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Chateaubriand (1768-1848)

François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (4 September 1768 – 4 July 1848) was a French writer, politician and diplomat. His love story with Juliette Récamier lasted 30 years. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.
Chateaubriand settled at a modest estate he called La Vallée des Loups (“Wolf Valley”), south of central Paris. He was elected to the Académie française in 1811, but, given his plan to infuse his acceptance speech with criticism of the Revolution, he could not occupy his seat until after the Bourbon Restoration. His literary friends during this period included Madame de Staël, Joseph Joubert and Pierre-Simon Ballanche.
In his final years, he lived as a recluse in an apartment 120 rue du Bac, Paris, only leaving his house to pay visits to Juliette Récamier in l’Abbaye-aux-Bois. His final work, Vie de Rancé, was written at the suggestion of his confessor and published in 1844. It is a biography of Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé, a worldly seventeenth-century French aristocrat who withdrew from society to become the founder of the Trappist order of monks. The parallels with Chateaubriand’s own life are striking. Chateaubriand died in Paris during the Revolution of 1848 and was buried, as he requested, on an island (called Grand Be) near Saint-Malo, only accessible when the tide is out.

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