Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin

(1804-1869)

   writer and literary critic

   Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was educated in Paris. At age 20 he was a journalist for the Globe, a philosophic, literary, and political newspaper founded in 1824, one of the opposition newspapers during the restoration. Already a literary critic, he became friends with victor hugo and a member of the cénacle group of romantics. In his Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre au XVIe siècle (where he notably discovered pierre de ronsard), he described romanticism as the continuation of a national tradition beginning in the Renaissance. He published a work that mixed prose and verse, Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829), followed by a collection of poems, Les Consolations (1830), in which his style can be seen as a precursor to that of charles baudelaire and paul verlaine. Disappointed by the lack of success of his writings and of his novel Volupté (1834), Sainte-Beuve turned to the study of literary history and published Port-Royal (1840-59), a serried critique on jansenism, and later Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire (1860) before collecting his articles in a series, Critiques et portraits (1836-46) in the Causeries du Lundi (1851-62), followed by the Nouveaux Lundis (1863-69). At the time of his death, he left important correspondences and personal notes, Mes poisons (published 1926). sainte-Beuve wrote about all literary genres as he sought to replace unqualified subjectivity with precise and solid scholarship and a sensitivity and intu-itiveness for his subject matter, which he then introduced to the literary criticism of his day. widely admired, especially because he changed the techniques of French literary criticism, his methodology was severely criticized, however, by marcel proust (Contre Sainte-Beuve). Sainte-Beuve was elected to the Académie Française in 1843.