Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (born December 23, 1804, Boulogne, France—died October 13, 1869, Paris) was a French literary historian and critic, noted for applying historical frames of reference to contemporary writing. His studies of French literature from the Renaissance to the 19th century made him one of the most-respected and most-powerful literary critics in 19th-century France.

Early life and Romantic period

Sainte-Beuve was the posthumous only child of a tax collector. After a sheltered childhood, he completed his classical education in Paris and began to study medicine, which he abandoned after a year. A talented but in no way brilliant youth, he continued his general education at his own pace, attending the University of Paris and extension institutions, and in 1825 was drawn into journalism by his former teacher, Paul Dubois, editor of a new liberal periodical, Le Globe. In its pages he wrote his first essays on the poetry of Victor Hugo and soon became a member of his literary circle of Romantic writers and poets. In his first book, Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au XVI^e siècle (1828; “Historical and Critical Description of French Poetry and Theatre in the Sixteenth Century”), he discovered, perhaps naturally, a Renaissance ancestry for Hugo and others of his new friends.

A brief visit to England in 1828 strengthened his taste for the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both of whom were then little known in continental Europe. His visit to England may also account for the appearance of elements of the style of William Cowper and George Crabbe in volumes of his own poetry, Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829; “The Life, Poetry, and Thought of Joseph Delorme”) and Les Consolations (1830), which on their publication attracted some attention—not least because of their deliberate flatness and apparent uncouthness, much in contrast to the grander manner of Hugo and the poet Alfred de Vigny.

He had meanwhile developed a taste for social speculation and a concern for problems of religious experience. His social concerns first crystallized in a passing attachment to the group of reformers assembled around the doctrines of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon. According to Saint-Simon’s disciples, the feudal and military systems were to be replaced by one controlled by industrial managers, and scientists rather than the church were to become the spiritual directors of society. When this group in 1830 took over management of Le Globe, Sainte-Beuve was entrusted with drafting two manifestos, or “professions of faith,” and, although he was soon to be repelled by the sentimental excesses and intemperance of its leaders, he retained for 30 years a lingering sympathy for its vision of a technocratic society founded on the brotherhood of man.

Almost simultaneously, Sainte-Beuve came under the spell of a religious reformer and polemist, Félicité Robert de Lamennais, to whom for a time he looked for religious guidance. Lamennais was then the spiritual adviser of the wife of Victor Hugo, Adèle, with whom Sainte-Beuve in 1831 struck up a lasting but seemingly platonic relationship of great intensity. Many of the details of this shadowy affair are more or less accurately related in the critic’s privately printed volume of lyrics, Livre d’amour (1904), which was, however, not published in the lifetime of either of them.

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Early critical and historical writings

Besides Le Globe, Sainte-Beuve from 1831 contributed articles to another new periodical, the Revue des Deux Mondes. The success of his articles in the two reviews prompted him to collect them as Critiques et portraits littéraires, 5 vol. (1832–39). In these “portraits” of contemporaries, he developed a kind of critique, novel and much applauded at the time, of studying a well-known living writer in the round and entering into considerable biographical research to understand the mental attitudes of his subject.

In the early 1830s Sainte-Beuve was hampered by his dislike for the newly established regime of King Louis-Philippe, which had aroused his anger mainly by its brutal handling of the riots of 1832. He accordingly refused several educational posts that would have relieved his poverty, fearing that they might compromise his freedom of judgment.

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Sainte-Beuve’s friendship with Victor Hugo, which had already begun to cool in 1830, was almost extinguished by the anonymous publication of Sainte-Beuve’s autobiographical novel Volupté in 1834. In this book the hero Amaury’s hopeless love for the saintly and unapproachable Madame de Couaën reflects its author’s passion for Adèle Hugo. Volupté is an intensely introspective and troubling study of Amaury’s frustration, guilt, religious striving, and final renunciation of the flesh and the devil.

While continuing to produce intellectual “portraits” of his literary contemporaries, as further collected in Portraits contemporains (1846), Sainte-Beuve became a member of the circle presided over by Mme Récamier, the famous hostess, and the writer and politician François-René de Chateaubriand. Sainte-Beuve greeted the appearance of Chateaubriand’s memoirs with enthusiasm, though a decade and a half later he was to write an extensive and far more detached study of that writer and his literary circle, entitled Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l’empire (1861).

A softening of Sainte-Beuve’s attitude toward Louis-Philippe’s regime coincided in 1836 with an invitation from François Guizot, then minister of education, to accept a one-year appointment as secretary of a government commission studying the nation’s literary heritage. Guizot’s suggestion at that time that Sainte-Beuve demonstrate his eminence as a scholar by producing a major work led to Port-Royal, his single most famous piece of writing. In 1837 Sainte-Beuve accepted a year’s visiting professorship at the University of Lausanne to lecture on Port-Royal, the convent famous in the 17th century for advancing a highly controversial view of the doctrine of grace, loosely called Jansenism. For his lectures he produced Histoire de Port-Royal, 3 vol. (1840–48), which he revised over the next two decades. This monumental assemblage of scholarship, insights, and historical acumen—unique of its kind—covers the religious and literary history of France over half of the 17th century, as glimpsed through the internal records of Jansenism.

On completing his year in Lausanne, Sainte-Beuve returned to Paris, and in 1840 he was appointed to a post in the French Institute’s Mazarine Library, a position he held until 1848. He continued regular essay writing, and the first two volumes of Port-Royal had also been published when he was elected to the French Academy in 1844. By then he had already broken his earlier close links with the Romantics and was highly critical of what now appeared to him as the undisciplined excesses of that movement.

After the overthrow in 1848 of Louis-Philippe, Sainte-Beuve was not impressed by what he saw of revolutionary democracy. Unfairly accused in the republican press of accepting secret government funds for the repair of a chimney in his apartment, he resigned his library appointment in a fit of pique and settled for a year at the University of Liège (Belgium) as visiting professor. There he wrote his definitive—but unfinished—study of Chateaubriand and the birth of literary Romanticism and carried out research on medieval French literature.