Francois-René de Chateaubriand, Anne-Louis Girodet (1809)

Introduction

The young aristocrat François-René de Chateaubriand wrote the novella Atala while in exile after the French revolution of 1789. Chateaubriand traveled to the United States where his experience of the wilderness and of Native Americans inspired rich reflections on religion, nature, civilization, and savagery. He republished the story a year later as part of a longer work, The Genius of Christianity, which was intended to reaffirm the spiritual value and, above all, the beauty of Christianity in an era when the church was losing its cultural importance.

The French Revolution

In thinking about what Chateaubriand has to say about civilization, violence, and religion in Atala, it is essential to keep in mind that he was writing against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Questions about whether savagery was a natural human characteristic that needed to be civilized out of people, or whether it was a product of life in civilization (questions we will encounter again in Beaumont's Marie) are not abstract philosophical musings for him, but urgent problems for making sense of the violence that he lived through during the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), a phase of the French Revolution in which the revolutionary government executed as many as 40,000 people considered to be enemies of the revolution. Since the purpose of the revolution was to unseat the monarchy and the eliminate the privileges held by the aristocracy, many of the people killed were aristocrats like Chateaubriand, including many of his family and friends. The Terror raised many questions about human nature and whether people naturally contained the necessary traits (reason and sentiment) to govern themselves in a just and moral way, or whether people were naturally susceptible to passions and violence (savagery) that needed to be controlled by strong authorities like the state and the church. The Native Americans that Chateaubriand writes about in Atala serve as a kind of case study for these philosophical questions, so we will want to think about how they are defined as fundamentally different from Europeans, both positively and negatively, and what kinds of exchange or learning seem to be possible between Native Americans and Europeans in the novella.

Glossary

Meschacebe - Mississippi River

Natchez - Native American people who lived in present-day Mississippi; click here for more on the Natchez Nation today

Muskogee - aka. Muscogee/Creek; Native American people who lived in present-day Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida; click here for more on the Muscogee Nation today

Seminole - Native American people who lived in present-day Oklahoma and Florida; click here for more on the Seminole Tribe today

Questions to guide your reading...

- How does Chateaubriand set up the story in the prologue? What does he describe at length and what does he lay out quickly? What are the most striking features of the American wilderness here?

- What is the character of the Frenchman René doing in Atala? When does he appear and what function does he serve?

- How does Chactas come to meet Lopez? Why does he need Lopez's protection? What is the nature of the bond between them? How does Chactas's allegiance with the Spaniard against the other Native American tribes trouble his apparent status as the representative "noble savage" character?

- How does Chactas come to meet Atala? What misunderstanding starts off their relationship? How do the revelations of Atala's religion and parentage change their relationship, and why? What qualities does Chateaubriand attribute to Atala as a result of her not being just a Native American?

- What qualities does Atala share with the Native Americans who live in Father Aubry's colony? What kind of combination of civilization and naturalness does this community represent? How are they contrasted with the Muskogee and Seminole characters in the story?

- What causes Atala's death? How does the Christianity of her mother differ from that of Father Aubry? Is Christianity an unqualified value no matter how it is practiced, and how come?

- What kinds of relationships are most highly valued in this story? Familial? Romantic? National/tribal?

Influence

Chateaubriand's writing, and Atala in particular, were hugely influential on the French Romantic movement that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. Atala takes up many of the problems that would lie at the heart of Romanticism (some of which can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau): the relationships between sensibility/sentiment and nature, the detrimental role of civilization in distancing people from their natural being, and the melancholy caused by a longing for higher meaning. Atala (along with the novella René that accompanied it in The Genius of Christianity) was very influential throughout the 19th century, not only for other writers, but also for painters and engravers, who were inspired by its powerful imagery--particularly the death of Atala in a remote cave, accompanied by Chactas and Father Aubry:

The Funeral of Atala by Anne-Louis Girodet (France, 1808) The Last Moments of Atala by Luis Monroy (Mexico, 1871)

The Death of Atala by Rodolfo Amoedo (Brazil, 1883) The Death of Atala by Cesare Mussini (Italy, 1835)