François-René de Chateaubriand

François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand came from old Breton aristocracy and held royalist convictions through an age of upheaval. In 1811 the Académie Française admitted him; by then he'd already published Génie du christianisme, a defense of Catholicism written when the intellectual current ran hard against the Church. Between 1822 and 1824 he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and his diplomatic postings took him to Sweden, Prussia, the United Kingdom, and the Papal States. He spent decades on Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, an autobiography designed to appear only after he was gone - it came out in 1849-1850 and is now considered one of French literature's essential works. Historian Peter Gay noted that Chateaubriand saw himself as the greatest lover, writer, and philosopher of his age, and that he dominated the French literary scene for the first half of the nineteenth century.