In brief
Julien Sorel is eighteen or nineteen, the bookish son of a sawmill owner in a small town in the Franche-Comté, and he hates almost everyone he knows. He is clever, proud, physically slight and full of Napoleon. He becomes tutor to the mayor’s children and the lover of the mayor’s wife, then a seminarian in Besançon, then secretary to a great nobleman in Paris and the lover of his daughter. On the brink of a title, a commission and a brilliant marriage, he goes back to his home town and shoots his first mistress during Mass. He is tried and guillotined.
Told like that it is a crime story, and Stendhal took it from one. But the book’s real material is the inside of Julien’s head: the calculations, the panics, the rehearsed speeches, the sudden floods of feeling that wreck the plans. It is one of the first novels to make consciousness itself the main event, and it is also a cold, exact satire of France in the last years of the Bourbon kings.
The argument
The novel’s central claim is historical. Under Napoleon a carpenter’s son could become a marshal; after 1815 that road is shut, and the only career open to talent without birth is the Church. Julien works this out in ch. 5, watching a young vicar push an old magistrate around. In the time of Bonaparte, he reasons, military glory was the fashion; “Nowadays, one sees priests of forty with salaries of 100,000 francs.” His conclusion is three words long: “I must be a priest.” The title is usually read in these terms, red for the army’s uniform and black for the cassock, though Stendhal never explained it and the roulette table, rouge et noir, has its supporters too.
So Julien becomes a hypocrite on principle. He learns the Latin Bible by heart to impress the mayor’s dinner table (ch. 6), hides a portrait of Napoleon in a mattress (ch. 9), and treats every human contact as a battle to be won. The book’s second claim is psychological, and it cuts against the first. Julien’s plans rarely work. What carries him upward is what he despises in himself: the spontaneous feeling, the flash of temper, the pride that will not bow. Madame de Rênal loves him for the boy he is when he forgets to perform. The marquis likes him for his bluntness. Mathilde wants him because he seems dangerous.
The last movement turns the argument inside out. In prison, with no career left to plan, Julien stops acting. He sees that the woman he shot is the only person he has loved, and that the ambition he served was borrowed from books and from other people’s envy. With Madame de Rênal visiting him in his cell he says, “I shall never have been so happy” (ch. 73). The book does not call this redemption. It lets the guillotine follow anyway.
The shape of the book
There are two books, the second somewhat longer, set in three places. Book One is the provinces: Verrières (ch. 1–23), a town run by a mayor who builds walls and a poorhouse director who does well out of the poor, and then the seminary at Besançon (ch. 24–30), a school for informers. Book Two (from ch. 31) is Paris and the Hôtel de la Mole, and its last eleven chapters return to Franche-Comté for the shooting, the prison and the trial.
The two halves rhyme. Each has a love affair begun as a campaign: Julien takes Madame de Rênal’s hand in the dark because he has sworn to do it when the clock strikes ten, and when she leaves her hand in his he feels mainly relief: “He had accomplished his duty, and a heroic duty too” (ch. 9). Each affair has a ladder at a window, at Verrières in ch. 30 and at the Hôtel de la Mole at one in the morning in ch. 46. Each has a priest who protects him, Chélan and then Pirard, and a priest who works against him, from the spies of the seminary to the Abbé de Frilair, who stands behind the trial.
The ending is famously abrupt. Madame de Rênal’s letter to the marquis, written at her confessor’s urging, destroys Julien’s marriage in a page (ch. 65). He hurries to Verrières by post-chaise, buys pistols, and the shooting takes one sentence: “he aimed a pistol shot at her, and missed her: he aimed a second shot, she fell.” Readers have argued ever since about whether it is motivated. Stendhal gives no explanation because Julien has none; the act comes from below the level where he makes plans, which is the point the whole book has been making.
The voice
Stendhal’s narrator is quick, dry and openly present. He interrupts to apologise for his hero, to mock the provinces, to defend himself against the charge of immorality. The best known of these asides comes in ch. 49: “a novel is a mirror which goes out on a highway. Sometimes it reflects the azure of the heavens, sometimes the mire of the pools of mud on the way.” If you see mud, blame the road and the inspector of roads, not the mirror. In ch. 52 he breaks off to argue with his publisher: politics in a novel, the author says, “is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert”. The publisher answers that characters who avoid politics “cease to be Frenchmen of 1830”, and the chapter goes ahead.
Against that public voice runs a private one. Much of the book is spent inside Julien’s head, in his own words, as he plans, misreads and reproaches himself. Stendhal follows the swings of a mind from moment to moment, the way a triumph turns to suspicion in the space of a paragraph, more closely than any novelist before him; this is the main reason he is called the founder of the psychological novel. The irony comes from the gap between the two voices. We hear Julien think he is Napoleon, and the narrator lets us see a nervous boy.
The style is deliberately plain. Stendhal later told Balzac that while writing The Charterhouse of Parma he read pages of the Civil Code to catch the right tone, and the prose here avoids Romantic colour. Each chapter carries an epigraph, from Byron’s Don Juan, Shakespeare, Schiller, Hobbes; many of the attributions are false, and several “quotations” are Stendhal’s own. The game suits a book about people who borrow their words and passions from others.
1830
The original subtitle called the book a chronicle of the nineteenth century, and the edition on Gutenberg calls it “A Chronicle of 1830”. It is set in the late 1820s under Charles X, when the restored Bourbons and the Church were trying to rebuild the old order, and it was published in November 1830, a few months after the July Revolution had thrown them out. Stendhal is precise about how power works in this world. In Verrières the mayor, the poorhouse director and the priests trade favours, and the Liberals are no better, merely out of office. At Besançon advancement goes through the Jesuit-leaning Congregation, and Pirard, a Jansenist, is pushed out. In Paris Julien carries a memorised message for an Ultra plot to bring foreign troops into France (ch. 51–53), serving a cause he despises because he likes his employer.
Above all the book is about class fear. The salon of the Hôtel de la Mole is perfectly polite and dying of boredom (ch. 34); its young men have titles and nothing to do. Mathilde finds Julien interesting because he looks like a man from 1793 who might one day send them all to the scaffold. At the trial Julien says it outright. “You behold in me a peasant who has rebelled against the meanness of his fortune,” he tells the jury, and he is to be punished less for the shooting than as a warning to “that class of young man” who, born poor, have got an education and dared to enter society. He adds that he is “very far from being judged by my peers”: there is no rich peasant on the jury, only “indignant bourgeois” (ch. 71). The foreman who reads the verdict is Valenod, his old rival from Verrières.
The people
Julien Sorel
Not a likeable hero and not meant to be. He is vain, suspicious, often cruel, and so afraid of being laughed at that pleasure is spoiled for him by the effort of seeming to feel it. He is also brave, quick, honest with himself in flashes, and the only person in the book with any energy. Stendhal plainly loves him and plainly sees through him, and the novel lives in that double view.
Madame de Rênal
About thirty, devout, married to a man she has never examined, she falls in love without knowing what is happening to her. She has no strategy at all, which makes her the opposite of everyone else in the book. When her son falls ill (ch. 19) she believes God is punishing her adultery, and her guilt later lets a confessor turn her into the instrument of Julien’s ruin. She outlives him by three days: “she died embracing her children, three days after Julien” (ch. 75).
Mathilde de la Mole
Brilliant, bored, and in love with the sixteenth century. Every 30 April she wears mourning for Boniface de la Mole, the ancestor beheaded in 1574 whose head Queen Marguerite is said to have carried away and buried (ch. 40). She loves by an act of will, as a dare against her class, and falls out of love as soon as she feels safe. The affair is a duel of pride, and Julien wins it only when the Russian Prince Korasoff teaches him to ignore her and court another woman with borrowed letters (ch. 54). Her last act, kissing and burying Julien’s severed head, is her ancestor’s story re-enacted.
The fathers
Julien has too many. Old Sorel, who knocks his son’s beloved Memorial of St Helena into the millstream (ch. 4) and haggles over his wages like timber. The curé Chélan, honest and therefore removed. The Abbé Pirard, harsh, poor and just. The Marquis de la Mole, who comes to like him, gives him an estate in Languedoc, a lieutenancy in the hussars and the name Julien Sorel de la Vernaye (ch. 64), and is happy to let a rumour pass that he is some nobleman’s natural son. And behind them all Napoleon, whom Julien never met.
How it was made
Stendhal was the pen name of Henri Beyle (1783–1842), from Grenoble, close to the novel’s setting. He had served Napoleon as a dragoon and as an administrator and made the retreat from Moscow; after 1814 he lived in Milan for several years and wrote on music, painting, Italy and, in On Love (1822), the psychology of passion. He was in his mid-forties and had published one earlier novel, Armance (1827), when he began this one.
The plot came from the newspapers. In 1827 Antoine Berthet, a blacksmith’s son from near Grenoble who had been a seminarian and then a tutor in two well-off households, shot his former employer’s wife during Mass in the village church at Brangues; she survived, and he was guillotined at Grenoble in 1828. Stendhal kept the outline and invented everything that matters: Julien’s mind, Paris, Mathilde. Samuel’s introduction puts it neatly: the brain of Julien “is not Berthet but Beyle”. The novel was written in 1829–30 and came out in November 1830 in two volumes.
Readers and critics
It was not much read at first. Stendhal expected that; he addressed his readers as “the Happy Few”, the English words that end The Charterhouse of Parma, and he predicted he would find readers around 1880. He was roughly right. Taine and Zola took him up in the second half of the century; Nietzsche counted his discovery of Stendhal among the happiest accidents of his life.
Two twentieth-century readings shape how the book is discussed now. Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis (1946), opens his chapter “In the Hôtel de la Mole” with a scene from this novel and argues that Stendhal was the first to tie the inner life of his characters to the exact political and social moment, the beginning of modern realism. René Girard, in Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961), made it a key text for his theory of mimetic desire: Julien wants what Napoleon wanted, Mathilde wants Julien when another woman seems to have him, and nobody’s desire is his own. Both readings are already present in the trial speech.
Afterlives
Claude Autant-Lara’s 1954 film starred Gérard Philipe as Julien and Danielle Darrieux as Madame de Rênal. The BBC’s Scarlet and Black (1993) cast Ewan McGregor and Rachel Weisz, and added Napoleon’s ghost to advise Julien, which makes explicit what the novel leaves inside his head. There have been Soviet, Italian and German versions, a Takarazuka musical in Japan, and a French rock opera in 2016. Julien’s descendants, the clever outsider who climbs through women, include Maupassant’s Bel-Ami.
How to read it
- Watch the gap between plan and act. Almost every chapter has Julien deciding how he will behave and then doing something else. The second thing is usually the truth.
- Read the epigraphs as jokes. Many are invented, and they comment slyly on the chapter.
- Read chapters 65 to 75 slowly. The pace drops, the hero stops performing, and the prison chapters are some of the finest in the book.
- Try a modern translation as well. Samuel’s version on Gutenberg is complete and serviceable; those by Margaret Shaw, Roger Gard or Burton Raffel are livelier.
Read next
- Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). The other great novel: Italy, Waterloo seen by a boy who cannot tell if he was in it, and a prison that makes its hero happy.
- Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835). Another provincial young man in Restoration Paris, given the same lessons in a harder voice.
- Flaubert, Sentimental Education (1869). The ambitious young man of the next generation, with none of Julien’s energy and all of his illusions.
- Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925). Another poor young man, another climb through love and money, another crime and execution, in the United States.