The bust of René de Chateaubriand stands in a square in Dol de Bretagne. As a boy he went to school in Dol de Bretagne.
The bust of René de Chateaubriand stands in a square in Dol de Bretagne. As a boy he went to school in Dol de Bretagne.
The plaque on the pedestal contains a feather with the following text above it:
Rene de Chateaubriand
Au collège de Dol
1777-1781
"François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, born September 4, 1768 in Saint-Malo and died July 4, 1848 in Paris, was a French novelist, memoir and politician. He is considered one of the forerunners of French Romanticism and one of the greatest names in French literature.
Born to the Breton nobility, the most famous member of his Saint-Malo family, Chateaubriand was part of the royalist movement politically. He was ambassador to various monarchs several times, was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs during the Restoration from 1822 to 1824 and belonged to the ultra-royalists under the reign of Charles X. The numerous political and diplomatic responsibilities that characterized his career, as well as his penchant for travel, in America and then the Mediterranean, structured a life marked by exile and nostalgia for stability.
He was three years old when, in 1761, his father, successful in business, was able to buy the Château de Combourg in Brittany, where the Chateaubriand family settled in 1777. François-René spent a childhood there, which he described as often gloomy, with a taciturn father and a superstitious and sickly, but cheerful and cultured mother.
He studied successively at the colleges of Dol-de-Bretagne (1777 to 1781), Rennes (1782) and Dinan (1783).
After much hesitation about his career, he was appointed a second lieutenant in the regiment of Navarre in 1786, under his brother Jean-Baptiste (who would introduce him to the Court, for which he felt "an invincible aversion"), and at nineteen he was he captain. He came to Paris in 1788, where he befriended Jean-François de La Harpe, Louis de Fontanes, who would become his best friend, and other writers of the time. Nourished by Corneille and drawn by Rousseau, Chateaubriand made his literary debut by writing verses for the Almanach des Muses.
Return to France and first literary success
At the time of the French Revolution, in 1791, François-René left France and went to the New World (Baltimore),
From 1793 -1800 he lives and works in London.
Back in France in 1800, he took an active part in the Mercure de France with Louis de Fontanes, which he then ran for a few years. It was in this context that he published Atala in 1801, an original creation that aroused controversial admiration.
Around the same time he wrote René, a work full of dreamy melancholy, which served as a model for future Romantic writers."
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