The Intellectual, the Historian and the Journalist

Abstract

‘When in the silence of abjection, only the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer are heard; when everyone trembles before the tyrant and it is as dangerous to court his favour as to merit his anger, the historian appears charged with exacting the vengeance of the people.’ This famous invective of Chateaubriand appeared in Le Mercure de France on 4 July 1807, some three years after his break with Napoleon. It mattered little that it was written in response to a volume entitled Voyage pittoresque et historique en Espagne, published by Alexandre de Laborde, a man who happened to be the brother of Chateaubriand’s then mistress, Nathalie de Noailles, and with whom he was madly in love: everyone knew — beginning with the Emperor — that in this review of what was essentially a work of no lasting significance the ‘historian charged with exacting the vengeance of the people’ was no one else but Chateaubriand and that the tyrant was obviously Napoleon himself. It was also the same Chateaubriand who did not hesitate to describe himself modestly as ‘Chateaubriand, journalist’. And a journalist he was, throughout his life fascinated by the events of the day and someone, moreover, who by launching Le Conservateur (1818–20) was able to rally the remnants of the French aristocracy, from Mathieu de Montmorency to Louis de Bonald, behind the cause of freedom of the press.