Francois Chateaubriand
From Philosopedia
Chateaubriand, François René, Vicomte de (4 September 1768 - 4 July 1848)
The founder of romanticism in French literature, Chateaubriand was the most important French author of his time.
The Martyrs celebrates Christianity’s victory over paganism. Despite the accumulating evidence of geology and paleontology, Chateaubriand persisted, Robertson lamented, “with his grotesque theorem that God made the world out of nothing with all the marks of antiquity upon it—the oaks at the start bearing ‘last year’s nests’—(on the ground that) if the world were not at once young and old, the great, the serious, the moral would disappear from nature, for these sentiments by their essence attach to antique things.”
J. M. Robertson observed, “It is humiliating, but instructive to realize that only a century ago a ‘Christian reaction’ in a civilized country was inspired by such an order of ideas (as found in Chateaubriand’s Gémoe di Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity, 1802) and that in the nation of Laplace, with his theory in view, it was the fashion thus to prattle in the taste of the Dark Ages.”
