English agriculturist and pioneering travel writer Arthur Young visited Comburg in 1788 and he described the immediate environs of the "romantic" Chateau de Combourg thusly: "SEPTEMBER 1st.

For a time he could not make up his mind whether he wanted to be a naval officer or a priest, but at the age of seventeen, he decided on a military career and gained a commission as a second lieutenant in the French Army based at Navarre.

When the French Revolution broke out, Chateaubriand was initially sympathetic, but as events in Paris - and throughout the countryside (including, presumably, "wretched" "brutal" and "filthy" Combourg) - became more violent he wisely decided to journey to North America in 1791.

His vivid, captivating descriptions of nature in the sparsely settled American Deep South were written in a style that was very innovative for the time and spearheaded what later became the Romantic movement in France.

As early as 1916,[7] some scholars have cast doubt on Chateaubriand's claims that he was granted an interview with George Washington and that he actually lived for a time with the Native Americans he wrote about.

Chateaubriand returned to France in 1792 and subsequently joined the army of Royalist émigrés in Koblenz under the leadership of Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince of Condé.

Under strong pressure from his family, he married a young aristocratic woman, also from Saint-Malo, whom he had never previously met, Céleste Buisson de la Vigne (in later life, Chateaubriand was notoriously unfaithful to her, having a series of love affairs).

His military career came to an end when he was wounded at the Siege of Thionville, a major clash between Royalist troops (of which Chateaubriand was a member) and the French Revolutionary Army.

His exile forced Chateaubriand to examine the causes of the French Revolution, which had cost the lives of many of his family and friends; these reflections inspired his first work, Essai sur les Révolutions (1797).

In 1802, he won fame with Génie du christianisme ("The Genius of Christianity"), an apologia for the Catholic faith which contributed to the post-revolutionary religious revival in France.

James McMillan argues that a Europe-wide Catholic Revival emerged from the change in the cultural climate from intellectually-oriented classicism to emotionally-based Romanticism.

[11] Chateaubriand therefore retired, in 1807, to a modest estate he called Vallée-aux-Loups ("Wolf Valley"), in Châtenay-Malabry, 11 km (6.8 mi) south of central Paris, where he lived until 1817.

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.

After Napoleon's final defeat in the Battle of Waterloo (of which he heard the distant cannon rumblings outside Ghent), Chateaubriand became peer of France and state minister (1815).

He lost his function of state minister, and joined the opposition, siding with the Ultra-royalist group supporting the future Charles X, and becoming one of the main writers of its mouthpiece, Le Conservateur.

Chateaubriand was soon relieved of his office by Prime Minister Joseph de Villèle on 5 June 1824, over his objections to a law the latter proposed that would have resulted in the widening of the electorate.

[13] Consequently, he moved towards the liberal opposition, both as a Peer and as a contributor to Journal des Débats (his articles there gave the signal of the paper's similar switch, which, however, was more moderate than Le National, directed by Adolphe Thiers and Armand Carrel).

After Villèle's downfall, Charles X appointed Chateaubriand ambassador to the Holy See in 1828, but he resigned upon the accession of the Prince de Polignac as premier (November 1829).

He became a harsh critic of the "bourgeois king" Louis-Philippe and the July Monarchy, and his planned volume on the arrest of Marie-Caroline, duchesse de Berry caused him to be (unsuccessfully) prosecuted.

[16] Chateaubriand thus gave a Christian interpretation of the revolutionary motto, stating in the 1841 conclusion to his Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe: Far from being at its term, the religion of the Liberator is now only just entering its third phase, the political period, liberty, equality, fraternity.

[16][17]In his final years, he lived as a recluse in an apartment at 120 rue du Bac, Paris, leaving his house only to pay visits to Juliette Récamier in Abbaye-aux-Bois.

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.

Chateaubriand died in Paris on 4 July 1848, aged 79, in the midst of the Revolution of 1848, in the arms of his dear friend Juliette Récamier,[18] and was buried, as he had requested, on the tidal island Grand Bé near Saint-Malo, accessible only when the tide is out.

He was the first of a series of French men of letters (Lamartine, Victor Hugo, André Malraux, Paul Claudel) who tried to mix political and literary careers.