12 - Memoirs and the Communication of Memory

Summary

On the afternoon of 18 June 1815, François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, was walking on the outskirts of Ghent, where he had accompanied Louis XVIII into exile, reading, if we are to believe him, a copy of Caesar’s Commentaries, when he heard a ‘dull rumbling’. He stopped and listened, looked up at the cloudy sky, but heard nothing more so continued on his way. Thirty paces later, the rumbling began again, ‘now short, now drawn out at irregular intervals’. He crossed the road and leant against the trunk of the poplar tree, with his face turned in the direction of Brussels:

A southerly wind sprang up and brought me more distinctly the sound of artillery. That great battle, nameless as yet, whose echoes I was listening to at the foot of a poplar, and for whose unknown obsequies a village clock had just struck, was the Battle of Waterloo!¹

These musings on the battle can be found in one of the most famous French memoirs of the nineteenth century, Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (or ‘Memoirs from Beyond the Grave’).² Chateaubriand never witnessed a battle, nor did he ever go out of his way to do so or ever encounter its aftermaths. Nevertheless, like many memoirists, Chateaubriand placed himself at the centre of a world historical event. He did so by making the battle much more about himself than about Napoleon or indeed about the fate of the French monarchy or the world. For Chateaubriand, as it was for the thousands of tourists who over the years came to visit the battlefield of Waterloo, this was a kind of exercise in imagining warfare, much as it is for historians who have never experienced it. Chateaubriand thus inadvertently underlines the extent to which the vast majority of contemporaries as readers would have lived the battle, and therefore would have lived history, vicariously. In fact, Chateaubriand thinks he is better placed to reflect on and to be moved by the battle because of the distance between himself and it.