-François-René Chateaubriand

Emo, Eternal

The force of emotion from Chateaubriand’s autofiction is powerful enough to stop readers on the page and then reread something that resonates deep inside their chest. Memoirs From Beyond the Grave is a fascinating narrative of a man who, in the life he lived - from exile to ambassador - maintains a modesty on the pages that readers must know to be coming from some deep recess in the mind, an aerial view of the aether of his humanity, as he watches himself become the person showing up with parades and fanfare to negotiate with the rulers of countries. The style succeeds as a lesson in holding a perspective and a position within the mind that life is illuminated with magic moments even if the darkness of doom is inevitable because all experience, each moment of pain and pleasure, is another step on the staircase to the self hovering above it all with eyes wide with wonder.

If the common language of current culture is irony, Chateaubriand’s language is attuned to the treasure to be found in tragedy through the power of an honest story. So honest, in fact, he wanted the prose to be unpublished until he, himself, took a step beyond it.

Need another reflection on French Romanticism? Check out Litverse’s essay on Tocqueville’s little-known notes on what Ireland was like before the potato famine.