Works of Stendhal

During Stendhal’s lifetime, his reputation was largely based on his books dealing with the arts and with tourism (a term he helped introduce in France), and on his political writings and conversational wit. His unconventional views, his hedonistic inclinations tempered by a capacity for moral and political indignation, his prankish nature and his hatred of boredom—all constituted for his contemporaries a blend of provocative contradictions. But the more authentic Stendhal is to be found elsewhere, and above all in a cluster of favourite ideas: the hostility to the concept of “ideal beauty,” the notion of modernity, and the exaltation of energy, passion, and spontaneity. His personal philosophy, to which he himself gave the name of “Beylisme” (after his real family name, Beyle) stressed the importance of the “pursuit of happiness” by combining enthusiasm with rational skepticism, lucidity with willful surrender to lyric emotions. “Beylisme,” as he understood it, meant cultivating a private sensibility while developing the art of hiding and protecting it.

It was in his novels above all, and in his autobiographical writings (the interchange between these two literary activities remains a constant feature in his case), that Stendhal’s thoughts are expressed most fully. But even these texts remain baffling. Their prosaic and ironic style at first glance hides the intensity of Stendhal’s vision and the profundity of his views.

Armance (1827) is a somewhat enigmatic novel in which the hero’s sexual impotence is symbolic of France’s conformist and oppressive society after the Restoration. The antagonism between the individual and society is the central subject of The Red and the Black. This realistic novel depicts the French social order under the Second Restoration (1815–30). The story centres on a carpenter’s son, Julien Sorel, a sensitive and intelligent but extremely ambitious youth who, after seeing no road to power in the military after Napoleon’s fall, endeavours to make his mark in the church. Viewing himself as an unsentimental opportunist, he employs seduction as a means to advancement, first with Madame de Rênal, whose children he is employed to tutor. After then spending some time in a seminary, he leaves the provinces and goes to Paris, where he seduces the aristocratic Mathilde, the daughter of his second employer. The book ends with Julien’s execution for the attempted murder of Madame de Rênal after she had jeopardized his projected marriage to Mathilde.

The title of The Red and the Black apparently refers to both the tensions in Julien’s character and to the conflicting choice he is faced with in his quest for success: the army (symbolized by the colour red) or the church (symbolized by the colour black). A variety of other polarities tempt the ambitious young hero as he sets out with fierce determination to rise above his lowly condition: the provinces or Paris, tender love or sexual conquest, happiness through ambition and achievement or happiness through reverie and the cultivation of selfhood. Careerism, political opportunism, the climate of fear and denunciation in Restoration France, a critique of bourgeois materialistic values—all these are dealt with in a subtle and incisive manner in a novel that is based on a newspaper account of a contemporary crime of passion. Julien Sorel, the central character, is a study in psychological complexity who both attracts and repels the reader. Timid and aggressive, sensitive and ruthless, vulnerable and supremely ambitious, Julien ultimately comes to realize, in prison, the vanity of worldly success and the superior value of love and a rich inner life. The Red and the Black also offers delicate portraits of two feminine figures, the maternal Madame de Renal and the romantic young aristocrat Mathilde de La Mole. At every point, the novel challenges conventions and denounces the sham of societal values. As a literary achievement, it is remarkable for its blend of comedy, satire, and ironic lyricism.

The uncompleted Lucien Leuwen (1894) is perhaps the most autobiographical of Stendhal’s novels. The memory of Métilde Dembowski hovers over the relationship between the young hero of the title and Madame de Chasteller. This biting fictional assessment of French society and politics during the reign of Louis-Philippe also describes a basic father-son conflict that corresponds to the conflicting ethos of two distinct historical periods. As it stands, despite its imperfections and uncompleted form, Lucien Leuwen contains some of Stendhal’s finest pages of psychological and social analysis, as well as delicate evocations of a young lover’s emotional states.

The Charterhouse of Parma is Stendhal’s other masterpiece. It fuses elements of Renaissance chronicles, fictional and historical sources, recent historical events (the Napoleonic regime in Italy, the Battle of Waterloo, the Austrian occupation of Milan), and an imaginative, almost dreamlike transposition of contemporary reality into fictional terms. The novel is set mainly in the court of Parma, Italy, in the early 19th century. Fabrice del Dongo, a young aristocrat and ardent admirer of Napoleon, goes to Paris to join the French army and is present at the Battle of Waterloo. He returns thereafter to Parma and enters the church for worldly advantage under the sponsorship of his aunt, the Duchess de Sanseverina, who is the mistress of the chief minister of Parma, Count Mosca. Following an affair with an actress, Fabrice kills a rival, is imprisoned, escapes, and is pardoned. In prison Fabrice falls in love with Clélia Conti, the daughter of the citadel’s governor. He continues his affair with her after she marries, and he becomes a high-ranking ecclesiastic and an admired preacher. The death of their child and then of Clélia herself causes Fabrice to retire to the Carthusian monastery, or charterhouse, of Parma, where he dies.

The incongruous yet always harmonious combination of lyricism and high comedy, of realism and dreamlike atmosphere, of The Charterhouse of Parma allows the author to caricaturize the petty tyranny of post-Napoleonic Europe, to question public morality, and to assert the prerogatives of love’s follies. There are subtly drawn portraits of the naive and idealistic young Fabrice del Dongo (notably at the Battle of Waterloo); of his courageous and passionate aunt, the Duchess de Sanseverina; of her lover, the benevolent Machiavellian statesman Count Mosca; and of the young and innocent Clélia Conti, the daughter of Fabrice’s jailer, who falls in love with the handsome prisoner. Passion in all its forms is the novel’s recurrent theme. And once again, the young hero learns the deeper lessons of spirituality, love, and freedom within the liberating confines of a prison cell.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of The Charterhouse of Parma is its highly sophisticated psychology. Rejecting traditional notions of a fixed and determined psychological makeup, Stendhal never defines his characters and instead depicts individuals in the process of becoming. His literary devices (his authorial comments, the improvisational tone of his narration) seem to grant his characters the freedom to discover themselves. Various forms of freedom are Stendhal’s ultimate preoccupation, which probably explains why he repeatedly explores the ambiguities of the prison image. True freedom, in the world of Stendhal, reveals itself in the context of the cell, once confinement becomes the symbol of the inner world of dreams and longings. His novels thus illustrate metaphorically the fundamental conflict between the demands of society and those of the individual.

Stendhal’s autobiographical writings, Souvenirs d’égotisme (1892; Memoirs of an Egotist) and Vie de Henri Brulard (1890; The Life of Henri Brulard), are among his most original achievements. Behind their vivacity and charming digressions, they reveal the uneasiness of a tender-hearted and fundamentally insecure human being wearing various masks. The Life of Henri Brulard in particular is a masterpiece of ironic self-searching and self-creation, in which the memories of childhood are closely interwoven with the liberating joy of writing.

Stendhal’s writings and his personality were marked by a striking independence of mind. He was a romantic who kept his distance from Romanticism, an antiauthoritarian with a nostalgia for the pre-Revolutionary world, a dreamer and tender-hearted enthusiast who passed himself off as a cynic. His writings combine lyrical fervour with a rationalist’s passion for analysis. Stendhal’s contemporaries, however, found it difficult to appreciate his nimble and ironic sensibility. The novelist Honoré de Balzac, in a famous article on The Charterhouse of Parma published in La Revue parisienne in 1840, was the only one to recognize his genius as a novelist. Stendhal’s literary fame came late in the 19th century, and this posthumous fame has steadily grown since then, largely because of the devotion of “Beylistes” or “Stendhalians” who have made of him a true cult. Stendhal has now come to be recognized as one of the great French masters of the novel in the 19th century.