Recompositions Territoriales: Quand la Révolution rebat les cartes (Mémoires d'outre-tombe, livres I à XII)

Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe reflects a metamorphosis in world geography. By putting the configuration of geopolitical space front and center, the autobiography (especially in the volumes spanning 1768 to 1800) traces a new world map, one that has been redrawn by the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. Highlighting the disintegration of the Ancien Régime's notions of territory, Chateaubriand shows a world in a form of social and political upheaval that foreshadows globalization. By its intensification of interdependent relations between nations (now locked in struggle for the possession of other territories), this new world uproots the individual from his land and confronts him with new spatial divides. (In French)