SAINTE-BEUVE, TAINE, sainte-beuve

SAINTE-BEUVE, TAINE,
AND RENAN

THE advent of the second Empire brought great changes
in French society. They had in turn their repercussion
in literature, where the exaggerations of Romanticism had already
become wearisome. The political idealists had also suffered
disenchantment in the failure of the Republic of 1848, founded
on the true, the beautiful, and the good, and the coming to naught
of the humanitarian sociological utopias. To many it seemed
best to throw off responsibility, and to settle down to a life of
materialism and of careless enjoyment under a benevolent despot.
This materialism Napoleon III undertook to foster as contributing to the splendor of his reign. The French, and particularly
the Parisians, were to be amused at all costs, and Napoleon III
did more than any other ruler to give Paris the reputation for
gaiety or frivolity which it has never lost, and which has perhaps
been its misfortune as much as its good luck. The city was
"beautified" and made more convenient, at the expense of much
of its picturesqueness, by the prodigious activity of Baron Hauss­
mann. The rebuilding made money flow into private pockets,
though at the cost of national indebtedness. Meanwhile, showy
court and popular entertainments, international exhibitions,
and the advent from abroad of pleasure-seeking millionaires or
"nabobs," of the type now called "rastaquouères," made the
Parisians more self-centred than ever, by convincing them that
the boulevards of the Ville-Lumière were the navel of the earth.1
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1 "La campagne, c'est bon pour les petits oiseaux," ( Nestor Roqueplan);
quoted by Arthur Meyer, Ce que mes yeux ont vu, p. 191.

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Publication Information: Book Title: A History of French Literature. Contributors: C. H. Conrad Wright - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1912. Page Number: 738.