DE SANCTIS, FRANCESCO. - Literary critic and political figure, born in Morra Irpina (Avellino) on March 28, 1817, died in Naples on December 19, 1883. Initially directed toward the study of law in Naples, he instead ardently attended the private literary school of Basilio Puoti, later distancing himself from it as he moved from lexical purism to more lively methods, where words were valued as «living things» situated in their own historical context. With this orientation, he established his own school and taught at the Military College.
Meanwhile, he became passionate about new political ideas, following parliamentary developments in France through the press. In 1848, he participated in the Neapolitan uprising, inciting his students with the famous cry: «Are we an Arcadia? Literature is life.» After the Bourbon restoration, he was arrested in Calabria in December 1850 and imprisoned in Naples, in the Castel dell’Ovo, until 1853. There, he devoted himself to studying the German language, particularly to read the Romantics and Hegel’s works in the original; he also translated Rosenkranz’s manual on universal poetic history, which applied and popularized Hegelian aesthetic theories. From this point onward, though maintaining his originality in contrast to the rigid aesthetic system of the German philosopher, De Sanctis resolutely embraced idealistic historicism.
In 1853, exiled to Malta, he took refuge in Turin, where he taught at a girls’ college and wrote articles for the Turin press. In 1855, he vehemently opposed Muratist projects in the Kingdom of Naples as contrary to Italian ideals and interests. From 1856 to 1859, he taught Italian literature at the Polytechnic in Zurich and came into direct contact with German-speaking culture. In 1860, following political upheavals, he became governor of Avellino, then director of public education in the lieutenantate of Naples, and subsequently Minister of Public Education (March 22, 1861–March 5, 1862) of the new Kingdom of Italy.
He then devoted himself intensively to journalism. Believing that a strong opposition was necessary for the proper functioning of the constitutional state, he left the majority aligned with Cavour’s tradition and joined the left.
From 1871, he was professor of comparative literature at the University of Naples. After the left came to power (March 26–December 14, 1878; November 25, 1879–January 1, 1881), he served as minister twice more.
He was captivated by Machiavelli’s «effective truth» and interpreted Vico’s historical teaching along the lines of Hegelian immanentist schemas. Religious problems were entirely absorbed in his thought into a secular morality, and the Church, like many other figures of the Italian political Risorgimento, appeared to him primarily as a political institution in conflict with Italian unity.
De Sanctis is regarded as the leader of Italian aesthetic criticism, in contrast both to the preceding classical, rhetorical, and content-focused criticism and to the contemporary historical criticism, whose leading figure was Carducci, inspired by positivist philological rigor. Developing Foscolo’s method, which investigates the poetic biography of the author as the raison d’être of the work, De Sanctis studied the work as a «living individual», as a «whole» in which the organism of the universe is tested, so that all the values of the universe appear in the work insofar as they have organically become internal to II. On the other hand, he was influenced by the Risorgimento ideal of literary history as civic history, an ideal that inspired his *Storia della letteratura italiana* (1870), which has been described as a history of Italian culture.
This work, however, too simplistically contrasts a Middle Ages conceived in Enlightenment terms as a cultural period dominated by the tendency toward an abstract afterlife, with the Renaissance as the rediscovery of the sense of this-worldly reality, albeit with an hypertrophy of intellect at the expense of will and moral commitment to life. In the Seicento and in Arcadia, he saw poetry dissolving into generic musicality, while from Parini onward he saw the rebirth of human ideals that in Manzoni are perfectly «grounded in reality.» A Romantic prejudice remained in De Sanctis in the form of a certain taste for «passion,» a prejudice that led him to characteristic errors, such as his misunderstanding of the poetry of Lucia in *I promessi sposi* and his confusion, in the case of Segneri, between psychological sincerity and artistic sincerity.
De Sanctis nonetheless remains the greatest Romantic critic: his teaching is both civic education and education in autonomous artistic contemplation, the two aims reconciled in the conviction that there can be no great poetry without intense moral life. In his later years, however, he was captivated by the charm of evolutionary positivism, as evidenced by some of his final essays on Zola and on Darwinism in art (1877–83). Thus, the overall trajectory of his critical thought is far more complex than is suggested by Croce’s simplifications.
Alongside his critical works (*Saggi critici*, *Saggio sul Petrarca*, *Storia della letteratura italiana*, *Storia della letteratura italiana nel XIX sec.*, *Studio sul Leopardi*, etc.), his autobiographical writings (*La giovinezza*, *Lettere a Virginia*, *Un viaggio elettorale*) and his political writings stand out for their fresh style.
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**Notice — De Sanctis, a Mohammedan beggar in Peshawar (India).**
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