The French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), who developed a very personal technique of literary criticism, remains the most important literary arbiter of his century.

Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve went to Paris in 1824 to study medicine. But by 1826 he was contributing actively to the Globe, where an article favorable to Victor Hugo won him the young poet's confidence and a place in his Cénacle, or coterie, among the most innovative literary talents of the time. Saint-Beuve's Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au XVI sie‧cle (1828) not only rehabilitated the neglected Pléiade poets (Pierre Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay) but laid a claim to respectability for his contemporaries, "romantic" descendants of those forgotten giants of lyricism.

Saint-Beuve's own elegiac efforts in Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829) and Consolations (1830) enhanced a prestige among his peers that was not echoed by the public; his unhappy affair with Hugo's wife, Ade‧le (allusively chronicled in his novel Volupté, 1834), led to an open break with his most ardent supporters and initiated a period (mid-1830s) of spiritual upheaval during which he sought guidance in Saint-Simonism and even in the renewed Catholicism of Félicité Robert de Lamennais. His interest in the Jansenist community of Port Royal dates from these years, although he continued producing critical articles for the Revue des deux mondes, which would be collected in Portraits littéraires, Portraits de femmes, and Portraits contemporains. The Histoire de Port-Royal (3 vols., 1840-1848; originally a lecture series given in Lausanne in 1837-1838) remains his most important single contribution, however, and is often termed the most valuable and original work of literary criticism in the 19th century. Here his ideal role as "naturalist of human spirits," seeking to classify by "families" and "generations" those writers whose interior lives he deliberately pursues, is clearly expressed. Sainte-Beuve sought here, as he would throughout his career, that "relative truth of each thing" by which literature remained for him a domain of vital and infinite variety.

The second half of Sainte-Beuve's career (1849-1869), marked by a hasty and widely criticized rallying to the regime of Napoleon III, saw his elevation to a place in the French Academy and finally (1865) a seat in the Senate. These were his most productive years, during which the Causeries du lundi ("Monday Chats" in the Moniteur) regularly confirmed his official status as arbiter of national taste under the Second Empire. Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire (1861; dating from a course given at Lie‧ge in 1848-1849) stands with Port-Royal as a major, unitary contribution. The Lundis and Nouveaux Lundis, however, best reveal that shifting, curious, always allusive talent with which he attempted to join "physiology" and "poetry" in an art of evocation and critical appraisal. Sainte-Beuve, by abandoning the dogmatic evaluations of his predecessors, made of criticism an inductive process based on detailed examination of the author's character, his life, and so his literary work. This historical, biographical method established Sainte-Beuve as the first "modern" literary critic.

Further Reading

There is no complete edition of Sainte-Beuve's works in either French or English, although many of his works have been translated. Two particularly useful critical biographies and appraisals are Harold Nicolson, Sainte-Beuve (1957), and Andrew George Lehmann, Sainte-Beuve: A Portrait of the Critic, 1804-42 (1962).

For more information on Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, visit Britannica.com.

Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin (1804-69). French poet, novelist, and critic. Even before the publication of Contre Sainte-Beuve, where Proust used him as a straw man in order to define his own anti-intellectual conception of art, Sainte-Beuve had become the scapegoat for all the guilt of literary criticism, and he remains best remembered for his underestimation of Balzac, Stendhal, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, to whom he preferred Béranger, Ernest Feydeau, and many minor writers.

Notorious mostly as a critic—the ‘prince of critics’ and ‘uncle Beuve’, an academician in the July Monarchy and a senator of the Second Empire—he was also, and before this, a poet. Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829), where he poses as the anonymous editor of a dead poet, is marked by a rare realism, for instance in ‘Les Rayons jaunes’, and introduces day-to-day city life into lyric poetry. But Sainte-Beuve never attained the reputation of Lamartine and Hugo, whose glory would always stand in his way. He had come to Paris in 1818 and studied medicine, but quickly turned to literature. His early articles on Hugo and in defence of Romanticism, in Le Globe (1827), introduced him into the Cénacle. He became a friend of Hugo while falling in love with the latter's wife, Adèle. His two other volumes of poetry, Consolations (1830) and Pensées d'août (1837), parallel the evolution of his feelings for Hugo, from ambivalence to hostility after their break in 1835. In 1834 he published his only novel, Volupté, a first-person narrative, where autobiographical elements abound.

Disappointed by the reception of his creative works, Sainte-Beuve later confined himself to criticism and created the 19th-c. genre through numerous articles in Le Constitutionnel, Le Moniteur, and Le Temps, as well as lectures in Lausanne (1837-8), Liège (1848-9), and the École Normale Supérieure (1858-61), all collected in volumes. His Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au XVIe siècle (1828) re-evaluates the Pléiade and uses it to justify Romanticism; Critiques et portraits littéraires (1836-46, devoted to 17th-c. writers), Portraits de femmes (1844), and Portraits contemporains (1846) develop the biographical genre, explaining, through sympathy, the inspiration of literature by the life of authors. Port-Royal (1840-59), expanding on the lectures in Lausanne, and Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l'Empire (1861), based on the lectures in Liège, trace the broader picture of a period and milieu. In the almost 500 articles collected in Causeries du lundi (1851-2) and Nouveaux lundis (1863-70), Sainte-Beuve touched upon a great variety of literature, mostly French, but also classical and foreign. As distinct from the earlier ‘portrait’, the ‘causerie’ is more of an essay and leads to a judgement. Sainte-Beuve combines the criticism of a journalist and a professor; he still protests against theory and systems but, perhaps influenced by Taine's determinism, he claims to create a ‘histoire naturelle des esprits’.

Sceptical, disillusioned, politically ambiguous—students interrupted his lectures at the Collège de France in 1855 in protest against Napoleon III, but massively followed his funeral after he had become a liberal senator—Sainte-Beuve has succeeded in attracting widespread hostility, perhaps because he dared write on the literature of his own time, a risk that academic criticism was soon to avoid. His intimate notebooks, posthumously published in Mes poisons (1926) and Le Cahier vert (1974), should allow us to reappraise a writer to whom history has been unfair.

[Antoine Compagnon]

Bibliography

• J. Cabanis, Pour Sainte-Beuve (1987)
• M. Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays (tr. J. Sturrock, 1988)

(shärl ōgüstăN' săNt-böv) , 1804–69, French literary historian and critic. The first major professional literary critic, he developed the art of appreciating literature through psychological and biographical insight. He studied medicine but abandoned it for literature, and began contributing reviews to the Globe in 1824. After attempts at writing poetry, Vie, poésies, et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829), and a semiautobiographical psychological novel, Volupté (1834), which was inspired by his love for Mme Victor Hugo, he turned to criticism. His weekly articles in reviews were collected as the Causeries du lundi (15 vol., 1851–62, tr. Monday Chats, 1877). He considered his great work to be Port-Royal (1840–59), taken in part from his lectures in 1837 at Lausanne. This work, comprised of six books, is a history not only of Jansenism but of a whole section of 17th-century French society. Made a member of the French Academy in 1844, Sainte-Beuve taught (1848–49) at Liège, and in 1857 he became a professor at the École normale supérieure. He was appointed senator in 1865. His vast literary output reveals a critic of great taste, vast memory and learning, and a passion for truth in judgment.

Quotes:

"There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age."

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