SOURCE: O'Neil, Mary A. “Chateaubriand's Atala: A Study of the French Revolution.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 22, nos. 1-2 (fall-winter 1993-94): 1-14.

[In the following essay, O'Neil presents Chateaubriand's Atala, The Genius of Christianity, and Memoirs, as organized around contemporary history, particularly the French Revolution. In so doing, Chateaubriand critiqued government, religion, and the excesses of the Revolution.]

The young Chateaubriand was a perceptive critic of his own work. In his preface to the first edition of Atala, he predicted that this book would confuse its audience:

Je ne sais si le public goûtera cette histoire qui sort de toutes les routes connues, et qui présente une nature tout à fait étrangère à l'Europe. Il n'y a point d'aventures dans Atala. C'est une sorte de poème, moitié descriptif, moitié dramatique: tout consiste dans la peinture de deux amants qui marchent et causent dans la solitude; tout gît dans le tableau des troubles de l'amour au milieu du calme des déserts et du calme de la religion.

(Moreau 239-260)

Indeed, readers from M. J. Chénier in 1801¹ through the twentieth century have accused Chateaubriand of incoherence, as he moves from the story of his Indian lovers to a description of a Christian utopia in the New World to the Père Aubry's sermons and Atala's death, only to end with an elegiac evocation of the Natchez Indians in exile. The book's strange mixture of lyricism, didacticism, sensuality and theology have often been attributed to the successive stages of its composition. At first intended as an episode of the epic Natchez, it was later revised for inclusion in Le Génie du Christianisme. As Charles Porter explains,

Chateaubriand originally set out to write Atala as a demonstration of the havoc wreaked on the state of nature by the encroachments of civilization, in particular by ill-understood or poorly proclaimed Christianity. Then, having decided to use Atala as an example of the “harmonies de la religion, avec les scènes de la nature et les passions du coeur humain,” he found himself constrained to take what he had—already written? planned out in some detail? and transform its message. From this shift remains a most uneasy diffusion of interest in the story.

(83)²

This does not mean that Chateaubriand's first published work of fiction only interests us today as a “voluptueux poème de la nature, de l'amour, du sang et de la mort” (99) that attains “le suprême degré dans l'art de jouir, par le style, des formes, des couleurs et des sons” (98), as Lemaître claimed at the beginning of this century. Many critics have brought to light the novel's various organizing principles. For Salwa Mishriky, Atala gains coherence from the theme of divine providence (69), while for Joyce Lowrie, “exile figures prominently in the basic givens of the plot of Atala” (755). Both Jon Beeker and James Hamilton have elaborated archetypal interpretations of the novel as a quest for “psychic wholeness” (Beeker 101) and as a ritual of passage from solitude to incorporation into a community (Hamilton 385-386). In his “Paradise Setting of Chateaubriand's Atala,” Dennis Spininger sees the novel as a Romantic rendering of the Eden myth. Doris Kadish's insightful “Symbolism of Exile: The Opening Description in Atala,” explains how the book's first paragraphs function as a “generative source of imagery in the novel, the use of which gives the novel a sense of symbolic cohesion or pattern,” much as do the opening descriptions in Balzac or Flaubert (365). The greatest drawback to these studies, with the exception of Mishriky's, is that they can make no sense of the defense of Christianity in the novel's second half, which they view as either ironic (Lowrie), unconvincing (Spininger, Kadish), or even as working against the text's true symbolic meaning (Beeker). At best, the modern reader may decide, along with Porter, that these contradictions add to the force and originality of Atala (88-89). At worst, however, we may agree with Hamilton that “the dénouement troubles contemporary critics who are left generally with an overwhelming feeling of futility” (391).

Perhaps one aspect of Atala that has not been sufficiently elucidated is Chateaubriand's use of contemporary history as an organizing element. Certainly the French Revolution, whose early stages he witnessed in Brittany and Paris, left a lasting impression on his writings from his first published work, L'Essai sur les Révolutions of 1797, until his Mémoires d'Outre-tombe, not only because of the effect it had on his own life but also because he considered it the primordial event of modern history, “le fleuve du sang qui sépare à jamais le vieux monde … du monde nouveau” (Mémoires 181).³ If we examine Atala in its relation to his more clearly historical studies of this period found in L'Essai, Les Mémoires, and Le Génie du Christianisme, we discover subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, references to the Revolution from the prologue to the epilogue. These allusions shed light on the novel's conflicting preoccupations with religion and passion as well as on the protagonists' development and suggest that this lyrical treatment of love in the New World may in fact be a roman engagé that Chateaubriand hoped would appeal to the post-Revolutionary generation.

The theme of exile is the most obvious reference to Chateaubriand's personal experience of the Revolution. Between 1786 and 1800, this Breton youth moved from the provinces to Paris, traveled to the American east coast, only to return to France, then enlist in the émigré army before fleeing for safety to the Isle of Jersey and ultimately to London. Lowrie suggests that Atala is “a celebration of exile” (764) performed by all of the central characters but that Chateaubriand is interested in the idea of exile more for its lyrical potential than for any “sober ideological inquiry” (764). Kadish considers the theme of exile as somewhat more relevant to the author's attempt to understand his place in history: the opening paragraphs “contain symbolic allusions to the plight of the exile. Alone, cut off from his roots, the exile longs for a spirit of community that, history having denied him, he projects onto the landscape” (362). As we shall see, Chateaubriand projects the problems of exile not only onto the landscape but also onto his Indian protagonists, Chactas and Atala, in order to set up the argument of his novel.

Like Chateaubriand, Chactas is a noble severed from his family and social position by a political reversal. As he explains to René in the first pages of “Le Récit,” he lost his warrior father and most of his fellow tribesmen in war against the Muscogulges. After sojourning briefly in St. Augustine with the Spaniard Lopez, he returns voluntarily to his native forests only to be captured himself by the Muscogulges. When he first speaks to Atala, he complains above all about his loss of patrimony: “Mon père avait aussi une belle hutte et ses chevreuils buvaient les eaux de mille torrents; mais j'erre maintenant sans patrie” (Moreau 55). Atala is not a physical exile since she is a Muscogulge living among her people. A Christian by both her Indian mother and Spanish father, however, she seems a religious exile, for her vow of chastity and her belief in the Church's power alienate her from the Indians. She represents, at least partially, her author's dépaysement while in England as well as his dashed hopes for happiness with Charlotte Ives (Mémoires 384-389), from whom he was separated by his own marriage vows. At the same time, Atala expresses the exile's longing for the security of home and family in some of the most beautiful nostalgic verse since du Bellay: “Heureux ceux qui n'ont point vu la fumée des fêtes de l'étranger, et qui ne se sont assis qu'aux festins de leurs pères” (Moreau 76). Deprived of parents, land and culture, separated from their past, Atala and Chactas form a composite portrait of the young Chateaubriand in which the novel's post-Revolutionary readers might easily have recognized themselves.

Solace comes to our two wanderers at the end of “Les Chasseurs” in the form of le Père Aubry. Let us recall to those readers who feel that Aubry was a late addition to Atala, used to impose a patina of Christianity on this otherwise erotic tale, that Aubry directs the plot in “Les Laboureurs” and “Le Drame” and certainly plays an important role in “Les Funérailles.” What could the original Atala possibly have looked like without this character? Chateaubriand makes it clear in his preface that he has tried to create an original figure, neither fanatic nor philosopher, who realistically depicts “le prêtre tel qu'il est,” (Moreau 262). Pierre Sage, in his excellent Le “Bon Prêtre” dans la littérature française d'Amadis de Gaule au Génie du Christianisme also demonstrates how richly Chateaubriand endows Aubry with sacerdotal traits found in medieval and modern French literature, the Bible and the real lives of country priests and missionaries (419-437) to form a priest who would appeal specifically to a post-Revolutionary audience (420).

The Aubry we see through Chactas's eyes appears, above all, as a father. He saves, shelters and feeds the lost couple, then plans for their future. The Indian settlement he directs is an extended family of brothers and sisters for whom he has provided a stable life, free of physical want and social strife. He seems like a modern Christ as he enters the mission grounds:

Aussitôt que les Indiens aperçurent leur pasteur dans la plaine, ils abandonnèrent leurs travaux et accoururent au-devant de lui. Les uns baisaient sa robe, les autres aidaient ses pas; les mères levaient dans leurs bras leurs petits enfants pour leur faire voir l'homme de Jésus-Christ, qui répandait des larmes … Il donnait un conseil à celui-ci, réprimandait doucement celui-là, il parlait des moissons à recueillir, des enfants à instruire, des peines à consoler, et il mêlait Dieu à tous ses discours.

(Moreau 93)

Both a temporal and spiritual leader, he manages to remain close to his flock while meting justice; he does not sacrifice the individual to the community. Aubry has also helped maintain the continuity of generations. At the front of the mission, he has placed the cemetery where the dead are buried according to their ancient Indian customs; four tribal elders assist the priest in the mission's economic administration. At the same time, Aubry directs his flock's vision to the future through agriculture and by administering the sacraments: “Cependant on présenta un enfant au missionnaire, qui le baptisa … tandis qu'un cercueil, au milieu des jeux et des travaux, se rendait aux Bocages de la mort. Deux époux reçurent la bénédiction nuptiale, et nous allâmes les établir dans un coin du désert” (Moreau, 95). Chateaubriand fittingly compares Aubry to God the father at the Creation, for the priest certainly incarnates divine providence. While it would be rash to suggest that, through Aubry, Chateaubriand attempts to formulate a political agenda for France, it seems obvious that our author tries to make a strong case for the value of orthodox religion, especially for those who, like Atala and Chactas, feel abandoned. This perspective of Christianity is highly consistent with Chateaubriand's intellectual development at the turn of the nineteenth century. Butor considers that the main reason for Chateaubriand's conversion, as we find it explained in the Mémoires, was his need to reestablish ties with his past and family (187). Or as Barbéris explains in reference to Le Génie, “L'expérience post-révolutionnaire insiste sur l'orphelin … Le gouvernement naturel n'étant plus … s'impose le choix d'un gouvernement du père. On est ici au coeur du problème de Chateaubriand” (154).

The description of the mission's legal and economic organization pointedly alludes to contemporary political thought. Aubry explains to Chactas that in civilizing his Indians,

… Je ne leur ai donné aucune loi: je leur ai seulement enseigné à s'aimer, à prier Dieu, et à espérer une meilleure vie: toutes les lois du monde sont làdedans … et si les propriétés sont divisées, afin que chacun puisse apprendre l'économie sociale, les moissons sont déposées dans des greniers communs, pour maintenir la charité fraternelle. Quatre vieillards distribuent avec égalité le produit du labeur.

(Moreau 96)

Sage has already demonstrated the influence of Rousseau's thought on this passage (427-430), while Barbéris has compared this Indian mission to the Christian communes of the Jesuits in Paraguay praised by Chateaubriand as ideal governments in Le Génie (151). For our purposes, it is worth noting that here Aubry mentions the three goals of the French Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. Liberty becomes the relative freedom of the individual from complicated laws, all of which are reduced to the New Testament injunction to love God and one's neighbor; equality is established by a benevolent authority, and fraternity changes into charity. Aubry's words suggest, at least, that civil rights are perfectly compatible with orthodox religion and that, moreover, religion can help society attain these ideals by giving them a spiritual dimension. Chactas recognizes this role of religion in establishing an equilibrium between nature and culture, the individual and the community when he refers to Christianity as “ce grand contrat” (95) binding the Indians to the earth. He anticipates the sentiments expressed by Chateaubriand in the final pages of Le Génie that all of the philosophy of the eighteenth century had done less to preserve civilization or to advance humanity toward perfection than the Bible and the Church (2: 251). This idealized vision of government, coming as it does between the story of the young lovers' trials and Atala's death, reminds us of the Eldorado episode of Voltaire's Candide. Both the mission and Eldorado are utopias, which ultimately do not offer viable solutions to their wandering protagonists. Both utopias, however, force the reader to recognize that contemporary society is defective and that happiness lies elsewhere—in Chateaubriand's novel, under the Church's tutelage.

The discussion of government and religion leads directly to the novel's climax, the confrontation between Aubry and the lovers, that is, between religion and the passions, in “Le Drame.” This is the section of Atala that has most caused readers to doubt Chateaubriand's religious convictions, principally because of Chactas's ringing condemnation of God and the Church: “Périsse le serment qui m'enlève Atala! Périsse le Dieu qui contrarie la nature!” (Moreau 101) and Atala's admission that her sexual desires outweigh her desire for paradise: “au moment où, pour obéir à ma mère, je vois avec joie ma virginité dévorer ma vie: eh bien par une affreuse contradiction, j'emporte le regret de n'avoir pas été à toi!” (Moreau 104). We can hypothesize several reasons for these anomalies. Perhaps these statements are remnants of some early version of the text, the philosophical tale in the manner of Voltaire's Ingénu that Porter describes, remnants that Chateaubriand neglected to excise from his revised novel. On the other hand, these statements may well fit into a defense of religion by acting as foils that confirm Aubry's wisdom. Although our sympathies may lie with love and youth, if we examine “Le Drame” in its relation to Chateaubriand's non-fictional reflections on the French Revolution we will concur with Jean-Pierre Richard that “Chactas et Atala se trompent … que pour être heureux, et même amoureusement heureux, ils ont besoin de ce prêtre, de ce dieu que nous venons de les voir refuser et maudire” (42).

For Chateaubriand, the Revolution was an irrational display of passion provoked, ironically, by the Enlightenment. In his Essai sur les révolutions he specifically condemns the Encyclopedists for their negativity and fanaticism:⁴ “Quel fut donc l'esprit de cette secte? La destruction. Détruire, voilà leur but, détruire, leur argument. Que voulaient-ils mettre à la place des choses présentes? Rien. C'était une rage contre les institutions de leur pays, qui, à la vérité, n'étaient pas excellentes; mais enfin quiconque renverse doit rétablir, …” (45). This license to criticize and to express anger resulted in the Revolution's worst excesses, reducing humanity to a primitive state, as we see in Chateaubriand's description of Paris after the Bastille's destruction: “Les passions et les caractères en liberté se montrent avec une énergie qu'ils n'ont point dans la cité bien réglée. L'infraction des lois, l'affranchissement des devoirs … les périls même ajoutent à l'intérêt de ce désordre: Le genre humain en vacances … débarrassé de ses pédagogues, rentré pour un moment dans l'état de la nature …” (Mémoires 1: 197). In the last pages of Le Génie Chateaubriand expresses his fear that the legacy of the philosophes would lead to an endless cycle of crime and bloodshed in the nineteenth century unless religion re-established its authority:

Il est temps enfin de s'effrayer sur l'état où nous avons vécu depuis quelques années. Qu'on songe à la race qui s'élève dans nos villes et dans nos campagnes, à tous ces enfants qui, nés pendant la Révolution, n'ont jamais entendu parlé ni de Dieu, ni de l'immortalité de leur âme, ni des peines ou des récompenses qui les attendent dans une autre vie; … déjà se manifestent les symptômes les plus alarmants, et l'âge de l'innocence a été souillé de plusieurs crimes.

(2: 253)

In Atala, the Indian maiden's forced vow of chastity as well as the conflicts it sets up between Chactas and Aubry provide the occasion for a dramatic enactment of Chateaubriand's judgment of contemporary history.

Atala incarnates the two principal defects Chateaubriand noted in the philosophes and their revolutionary heirs: she is totally ignorant of Christian theology and passionate to the point of folly. In fact, she knows so little about religion and feels so powerless to control her sexual urges that she considers self-destruction the only means of fulfilling her vow. When Père Aubry first hears of her desperation, he is shocked by the stupidity of her dilemma. He explains to her that involuntary vows are not binding and that, even if they were, her bishop had the power to repeal them.⁵ (May we not consider Aubry's words an attempt to exonerate the church from the evils of forced vocations denounced in Diderot's La Religieuse and Voltaire's Candide?) He goes on to blame the fanaticism of Atala's mother and her missionary counselor on their failure to consult their superiors before imposing a vow, on their taking religion into their own hands, so to speak: “Votre mère et l'imprudent missionnaire qui la dirigeait ont été plus coupables que vous: ils ont passé leurs pouvoirs, en vous arrachant un voeu indiscret … Vous offrez tous trois un terrible exemple des dangers de l'enthousiasme et du défaut de lumières en matière de religion” (Moreau 108). Aubry appears so intelligent, so well-informed, that he deflects the Indian couple's anger from Christianity to those who would misrepresent Christianity. He demonstrates here, as he did in “Les Laboureurs,” that an understanding of Church doctrine and strict adherence to its authority provide the best insurance for happiness in a world dominated by excess and irrationality.

Aubry reserves his most powerful arguments, however, for a condemnation of the passions. He begins his attack with Chactas, another agitated character, who has declared earlier in the novel that he prefers torture and death at the hands of his Muscogulge captors to separation from his beloved. When Chactas learns of Atala's vow he immediately blames not her mother but the Christian God that thwarts lovers, “qui contrarie la nature.” Aubry answers him with a comment similar to that in Chateaubriand's criticism of the philosophes in the Essai: “Et malheureux, tu ne m'offres que des passions et tu oses accuser le ciel?” (Moreau 101). In other words, blasphemy is hardly an appropriate solution to the problem of evil. A form of self-indulgence, it merely stimulates the passions, which, in turn, do not provide a constructive basis for reform. Aubry returns to the problem of what is natural in the passions when he reacts to Atala's explanation of how her desire for Chactas has led to her poisoning: “Ma fille … cet excès de passion auquel vous vous livrez est rarement juste, il n'est même pas dans la nature” (Moreau 104). If Enlightenment thinkers, especially Voltaire, believed that the suppression of the passions by religion resulted in perversion, Aubry shows us that an overindulgence of the passions degrades us and is, in fact, as contrary to human nature as repression. Aubry finishes his sermon by demonstrating the disastrous consequences of uncontrolled passionate behavior on human history: “… que penseriez vous donc, si vous eussiez été témoin des maux de la société, si en abordant sur les rivages de l'Europe, votre oreille eût été frappée de ce long cri de douleur, qui s'élève de cette vieille terre?; … les reines ont été vues pleurant, comme de simples femmes, et l'on s'est étonné de la quantité de larmes que contiennent les yeux des rois” (Moreau 109). From Aubry's perspective, the French Revolution, far from appearing as a decisive event that has improved the human condition, simply provides another example of the endless cycle of evil and destruction that can only be broken by Christianity.

Throughout “Le Drame” Aubry defends Christianity as the true philosophy that makes reasonable demands on humanity, that seeks to moderate our excesses and, thereby, ameliorate our condition in this life as well as the next: “La religion n'exige point de sacrifice plus qu'humain. Ses sentiments vrais, ses vertus tempérées sont bien audessus des sentiments exaltés et des vertus forcées d'un prétendu héroïsme … il faut des torrents de sang pour effacer nos fautes aux yeux des hommes, une seule larme suffit à Dieu” (Moreau 104). Like Chateaubriand, Aubry envisages the Revolution as a river of blood that flowed because society broke free of the Church's benevolent authority. Ironically, in Atala, the Church becomes the institution best suited to fulfill the Enlightenment program of crushing the infamous, the infâme being here ignorance and fanaticism. The ending of “Le Drame” demonstrates this hypothesis. Under Aubry's guidance, Atala's erotic passion changes into a charitable concern for Chactas's future well-being. Rather than repeat her mother's mistake by forcing Chactas to convert, she simply requests that he study Christianity: “Si tu m'as aimée, fais-toi instruire dans la religion chrétienne, qui prépara notre réunion” (Moreau 115).⁶ Having been touched by his dead lover's virtue and Aubry's goodness, Chactas quits his solitary life for the socially useful role of a leader of the Natchez.

While it would impoverish Atala to reduce it to the status of a polemic against the Revolution, our recognition of the historical subtext does permit us to credit Chateaubriand with a coherent plan for the “Récit” and to understand the relationship between his story of love in the wilderness and Aubry's pronouncements. From this perspective, Atala does indeed seem to embody the main themes of Le Génie du Christianisme and to prepare the reader for this more elaborate defense of Christianity published two years later. Yet a problem remains, since Atala does not end with the heroine's burial, but with an epilogue, which tells us that Aubry has been massacred, the mission destroyed and the Natchez forced into exile by European colonial ambitions. The narrator, a European exile and traveler to America who has now heard the three stories of René's encounter with Chactas, Atala and Chactas's tragic romance and the Natchez defeat, unambiguously decries the instability of human happiness in terms that make no mention of the consolations of religion: “Ainsi passe sur la terre tout ce qui fut bon, vertueux, sensible! Homme tu n'es qu'un songe rapide, un rêve douleureux; … tu n'es quelque chose que par la tristesse de ton âme et l'éternelle mélancholie de ta pensée!” (Moreau 136). No wonder that critics such as Lemaître and, more recently, Lowrie, refuse to believe that the novel contains any serious message, preferring to consider it a lyrical treatment of various Romantic themes (Lemaître 97-99; Lowrie 763-764), or that Spininger feels that such a conclusion contradicts Aubry's belief in the power of Christianity: “… this reaffirms man's position between the lost Eden and the Eden to come. The loss of the one is unhappily sure, while the attainment of the other is desperately uncertain. It is a bitter and unhappy scene with which the narrator strongly empathizes because he is a wanderer, too, and in exile” (535). The two final paragraphs of the novel, however, which contain obvious references to the author's personal experiences during and after the Revolution, suggest that, as in “Le Récit,” contemporary history may explain why Chateaubriand returns to the theme of exile in the epilogue as well as how the epilogue fits together with the main plot.

In his Mémoires, Chateaubriand asserts the importance of the émigrés in the history of the Revolution, an importance often overlooked by early nineteenth-century chronicles:

Dans les histoires de la Révolution, on a oublié de placer le tableau de la France extérieure auprès du tableau de la France intérieure, de peindre cette grande colonie d'exilés, variant son industrie et ses peines de la diversité des climats et de la différence des moeurs des peuples … la vieille France voyageuse avec ses préjugés et ses fidèles, comme autrefois l'Eglise de Dieu errante sur la terre avec ses vertus et ses martyres.

(1: 383)

He presents the émigrés as an ancient, but very flexible class. They fulfill the double mission of remaining faithful to their heritage and of adapting this heritage to new lands and civilizations. The Natchez of Atala's epilogue also preserve religion and culture. Not only do they tenaciously observe their native custom of drying and transporting their own tribal relics, they also protect the bones of Atala and Aubry and have even added the tales of the Indian lovers and the missionary to Natchez folklore. The Natchez resemble the aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution in two other ways. Warriors and hunters, they pursue the traditional occupations of the nobility, and they have been victimized by the so-called march of civilization, first in a massacre by French soldiers and later by a political treaty that handed over Indian lands to Virginia. Even after political persecution has halted, their suffering continues (as did that of Chateaubriand and his family), since the hardships of exile kill the newborn.

Although the situation of the Natchez in the epilogue is hardly enviable, we must notice that the description of their departure contains positive elements:

Les jeunes guerriers ouvraient la marche, et les épouses la fermaient; les premiers étaient chargés des saintes reliques; les secondes portaient leurs nouveau-nés; les vieillards cheminaient lentement au milieu, placés entre les souvenirs et l'espérance, entre la patrie perdue et la patrie à venir.

(Moreau 36)

If they have lost their lands, they have retained their tribal unity. Families remain intact and four generations, if we count “les saintes reliques,” emigrate together. The author further refers to the babies as “l'espérance” and “la patrie à venir,” suggesting that the Natchez will attain new lands and power in the future. Chateaubriand also seems to allude to the biblical story of exile in this passage. The Indians bearing their ancestor's remains remind us of Moses “who took the bones of Joseph with him” (Exodus 13:19) as he led the Hebrews out of Egypt toward the promised land, thus accomplishing one of the greatest reversals of ill fortune in Western mythology.

Rather than acknowledging the defeat of love, virtue and religion, the epilogue perhaps evokes some interim between defeat and revival that Chateaubriand wishes the reader to consider. Such an interest in the temporary, in transitions and reversals, is extremely common in all of Chateaubriand's work, where the protagonists most often present themselves as travelers (Riffaterre 67), where even plants endlessly migrate (Génie 1: 187) and ruins recombine with their natural settings to turn the evidence of war and bloodshed into peaceful monuments (Génie 2: 45). As we have noted in Chateaubriand's judgment of the philosophes, he did not view the Revolution as a finished event but rather as a destructive phase that had not yet been followed by reconstruction or as a volatile period that could lead to violence but might also be tamed by a return to religion. Richard best explains Chateaubriand's later thoughts on the failure of the Revolution in his treatment of Les Mémoires: “… si la crise révolutionnaire abat sauvagement l'état ancien, elle se contente de promettre un avenir qu'elle n'a pas le pouvoir de lui substituer tout aussitôt. D'où l'impression d'une sorte de vacance: l'être nous a été retiré et non encore redonné” (148). The Natchez of Atala, caught between the past and the future, find themselves in just such an empty spot of history, much as did Chateaubriand and his fellow émigrés returning to France at the turn of the century. By speaking of hope and “la patrie à venir,” by alluding to Moses, surely our author intended to suggest, even if only subtly and ambiguously, that it is possible for a defeated people to survive the fortunes of history, especially when this people remains faithful to its past.

In contrast, the epilogue's narrator appears totally severed from his past. After imagining the Natchez exodus, he speaks of the heartbreak of leaving home and country and finishes with the complaint that, as he faces exile, “je n'ai point emporté les os de mes pères” (137). Here Chateaubriand certainly alludes to one of the most bizarre episodes of the Revolution, the desecration of aristocratic tombs, especially the exhumation of the kings of France from St. Denis in 1793 and their reinternment in a common grave. Richard asserts that this event haunted Chateaubriand throughout his career (26-28). Indeed, the detailed record of the exhumations contained in footnote 46 of Le Génie is ample evidence of his morbid fascination with this act of fanaticism, as is the following condemnation found in Le Génie's section on the beauty of tombs:

Il fut réservé à notre siècle de voir ce qu'on regardait comme le plus grand malheur chez les anciens, ce qui était le dernier supplice dont on punissait les scélérats, nous entendons la dispersion des cendres.

(2: 95)

For the young Chateaubriand graves were not only beautiful but actually consoling.⁷ Located, as they normally were in pre-nineteenth-century France, either within churches or next to them, they conjur up thoughts of the Christian afterlife (Le Génie 2: 94). Ancestors' bones even have the power to teach us how to live this life more fully: “la cendre des pères, loin d'abréger les jours des fils, prolonge en effet leur existence, en leur enseignant la modération et la vertu, qui conduisent les hommes à une heureuse vieillesse” (Le Génie 2: 94). To be severed from these bones signifies an isolation from those spiritual supports enjoyed by the Natchez that help the young move from “souvenirs” to “espérances,” from “la patrie perdue” to “la patrie à venir.” The juxtaposition of the Natchez and the narrator at the end of Atala allows Chateaubriand a bitter parting shot at the revolutionaries who had, in his view, achieved new depths of barbarity in their attempts to eradicate the ancien régime. At the same time this final image leaves the reader with an ineradicable impression of the redemptive value of the past. Even though the Natchez were exiled permanently whereas the émigrés were returning home, perhaps Chateaubriand projects upon the Natchez his hope that the émigrés will regain France as a united class committed to their families and traditions. Certainly this image affirms that fidelity to class and customs offers the best possibility for survival in the new century.

This epilogue returns to several preoccupations of “Le Récit”—political upheaval, the destruction of societies, exile and the benefits of religion. Rather than contradicting Aubry's teachings, both the Natchez and the narrator serve as examples of the damage inflicted by the unbridled passions of ambition and revenge, the very dangers the missionary predicted in his sermons to Atala and Chactas. Chateaubriand's memories of his experience during the Revolution and his need to understand this cataclysm provide at least a partial clue to the organization of his first novel. These allusions to contemporary history become even clearer if we read Atala in its relation to the Essai sur les révolutions of 1797 and Le Génie du Christianisme of 1803. All three of these early works exhibit the same condemnation of Enlightenment thought and analyze the tension between the passions and Christianity. All three alternate between political treatises and lyrical outpourings on the beauty of nature or the complications of the human soul. All three are at once greatly concerned with history and autobiography, probably because, as Butor has said, Chateaubriand lived more profoundly than any other French Romantic writer the conflicts of European civilization of his time (187).

In his Mémoires, Chateaubriand tells us that his literary success began with the publication of Atala. The novel was not only widely read but also immediately inspired engravings, statuary, theatrical performances and parlor games (461). He attributes this popularity to “l'étrangeté de l'ouvrage” (461) that appealed to a society bored with rehashings of neoclassical literature. We may also conjecture that the educated French audience of the early nineteenth century discovered in the exotic descriptions of Indian life in America a description of their own generation's fatigue and disillusionment with political experimentation. Atala harks back to the eighteenth-century philosophical tale in the tradition of Montesquieu and Voltaire as it holds up a mirror to society. It prefigures, as well, the great realistic novels of the later nineteenth century where social criticism often provides the impetus for character development. Far from a naïve work, almost two hundred years after its composition, Atala appears as a roman engagé, in which Chateaubriand, either through overt references to current events or through the tragedies of his characters, condemns the excesses of the Revolution.

Notes

1. For the most complete study of early critical reactions to Atala, see Weil XCVIII-CXI and Letessier XXVII-XXXI.

2. For similar interpretations of Atala's genesis see Lemaître 92-94; Butor 164-165, 184; Barbéris 51-52; Letessier XXV-XXVI; Weil LXI-LXVII.

3. For a treatment of history in Chateaubriand's works, see Richard 141-160 and Barbéris 125-158.

4. For an excellent discussion of Chateaubriand's criticism of the Enlightenment, see Ages, “Chateaubriand and the Philosophes.” Shackleton's “Chateaubriand and the Eighteenth Century” also demonstrates our author's indebtedness to Enlightenment thought.

5. Chateaubriand himself was well aware of the problems caused by vows imposed upon children by their elders. His wet-nurse, fearing that he would succumb to an early death, vowed to Our Lady of Nazareth that the boy would wear only white and blue for seven years (Mémoires 32).

6. Richard says that in Atala “c'est le retournement du désir charnel en bonheur d'âme qui ouvre le chemin de Dieu; et c'est l'union spirituelle avec Dieu qui compense pour l'âme la perte de la joie naturelle” (43).

7. Riffaterre analyzes in detail the importance of tombs in all of Chateaubriand's writings. See especially (67-69). See also, Richard 27.

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