Mémoires d'outre-tombe Reading Order

Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, written over decades, published serially 1849-50, book 1849-50) by François-René de Chateaubriand is the greatest work of French Romantic autobiography and one of the supreme achievements of French prose — a vast memoir in forty-two books, begun in 1809 and revised repeatedly until Chateaubriand's death in 1848, covering his childhood in Brittany, his emigration and years in England after the Revolution, his travels in America, his diplomatic career under Napoleon and the Restoration, his relationships with Pauline de Beaumont, Natalie de Noailles, and Juliette Récamier, and his analysis of the end of the Ancien Régime and the beginning of the modern world. The Mémoires d'outre-tombe is remarkable in the French tradition for several things: its prose, which is among the most beautiful in the language and is characterized by the long, melancholy period that rolls over vast distances of time and landscape; its historical scope, which makes it a primary document for the period from the fall of the Monarchy to the 1840s; and its fundamental subject, which is time itself — the way the present is always being colonized by the past, and the way the writer's consciousness is the site where different temporal layers coexist. Proust's treatment of time and memory in À la recherche du temps perdu is the fullest development of what Chateaubriand establishes in the Mémoires.