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Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (December 23, 1804 – October 13, 1869) was a literary critic and one of the major figures of French literary history.

He was born in Boulogne, educated there, and studied medicine at the Collège Charlemagne in Paris (1824-27). In 1828, he served in the St. Louis Hospital. Beginning in 1824, he contributed literary articles, the Premier lundis of his collected Works, to the Globe newspaper, and in 1827 he came, through a review of Victor Hugo's Odes et ballads, into close association with that poet and the Cénacle. He became friendly with Hugo after publishing a favourable review of the author's work, later having an affair with Hugo's wife, which, naturally enough, led to their estrangement. Curiously, when Sainte-Beuve was made a member of the French Academy in 1845, it was upon Hugo that fell the ceremonial duty of giving the reception speech. It must have been a delicate moment!

During the turmoil of 1848 in Europe, he lectured at Liège on Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire. He returned to Paris in 1849 and began his series of topical columns, Causeries du lundi ('Monday Chats') in the Constitutionnel newspaper. When Louis Napoleon became Emperor he made Sainte-Beuve professor of Latin poetry at the Collège de France, but anti-Imperialist students hissed him and he resigned.

After several books of poetry and a couple of failed novels, Sainte-Beuve began to undertake literary research, of which the most important is Port-Royal, while also contributing to the Revue contemporaine

Port-Royal (1837-1859), probably Sainte-Beuve's masterpiece, is a huge history of the famous Jansenist abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs. This monumental work not only had an influence on what constitutes the history of religious belief, i.e. the method of how it is carried out, but also, of course, on the philosophy of history and on the history of esthetics, the whole episode of Jansenism being one of the richest and most important in French intellectual history.

He was made Senator in 1865, in which capacity he distinguished himself by his pleas for freedom of speech and of the press. However, it seemed Sainte-Beuve had a bit of a temper. According to Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, "Sainte-Beuve was a clever man with the temper of a turkey!" In his last years he was an acute sufferer and lived much in retirement.

Sainte-Beuve had vast knowledge, wonderful tact, and acute perception of what was vital and significant in his subjects. A selection of the Causeries in English appeared as English Portraits (New York, 1875) and another as Essays on Men and Women (London, 1890). E. J. Trechmann published a translation (eight volumes, New York, 1909-11).

One of Sainte-Beuve's critical contentions was that, in order to understand an artist and his work it was necessary to understand that artist's biography. Marcel Proust took issue with this notion and refuted it in a set of essays, Contre Sainte-Beuve ('Against Sainte-Beuve'). Ideas that Proust began to examine in these essays eventually developed into his approach to À la recherche du temps perdu.

• Tableau de la poésie française au seizième siècle (1828)
• Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829)
• Les Consolations (1830) (poetry)
• Volupté (1835) (novel)
• Port-Royal (1840–1859)
• Les Lundis (1851–1872)
• Causeries du lundi (1851–1862)
• Nouveaux Lundis (1863–1870)

• Works by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve at Project Gutenberg
• What Is a Classic? at Bartleby.com