Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve - Paris, France
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N 48° 50.299 E 002° 19.716
31U E 450733 N 5409699
Sainte-Beuve is often described as the Father of Modern Criticism.
Waymark Code: WMD248
Location: Île-de-France, France
Date Posted: 11/08/2011
Views: 12
The gravesite of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve is located in Montparnesse Cemetery in Paris. Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869) was a French literary critic. Victor Hugo gave the reception speech when Saint-Beuve was inducted into the French Academy in 1845. In addition to being a critic, he also authored a collection of poems and a partly autobiographical novel, "Volupté".
Wikipedia (
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"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. He continued to contribute to La Revue contemporaine.
Port-Royal (1837-1859), probably Sainte-Beuve's masterpiece, is an exhaustive history of the Jansenist abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs. It not only influenced the history of religious belief, i.e., the methodology of such research, but also the philosophy of history and the history of esthetics.
He was made Senator in 1865, in which capacity he distinguished himself by his pleas for freedom of speech and of the press. 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.
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"). Proust developed the ideas first voiced in those essays in À la recherche du temps perdu."
The gravesite has a bust of him (unflattering, it must be said) atop a column which has a carved cloth draped around it and flowing onto the horizontal portion of the grave. The grave is only marked "Sainte-Beuve".