SOURCE: Porter, Charles A. “Chateaubriand's Classicism.” Yale French Studies 38 (1967): 156-70.

In the following essay, Porter examines Chateaubriand's interest in a literary return to classicism, based on French and ancient traditions. Porter asserts that Chateaubriand believed that classicism, with rules and principles which could be discovered and followed, offers a timelessness for art. To this end, Chateaubriand offered his own works as models, including René and Atala.

“The Génie du christianisme will remain my great work,” Chateaubriand wrote in the Mémoires d'outre-tombe, “because it produced or determined a revolution and began the new era of the literary century.” But the Martyrs, he continued, a work demonstrating “serious studies, a labor of style, great respect for language and good taste,” was something else again: it had kept a flavor of the places it was concerned with—the lands of antiquity; in it “the classical dominates the romantic.” The...