François-René de Chateaubriand’s memoirs, essential classics since originally published after the author’s death in 1848, are appearing in a new English translation by Alex Andriesse, the first complete version in English in more than a century. So far, two volumes have been published, the first in 2018, the second at the end of 2022. These recollections, written intermittently during the second half of Chateaubriand’s life and presented after his death as if composed from the tomb, are as fresh as ever and speak as much to our times as they did to the nineteenth century.

Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was a Breton aristocrat born in the eighteenth century and a leader of the French Romantic movement in the nineteenth. As master of French prose, he is rivaled only by Victor Hugo. Anthony Powell, reviewing in 1961 an abridged translation of these memoirs by Robert Baldick, remarked that Chateaubriand did not export well and was best known outside of France for the steak named after him by a chef who worked for him. Nevertheless, Baldick’s translation, originally published by Hamish Hamilton and Knopf, has been reprinted in Penguin paperbacks on at least two occasions, indicating some interest in the Anglosphere. George D. Painter, famous for his Proust biography, embarked on writing three volumes of biography in English about Chateaubriand, but only one volume appeared in 1977 despite Painter surviving until 2005.

Chateaubriand may interest readers on both sides of the Atlantic since he visited in his youth the newly