François-René de Chateaubriand

Born to an ancient Breton noble family in Saint-Malo, Chateaubriand traveled to North America in 1791, wandering among Native American nations along the Mississippi and Niagara. Returning to fight in the royalist émigré army, he published Atala (1801) and Le Génie du christianisme (1802), restoring Catholic aesthetics to post-revolutionary France.

Serving as Foreign Minister under the Restoration, he resigned over principles of press freedom. For thirty-five years, he composed his monumental posthumous autobiography Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave), weaving his solitary life into the panoramic drama of the fall of the French monarchy and rise of democracy.