Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 473-492 [Access article in PDF] Sainte-Beuve between Renaissance and Enlightenment Paul Nelles For a period of eight years in the 1840s Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve held a post of conservateur at the Bibliothèque Mazarine. 1 Each day he traversed the gallery of hommes illustres which decorated the reading room. This held busts of major figures from history and literature. In one of his portraits littéraires from these years Sainte-Beuve pretended to derive inspiration from this legion of intellectual heroes. Among the busts stood one of Gabriel Naudé, Mazarin's first librarian in the 1640s. Sainte-Beuve dreamt, he wrote at the time, of placing Naudé's bust beside that of Charron, or even better, between those of Montaigne and Bayle. Through Naudé, Sainte-Beuve avowed to discover the genius loci of the Bibliothèque Mazarine. Yet whatever local reasons there were for the presence of Naudé's bust at the Mazarine, Sainte-Beuve set out in this essay to find a place for Naudé among the pantheon of French thinkers on his own merits. Such playfulness with a biographical conceit of both the literary and visual arts belied serious purpose. If it fuelled Sainte-Beuve's claim to have found in the seventeenth-century thinker "un sceptique moraliste sous masque d'érudit," 2 it was also expressive of a critical campaign devoted to the revision of a received tradition of French thought and learning. Sainte-Beuve [End Page 473] juxtaposed a seventeenth-century tradition of "literary" skepticism independent of formal philosophy with an Enlightenment inheritance he was eager to disown. Central to this task was a disciplinary turn away from philosophical inquiry and the history of philosophy to literary history. This in turn entailed a full embrace of the shadowy inhabitants of the margins of pre-Enlightenment thought from the late Renaissance to Bayle.Sainte-Beuve's discovery of seventeenth-century precursors, as he clearly regarded them, was first sketched in a series of articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes in the 1830s and 1840s. Naudé was thus somewhat more than a random sighting in Sainte-Beuve's critical galaxy. Together with Bayle and a handful of other figures Naudé occupied a key position within the constellation of thinkers Sainte-Beuve charted in plotting a course for the practice of literary history and criticism in the middle years of the nineteenth century. The context of the development of Sainte-Beuve's enterprise illuminates an intriguing aspect of the historiography of skepticism in modern intellectual history. While functioning in part to legitimize literary history as a discipline, the circumstances of Sainte-Beuve's undertaking are rooted in wider contemporary currents of historiography and the philosophy of history. There is, then, a crucial disjuncture between the tradition Sainte-Beuve set out to describe and that established in the twentieth century under the rubric of libertinage. Sainte-Beuve did not seek to establish seventeenth-century origins for Enlightenment free thought. Rather, he turned to the seventeenth century in an effort to exhume a tradition of criticism and literary skepticism with which, on his account, the Enlightenment had openly broken. 3Sainte-Beuve's interest in Naudé, Bayle, and other figures derived from a need to differentiate the orientation and method of literary history from contemporary mechanisms for assessing the significance of France's intellectual and cultural heritage. For all concerned this was a heritage unquestioningly viewed through the prism of the political events of 1789 and their aftermath. According to Sainte-Beuve, la critique emerged in the seventeenth century with thinkers such as Charron, Naudé, and Bayle. From his standpoint, the significance of such figures inhered entirely in their pre-Enlightenment status. They vividly illustrate how the Enlightenment had deviated from a well-established tradition of la critique. The degree to which they served as a foil to the Enlightenment becomes evident when contrasted with Sainte-Beuve's characterization of mainstream Enlightenment figures. [End Page 474]For Sainte-Beuve and his contemporaries literature was not yet restricted to a narrow canon...