Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin de

SAINTE-BEUVE, CHARLES-AUGUSTIN de. - French writer, b. at Boulogne-sur-Mer on 23 Dec. 1804, d. at Paris on 4 Oct. 1869, where he had lived almost all his life. He began with the study of medicine, which he soon abandoned for literature, drawn into the circle of the new Romantic ideas by his enthusiasm for V. Hugo, whom he exalted in some critical articles in the Globe as the standard-bearer of the new literary tendencies.

He made his debut as a critic (Tableau de la poésie française au XVIe siècle, 1827-28) and as a poet (Poésies de Joseph Delorme, 1829; Consolations, 1830). For a moment he was a Saint-Simonian under the influence of P. Leroux, then, after having defended eighteenth-century atheism, he came under the influence of Lamennais and of the abbé Gerbet. The echo of these spiritual conflicts is found in the novel Volupté (1834), with which, in practice, S.-B. bade farewell to his unfortunate career as a poet and novelist, in order to reserve for himself that of the critic. His activity was many-sided and innovative: against the dogmatism of the classicists, he raised the banner of liberal criticism, no longer based on moralistic or traditional schemas, but on historical and psychological research. Devoted to the idea of truth, in order to reach it he goes even beyond the aesthetic datum; the thought is his: « Le vrai, le vrai seul; et que le beau et le bien s'en tirent ensuite comme ils pensent ». But the more he exercises his curiosity and his spirit of inquiry on life and on history, the more he is compelled to set ideas aside and turn to the man, to the character, the only reality that truly interests him. Thus, in his most vast and organic work (Histoire de Port-Royal, 5 vols., Paris 1840-60), dedicated to the development of Jansenism, while he follows the thread of the historical narrative, he lingers in various ways on this or that figure, giving us in the end a gallery of characters whose physiognomy is portrayed in an unforgettable manner. Born of a course of lectures held at the University of Lausanne in 1837, and enriched by subsequent research, this history of Port-Royal belongs, without doubt, among the great historical monuments of the last century. S.-B.'s other unified work is that Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire (1860), also the fruit of a course of lectures held at Liège in 1848. S.-B. would no longer undertake any unified work. A professor at the Collège de France, then at the Ecole Normale, and appointed senator (1865), he remained for almost 40 years bound to literary journalism, passing from the Globe to the Constitutionnel, which published the series of the Causeries du lundi, from the Moniteur to the Temps. The articles were gradually gathered into numerous volumes: Portraits littéraires (1832-64); Portraits de femmes (1844); Portraits contemporains (1846); Causeries du lundi (1851-72); Nouveaux lundis (1863-70). Also to be remembered is the study on Virgil (1857). Like Balzac, to whom he can in a certain sense be compared for the fecundity of his human interests, he attempted to establish not a comédie, but a histoire naturelle des esprits, attempting to « répandre » - according to his expression - dans cette infinie variété de la biographie littéraire quelque chose de la vue lumineuse et de l'ordre qui préside à la distribution des familles naturelles en botanique et en zoologie. But the better part of S.-B.'s spirit was not to answer to such programmatic and scientific effort, for it always rebelled against cataloguings, the more it tended to recognize them as necessary. Therefore the vast work - to which must be added the posthumous Mes poisons (1896) and the very extensive Correspondance, still incomplete - remains entirely on the fertile and unforeseen ground of curiosity, of brilliant discovery, of critical and human enthusiasm.

The Histoire de Port-Royal was placed on the Index by decree of 13 Jan. 1845 for the false ideas that it expounds and defends against religion and the Catholic Church and for the false perspective under which it considers Jansenism, presenting it as an ascetic and moral reaction in favor of a return to the primitive Church.

Giacinto Spagnoletti