Intellectual Between Two Worlds

Chateaubriand(1768-1848)is the founder of the French Romanticism movement, and an academician of the French academy. Chateaubriand is also an outstanding politician and political writer, he has ever been the foreign minister of the French ministry of foreign affairs, a member of the Chamber of Peers, the ambassador to London and Berlin. And it's he who created the conservator, and produced a huge effect on the public opinion. Living in an age when revolutions surged forward vigorously and the society itself took on a kind of uncertainty, Chateaubriand belongs to the first generation of intellectuals in the post-revolution time to rethink the great revolution, and a contradiction between tradition and modernity can be told from his political thought and practice. Chateaubriand wants to find the way out for the French society between the tradition and liberty which consequently decides that he never falls into any party.There are altogether five parts in this article.The preface is primarily an academic review of the existing research about Chateaubriand's political thoughts at home and abroad in which the academic circle in Britain, France and America are more emphasized. The first part of the paper deals with the characteristics of the social transformation in the field of politics, economy, culture and ideas and its influence to the intellectuals. From the second part, I take Chateaubriand as an example to unfold my discussion, expound the formation process of his political thinking. In the third part and the forth part, I discuss respectively the principles of Chateaubriand's thought and his political practice. At the end, I try to explore the influence from the social transformation to the intellectuals from a broader angle of view.