Chateaubriand's Ruins: Loss and Memory after the French Revolution

On 17 May, "in the year of grace 1793," the acclaimed memoirist Chateaubriand arrived at Southhampton from Jersey. The next day British authorities handed him a "way-bill," a legal document drawn up under the Alien Bill, which permitted the refugee of the French Revolution to go to London. It described the man as follows: "François de Chateaubriand, French officer in the emigrant army, five feet four inches high, thin shape, brown hair and whiskers."(1) This is one of the few portraits Chateaubriand leaves of himself. Five feet four inches, thin, whiskers -- we see him, perhaps a bit short but nevertheless fixed in the mind's eye. Yet this summation, which Chateaubriand laconically adds "ran in English," is scarcely recognizable. From Southhampton, he remembered traveling in virtual obscurity, in the company of errant sailors; in London, he took a garret room "at the end of a little street off the Tottenham Court Road." "Poor, sick and unknown," Chateaubriand was undistinguished as he entered that "wealthy and famous city." Recollecting his impoverished condition thirty years later, when he returned to London as French ambassador, he found his present, much-celebrated self completely estranged from its past counterpart. Succession to fame and fortune was "incongruous"; his brothers in emigration were long scattered, alone, unhappy or dead; even the old cemetery that had lain beyond his dormer-window had disappeared beneath a newly laid-out factory terrain.(2) Chateaubriand's Memoirs acknowledged the extent to which the links of continuity had been broken; five feet four inches, thin, whiskers -- the "way-bill" can get Chateaubriand from Southhampton to London, but not from 1793 to 1822.
The disruption to memory-work is even more serious than simply a sense of alienation from a remembered past. The melancholic sense of loss, which is the foundation of so much of Chateaubriand's thought, is itself vulnerable to decay since this or that ruin, this or that memory, is itself in a state of continuous ruin. "On a beautiful evening of the month of July last" -- Chateaubriand wrote from Rome, ten years later (1803) -- "I visited the Coliseum." At that time, the effect of the setting sun, the barking of dogs, the striking of a clock had generated a series of stark images and illuminating ironies, but these could not be summoned up the following January when he returned and saw before him a mere "pile of dreary and misshapen ruins." Thus, the work of meditating over "the wreck of empires" is impaired by the fact that the meditator himself is a wreck, with "his lukewarm hope, his wavering faith, his limited charity, his imperfect sentiments, his insufficient thoughts, his broken heart." For Chateaubriand, memory is a slight impression that crumbles at the touch into "dust and ashes."(5) It is so feeble, in addition, that the "unforgettable" ends up crushing the "not-yet-forgotten." After seeing the spectacle at Niagara Falls, for example, he realized with horror that he would never again experience either the memory of earlier waterfalls or encounter later waterfalls except in terms set at Niagara. "My memory constantly counterposes voyages with voyages, mountains with mountains, rivers with rivers," he explained. "My life destroys itself."(6) This is so because past memories govern present experiences and later encounters erase previous recollections. Chateaubriand anticipated Walter Benjamin, who remarked that memory was not the sure "instrument for exploring the past," but was the "theater" of the past, a ceaseless exchange of scenes and characters.(7) In this sense, souvenirs call forth the instability of representation as forcefully as they recall the otherness of the past.(8)