The Genius of Christianity

The book’s premise is a reversal of the usual apologetic order. Chateaubriand does not begin with evidence for the truth of Christianity and proceed to its effects; he begins with the effects and argues backward, on the principle that a religion so productive of beauty, tenderness and moral grandeur answers something real in human nature.

The four parts move through dogma and doctrine, the poetic of Christianity, the fine arts and literature, and worship. The most famous sections treat Gothic architecture — which he did much to rehabilitate for a generation that had dismissed it as barbarous — the ruins, the bells, the missions, and the Christian handling of death and burial. The novellas Atala and René were originally published as episodes within it.

Published in 1802, in the same season as Napoleon’s Concordat restored Catholic worship in France, it was enormously and immediately influential — the book that made Christianity respectable again to the French literary imagination after a decade of official de-Christianisation. Its argument is unapologetically emotional, and has been criticized on exactly that ground ever since.

Charles I. White’s complete English translation (Baltimore, 1856) is free at Archive.org; the French original is also freely available. Our edition is a corrected typesetting of the White translation.

This edition follows Charles I. White’s translation of Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du christianisme, published at Baltimore in 1856.

THE CHOICE OF TRANSLATION IS THE POINT. An English version by Frederic Shoberl had been in print since 1815, and White’s edition exists because that version could not be trusted. Its editor says so on his own preface page: the earlier translator had taken “unwarrantable liberties with the original, omitting innumerable passages and sometimes whole chapters, excluding sentences and paragraphs of the highest importance, those particularly which gave to the author’s argument its peculiar force in favour of Catholicism.” White restored them, compared the French editions, and supplied “nearly one hundred pages which were never before presented to the public in English.” He is candid about the one thing he did not print entire: two or three of the notes in the appendix are condensed. We say so here because he said so there, and because a reader who is told that an edition is complete is owed the exception.

The book is in four parts and twenty-two books, and this edition keeps that structure: a hundred and seventy-seven chapters in their parts, ending with Chateaubriand’s General Recapitulation and his Conclusion, then his Notes, which are his own and are printed here as he printed them, at the back.

THE CHAPTERS WERE FOUND BY THE BOOK’S OWN PAGE NUMBERS. Six of the twenty-two book headings and some thirty-five chapter headings are lost in the scan — the printer set them in display type and the scanner could not read them. The table of contents gives the page every chapter starts on; every page carries its number in the running head; so each chapter is where the contents says it is, and the heading is matched in the two pages around that point however badly it is spelt. No chapter division here is our invention.

What has been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the author or his translator. Running heads, page numbers and the digitizer’s watermark have been removed; words broken at a line ending have been rejoined. Chateaubriand quotes French, Latin and Greek constantly and his translator leaves much of it untranslated; those quotations stand as printed, and where the scan has damaged them we have left them damaged rather than guess at a language the rest of this pipeline cannot check.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.