ABSTRACT
Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, that monumental figure dominating the landscape of early nineteenth-century French literature, is famously associated with conservative, legitimist politics. Les Natchez is situated at the intersection of various contrasted genres, and as a result the generic possibilities open to it are sometimes contradictory. The earliest-written part of the existing text, which recounts Chactas's time in France, belongs to the Enlightenment tradition of the philosophical tale. The Natchez' struggle against the French also owes a lot to epic inspiration: much of the treatment of the Natchez chiefs, the mourning for Chactas, and most of all the heroic battle scene in book ten is of pure epic inspiration. Both the epic and the Romantic novel were mixed genres, including verse as well as prose. Gordon Sayre sees the Romantic Noble Savage of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as 'a stoic chief mourning his own demise' and cites the example of Chactas.
