SOURCE: Charlton, D. G. “The Ambiguity of Chateaubriand's René.” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 23, no. 1 (January 1969): 229-43.

In the following essay, Charlton analyzes Chateaubriand's René as an example of French Romanticism that constructs the melancholic, solitary individualist. Charlton maintains that Chateaubriand presented an ambivalent view of both melancholy and Christianity.

No figure is more often connected with French Romanticism than the melancholic solitary. Although recent studies have identified not one kind of héros romantique but several—the poet-prophet, the rebel, the dandy, even the ‘unheroic hero’, amongst others—yet the most typically Romantic character for most readers remains the passion-tossed individualist afflicted with le mal du siècle. And it has commonly been alleged or implied that the Romantic writers do indeed portray this figure as a true hero, as someone to admire, as a superior being whose mental anguish lifts him above the common stock. The...