Madame d'Arbouville died in 1830, and with her death the private ties which connected him with the old parties were severed. The democratic and socialistic instincts which had drawn him to Armand Carrel and the Saint-Simonists now drew him to the Second Empire. Like all the other men of 1830, with the solitary exception of Auguste Barbier, a poet of high principles but mediocre talent, Sainte-Beuve shared to a certain extent the popular enthusiasm for Napoleon; to him the Empire was an imperialism which had its support in the people and was inimical to the domination of the bourgeoisie; and now, in his famous and much abused article, Les Regrets, he not merely proclaimed his allegiance to Napoleon III., but wrote of Orleanists and Legitimists with a strangely oblivious scorn. He was a regular contributor to the Constitutionnel, then for a time wrote in the Moniteur officiel, afterwards resuming his connection with the Constitutionnel. During the last years of his life he wrote for the Opposition newspaper, the Temps. He was evidently perfectly honest; it was not for the sake of any advantage to himself that he changed his opinions; he simply now, as always, involuntarily allowed himself to be influenced—with the result of a clear gain of insight and understanding for his future criticism. He came very little into personal contact with the Emperor; in politics he was an adherent of the "Left"; Princess Mathilde and Prince Napoleon treated him as an honoured friend, and he turned the Princess's friendship to account in the most disinterested manner, namely, in the furtherance of unobtrusive, genuinely benevolent schemes.
It was not till the last stage of his career that Sainte-Beuve's talent attained to its full development. The chances are that an uncritical author will deteriorate as he grows older, but that a critic will improve; Sainte-Beuve improved year by year, to the very end of his life. The absolute truthfulness, which was naturally as marked a feature of his character as his industry, but which had often been held in check by one consideration or another, allowed itself ever freer play; and the capacity for work remained as great as in his youth. Sainte-Beuve's writings fill fifty volumes, and in all these volumes there is not a careless line, and inaccuracies are of the rarest occurrence. But it was not until the last stage of his career that he was courageous enough to give perfectly free expression to his real opinions on religious and philosophical subjects. He now eased his mind of everything that he had repressed since the youthful days when he studied the philosophers of the eighteenth century. His want of appreciation of Balzac and Beyle, the one a man of a much coarser, the other of a much more eccentric nature than his own, must not render us oblivious of the courage and determination with which he championed the rising generation of French authors, even such writers as Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, whom he did not altogether understand. Nor ought it to be forgotten that he refused to write an article on Napoleon's Vie de César, and that in the Senate he distinguished himself as the solitary but determined opponent of clericalism.
In March 1867 he defended Renan and his Vie de Jésus. In June of the same year, when it was proposed (apropos of a complaint from the magnates of the town of Saint-Etienne) to exclude from the public libraries accessible to the people all literature objectionable to the clergy, including the works of Voltaire, Rabelais, &c., he was the solitary member of the servile, priest-ridden Senate who boldly championed intellectual liberty and warmly defended the honour of French literature. The students, who in 1855 had hissed him as an Imperialist, now honoured him with a deputation and a banquet. The lying rumours spread by the clerical press on the subject of a small dinner-party which he inadvertently happened to give on Good Friday, 1868, represented him in the light of an antichrist, of a reincarnated Voltaire; and when in May 1869 he made a last effort, and with a weak voice but stout heart spoke in the Senate in defence of liberty of the press and against the Catholic Universities Bill, his name became a war-cry, became the symbol of free thought. In January 1869 he renounced his allegiance to Imperialism. In October of the same year he died, after five years of illness and a long period of terrible suffering, borne with stoic fortitude.
Sainte-Beuve, with his exceptionally impressionable nature, underwent a whole series of religious, literary, and political transformations. These constituted the school he had to pass through to become the founder of modern criticism. Despite all his changes of opinion, we are safe in asserting that he was honest. Private interest can have had little power in great things over a man with a nature as truthful as that which reveals itself in his writings. Truth and honesty are, as Franklin says, like fire and flame; they have a certain natural brightness which cannot be counterfeited.
[1] See Sainte-Beuve's article on Alfred de Vigny's reception into the Academy, and also the letter, published by himself, which was written to him by a lady (Madame Hugo) on the occasion of the same event.
[2] _Lettres parisiennes_, i v. 170.
[3] He was accused of having accepted bribes from the secret fund of Louis Philippe's government. What lay at the foundation of the charge proved to have been a grant of a sum of—one hundred francs—for the repairing of a stove in the Mazarin Library, of which Sainte-Beuve was librarian.