Napoleon and Chateaubriand, with Ossian in between

The huge ‘noise’ caused at the end of the 18th century by Macpherson’s publication of the works of Ossian, “collected” in the Highlands, is today frequently forgotten. Napoleon chose Ossian as his poet, Werther found the Bard’s cantos the purest expression of his distress… The young Chateaubriand was likewise carried away by the Ossian torrent; he read and translated Ossian, and it is not in the least co-incidental that Chateaubriand’s first use of the term “romantic” occurs in the description of a scene (in which he was one of the protagonists) borrowed from Ossian… This paper is a presentation of these works which contributed to the birth of Romanticism, and it tracks their presence in those of Chateaubriand, even after the latter was convinced that the poems were a literary fake.