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3. God and the Historian: Sainte-Beuve's Port-Royal
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1. Saint-Beuve, Port-Royal (hereafter P-R), 2:34. 2. Sainte-Beuve, Correspondance générale, vol. 5, part 1, 193–94, 12 July 1843; quotation at 193. “Port-Royal has come into fashion,” as a topic that “reverberates everywhere,” noted Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1848.1 His assessment mixed surprise, gratiWcation , and annoyance. He had begun his own book on the topic in complete isolation, he claimed, believing that the public would Wnd Jansenist practices strange and repellant. In fact the public responded with enthusiastic interest. The 1840 publication of Port-Royal’s Wrst volume (there would eventually be Wve) led quickly to Sainte-Beuve’s election to the Académie française, and by 1843 he was complaining about imitators. In the draft of a letter that was apparently never sent, he accused Victor Cousin of unacknowledged scholarly borrowing on the topic, “behavior that, despite all I owe you, I cannot help but Wnd distasteful and improper.”2 3 god and the historian: sainte-beuve’s PORT-ROYAL Sainte-Beuve himself took the project seriously enough to devote twenty years of mature scholarly e¤ort to it, and it was by far his most important work. When its last volume Wnally appeared, in 1859, it had already been recognized as one of the century’s literary landmarks. Port-Royal is a complex book that deals with an overlapping set of themes. It centers on the convent of Port-Royal itself, whose nuns from the 1620s on sought to establish newly severe forms of Catholic devotion , and it follows the enthusiasm that these e¤orts evoked in Parisian high society and the suspicion with which the government viewed them, suspicion that eventually led Louis XIV’s government to disperse the nuns and raze the convent’s buildings. But Sainte-Beuve was as much concerned with the cultural background to these struggles as with the nuns’ own story. His book thus explores the theological guidance that they sought from the Belgian bishop Jansenius and the French abbé SaintCyran , who together developed a theology (eventually labeled Jansenism) that emphasized human depravity and divine predestination and denied individuals a role in achieving their salvation. It traces the intellectual life that grew up around the convent, as Wgures such as Blaise Pascal found themselves attracted to its combination of practical and intellectual rigor; and it compares their ideas with those of other seventeenth-century intellectuals , both religious thinkers (for example, François de Sales) and secular (Michel de Montaigne and François de la Rochefoucauld). Because of its range of topics, in the end Port-Royal had come to constitute the nineteenth century’s most substantial e¤ort to come to terms with early modern culture and the society that produced it. At the same time, Sainte-Beuve’s comments and complaints draw our attention to some historical problems surrounding that encounter. Why did a topic of apparently marginal signiWcance attract such passionate engagement, from both Sainte-Beuve and his audience? What concerns did the nineteenth century’s interest in Port-Royal, Jansenism, and the broader currents of seventeenth-century piety express? How did nineteenth-century intellectuals deWne their relationship to these early modern ancestors, whose values di¤ered so sharply from their own, and what did that understanding suggest for nineteenth-century historical practice? In previous chapters, I have argued that Sainte-Beuve played a central role in the development of nineteenth-century historical thought, with regard to both the century’s interest in social history and its understanding of French chronology . For these reasons his impact on twentieth- century historical thinking matches that of more commonly discussed historians like Leopold 78 lost worlds [3.237.186.170] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:14 GMT) von Ranke and Jules Michelet. Considerable importance thus attaches to understanding the explicit arguments and broader implications of his most important historical work, a work to which he devoted the central years of his career. I shall suggest that a great deal was in fact at stake in Port-Royal, and that the text should be read as part of an e¤ort to deWne the nature of modernity itself.3 Like others of his generation, Sainte-Beuve had to cope with the intellectual fallout of the French Revolution of 1789. Within the new world that the Revolution had made, the historical study of religious practices o¤ered a way to think about the distance between the Old Regime and the new. The history...