Mémoires d'outre-tombe Reading Order

Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, published 1849–50) by François-René de Chateaubriand is the greatest French autobiographical prose of the nineteenth century and one of the masterpieces of French literature — a vast retrospective account of Chateaubriand's life from his Breton aristocratic childhood, through the Revolution and emigration, his American journey, his diplomatic and political career under Napoleon and the Restoration, to his final years as an embittered survivor of the world he had helped create. Chateaubriand began the Mémoires in 1809 and continued writing them over forty years, with the explicit understanding that they would be published only after his death (hence 'from beyond the grave') — a formal choice that gave him the freedom to write about the living (including Napoleon, whom he alternately admired and despised) with a frankness that would have been impossible in his lifetime. The result is a unique combination of autobiography, history, and poetic meditation — the story of a life that was also the story of the fall of the ancien régime, the Revolution, the Napoleonic period, and the Restoration, told by the one writer who witnessed all of it and had the prose to do it justice. The Mémoires contain some of the most magnificent descriptive prose in the French language: the account of the Breton coast of his childhood, the description of Niagara Falls, the account of the fall of Napoleon, and the final meditation on old age and death are among the summits of French literary prose.