The French Ideal: Matthew Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, and Renan

Abstract

Examines the significant but conflicted roles that Sainte-Beuve and Renan played in Arnold’s construction of France as a counterpoint to the Philistinism of English cultural and intellectual life. While Sainte-Beuve epitomized the value of persuasion in criticism, Renan represented the advanced critical spirit that enabled the French to face the challenges of the future with a clarity and candor that England lacked. Examines Arnold’s religious criticism and his use of Renan’s racial theories to critique Arnold’s “true life’s work: the attenuation of the ‘Hebraic’ element in English cultural and political life, and in the Protestant Christianity that underpinned it.” Offers a nuanced study of Renan’s and Arnold’s racial theories and concludes by examining the reasons why Arnold’s “enchantment with French culture [came] to an end, or rather fracture[ed] into a combination of censoriousness about the present condition of France and nostalgia for a lost and still idealized past” in the wake of France’s catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.