Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le Noir, or The Red and the Black, was
published and set in 1830--as it turned out, a fortuitous event for the author,
as we shall see. The first half of the book is set in a medium-size town
in eastern France, the second half in Paris. The hero is Julien Sorel,
the son of a carpenter who owns a sawmill, who by dint of his extraordinary
intellect is given entrance first into the home of M. de Rénal, the mayor of
the town, and then in the second half of the book into the mansion of the
Marquis de la Mole, one of the leading noblemen of Paris. In each case, he proves a very disruptive
element indeed—a symbol of the passion and ambition still burning among the
lower classes of Restoration France, and a portent of things to come.
Restoration
France began in 1814 after Napoleon’s defeat.
(The Restoration was interrupted for 100 days after Napoleon’s return
from Elba the next year, but quickly resumed after Waterloo.) Le
Rouge et le Noir is a portrait of the nobility, the restored ruling class,
many of whom were guillotined in the early 1790s during the revolutionary
terror, and many more who had to flee the country and spent the years of the
Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire abroad.
They were restored to power both
in the government—an almost absolute monarchy, although it included a
legislature elected by a very limited suffrage—and in the Church, which became
a pillar and ally of the new state. The
new government also restored their fortunes with a large appropriation,
although it did not try to give back the land the revolutionary government had seized
and sold to peasants and bourgeois. The
only parallel to the restoration in the history of the United States, it seems
to me, is the former Confederate states in the years after Reconstruction. In both cases, a defeated ruling class had
re-established itself, and both were ruled in large part by fear of the lower
classes, who might once again rise up at any moment. Stendhal portrays a society ruled by money
and social intrigue. Every character’s
annual income, based upon either his wealth or the position he holds from the
government or church, is given down to the last franc, just as in Jane Austen
and Balzac. There are no industrialists
or financiers in the Parisian upper crust.
Julien
Sorel comes from one step above the peasantry, and he is too young—about 20
when the book begins—to remember Napoleon.
Because he is relatively weak and an intellectual, his father and
brothers despise him and beat him. But he
is brilliant, and he has been inspired by two relics of France’s recent past:
an old retired military surgeon who took part in Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy,
and Napoleon’s own memoirs. He is fired
by the knowledge that had he been twenty or thirty years older, he might have
risen to be a Marshal in Napoleon’s army.
He has been instructed by a very old local priest, a man born in 1850,
and so brilliant is his intellect that he has learned the entire Bible, in
Latin, by heart, and can quote any chapter if given the first line. Although Stendhal, who obviously has nothing
but contempt for the new leadership class, is generally hostile to the Church, the
local priest is one of two men of real integrity who have a profound influence
on Julien’s life. Thanks in part to him,
M. de Rénal, the mayor of Julien’s home town of Verrières, takes Julien into
his home to tutor his three sons in Latin.
They are captivated by him, and so is there mother. Julien, like his creator, is more a man of
the freethinking 18th century than of the 19th, and he
has no sincere religious beliefs. The
Church for him is a means to advance and a source of intellectual stimulation,
nothing more.
Mdme. de
Rénal is beautiful and religiously devout.
She and her husband married for fortune and position, and she has never,
apparently, been in love. She is seduced
by Julien’s frankness, his independence of mind, and his daring. When he makes a pass at her she cannot
resist, and soon finds herself torn between love and Catholic guilt. Their
affair seems relatively easy to conduct under the circumstances, because the Rénals
have separate bedrooms, quite widely separated. They are nearly discovered in flagrante more than once, however,
lending a great deal of drama to the book. Thanks to Élise, a maid in the
household who had hoped to marry Julien herself, the affair becomes known in
the town, and M. de Rénal receives an anonymous
letter about it from a political rival. Julien’s
presence in the household cannot continue, and he is eventually packed off to
the seminary at the larger town of Besançon to finish his apprenticeship for
the priesthood. Here Julien meets a
second ecclesiastical mentor, the Abbé Picard, another man of integrity
indifferent to worldly advancement.
Picard has a business relationship with the Marquis de la Mole, a
leading landowner in the region who lives in Paris, and he eventually places
Julien in the Marquis’s household as a secretary. Thus begins the second half of the book,
which takes place mostly in Paris.
The
conversation in the Hotel de la Mole, the family town house, is as vapid as
that of Verrières, for the simple reason that serious questions of politics and
history are out of bounds. (One easily
imagines that the situation among the aristocracy of the late nineteenth
century South might have been similar.)
They have a daughter, Mathilde, who is being courted by some of the
leading young men of Paris. And she,
too, is seduced by Julien, beginning with a conversation she overhears in which
he complains to his patron, the Abbé Picard, that dining with the Marquis and
his friends is so boring that he regards it as the most onerous of his
duties. “That one wasn’t born on his
knees,” Mathilde says to herself, and she and Julien begin a fascinating,
surreptitious courtship which ends with him literally climbing a ladder to
reach her bedroom window. Once they are
alone, they are both so stunned by what they are doing that for some time than
can hardly talk, much less act, but eventually nature takes its course.
The book
is among other things a study of romance, and Julien gradually learns, in
various ways, that the easiest way to seduce a woman is to pay her no
attention. In both of his great affairs
his attraction is mainly his pride and independent spirit, which his lovers
cannot resist. He represents an
irrepressible spirit and an authenticity which are compelling because they have
been so unfashionable—and which were about to break out in real life, as
well. Stendhal could not have known
this, but in 1830, the year that his book appeared, the Restoration monarchy
was overthrown and replaced by the somewhat more liberal monarchy of Louis
Philippe, which began by restoring the Tricolor flag of the Revolution. And although music plays no part in le Rouge et le Noir, I cannot help
noting that it was also in 1830 that Frederic Chopin, who appears to have been
exactly the age of Julien Sorel, arrived in Paris from Poland and began his
career as a pianist and composer. Chopin’s
music was as revolutionary in the 1830s as rock ‘n roll was in the 1950s, and
it expresses the same undiluted passion as Julien’s love affairs.
I shall
not go into the details of the dénouement of the book. It ends badly for Julien, because Restoration
society cannot absorb such a disruptive influence, and the Church plays a big
role in his downfall. Stendhal, born
Marie-Henri Beyle in 1783, knew where he stood in the great political struggles
of his lifetime, and he had no doubt when he was writing Le Rouge et le Noir that history had been moving in the wrong direction
for the last 15 years. He clearly
believed that the values of the eighteenth century—its rationalism and
egalitarianism—would eventually triumph, and he was right. Perhaps I am drawn to the book because I too
think that history has been moving in the wrong direction for some time.
