Girardin, FRANÇOIS SAINT-MARC

Girardin, FRANÇOIS SAINT-MARC, a French journalist and professor, was born at Paris in 1801, studied at the Collège Henri IV. with brilliant success, and in 1827 obtained a mastership in the Collège Louis-le-Grand. After two visits to Germany he published a report on the state of education there, and Notices politiques et littéraires sur l'Allemagne; in 1834 he was called to the chair of Literature at the Sorbonne, and became leader-writer for the Journal des Débats, distinguishing himself under the July monarchy as a ready combatant and resolute enemy to the dynastic and democratic opposition. He was elected a member of the Academy in 1844. His parliamentary career (1834-48) was not noteworthy; and under the Second Empire he retained his chair at the Sorbonne, where his lectures, following the orthodox lines of criticism, were very popular. He became a member of the National Assembly in 1871, and died near Paris, 11th April 1873. Besides his numerous contributions to the Débats, some collected in Essais de Littérature (2 vols. 1845), he published several large works, among them his Cours de Littérature dramatique (1843; 11th ed. 1875-77), being his sixty-three lectures for a period of twenty years, and Souvenirs et Réflexions politiques d'un Journaliste (1859). See Tamisier, Saint-Marc Girardin, Étude littéraire (1876).