Stendhal

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The works of the French author Stendhal (1783-1842) mark the transition in France from romanticism to realism. His masterpieces - "The Red and the Black" and "The Charterhouse of Parma" - provide incisive and ironic depictions of love and the will to power.

Stendhal was born Marie Henri Beyle on Jan. 23, 1783, in Grenoble. He was thus a child of the 18th century who lived well into the 19th. He early developed a dislike for his father and an undue attachment to his mother. She died when he was 7 years old. Stendhal soon displayed the customary pattern that develops from such emotional situations: a hatred for authority and a search for a surrogate mother.

Early Training and Career

Stendhal's schooling was under the Ideologues, a group of 18th-century investigators of psychology, a training that set him apart from the later romantic authors. From this schooling, as well as from an intensive study of Ideologue writings (especially those of Destutt de Tracy) that he began in 1804, Stendhal formed his world view. He sought to understand man by learning the workings of his mind and above all his emotions, the latter of which Stendhal believed were rooted in man's physiological nature. Stendhal hoped through this study to be able to dominate those about him. The principal keys were consciousness of self, awareness of the primal role of will, and excellence of memory in order to ensure recall of all relevant facts. In the happiness principle (la chasse au bonheur, the pursuit of happiness) Stendhal saw the central dynamic drive of man.

In 1800 Stendhal accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on his heroic crossing of the Alps into Italy, first coming at this time to know and love Italy. He rapidly became a functionary of some importance under the Napoleonic Empire and spent the years 1806-1810 in Germany, where, among other places, he stayed for a time in the town of Stendhal, from which he derived his pseudonym. In 1814, with the collapse of the Empire, Stendhal settled happily in Italy, renouncing forever his dreams of a major public career. He preferred Italy to his native land, for, probably erroneously, he believed it a more fertile soil for the cultivation of the passions.

Doctrine of "Beylism"

An elusive personality, the end product of a process of disillusionment, Stendhal showed a mocking exterior, ironic and skeptical, that masked his sensitive and wounded heart. He gradually elaborated a doctrine he called "egotism" or "Beylism." Stendhal later wrote of this doctrine in detail in a series of works not published until long after his death: his Journal (1888), his Life of Henri Brûlard (1890), and his Memoirs of Egotism (1892). The doctrine, the name of which is deceptive to speakers of English, urges a deliberate following of self-interest and views the external world solely as a theater for personal energies. The "will to glory" is no more than the doctrine's external manifestation. Its essence is inward, an intense study of the self in order to give to the fleeting moments of life all the density of which they are capable. Although this is an admittedly elitist doctrine, Stendhal excused and justified it by his total sincerity. It ultimately proposes self-knowledge, not self-interest, to enhance the cult of the will, and it proposes the energy to develop an ever present sense of what one owes to oneself. To Stendhal, Italy and Napoleon were the supreme models of his doctrine. He proposed them to the "Happy Few" as guides, for he believed that the elite alone possess sufficient independence of judgment and strength of will to dare to be themselves. They alone may seek the supreme goal - happiness and the complete conscious realization of self - through self-analysis leading to self-knowledge and an awareness of how all others also seek their own ends; through a conscious hypocrisy to conceal their own goals; and through an unabating honesty with self.

Early Writings

Stendhal's early works little suggest the sincerity of his approach. His History of Painting in Italy and Rome, Naples, and Florence, both written in 1817, contain interesting original elements among many plagiarized passages. In 1821 Stendhal was suspected as a spy and forced to leave Italy but not before completing much of the work on his first major publication, On Love (1822). This study of love, today highly prized, sold only 17 copies during his lifetime. It is a rationalist's account of the ultimate emotional experience. Through a witty analogy Stendhal suggested that the initial manifestation of love is no more than a "crystallization" about the loved one of qualities the lover wishes to find in him or her - a matter (to use a later terminology) of projection and ego-satisfaction little dependent upon the real qualities of the person who is loved. It is a form of self-love, then, and not real love. For Stendhal, if love is to be complete, it must become a discovery of the loved person and a loss of self in love of the other. This total absorption is the supreme manifestation of the ego, a transcendent state to which all art and nature then contribute.

Stendhal's Racine and Shakespeare, a minor foray into the developing battle of romanticism in France, appeared in 1823. In 1827 he published his first major novel, Armance, a psychological study marred by a lack of clarity (a fatal fault in such analyses).

The Red and the Black

In 1831, taking advantage of a momentary easing of the censorship, Stendhal published The Red and the Black. Although it is today acclaimed as a masterpiece, it had to wait 50 years and long after the death of its author to begin to achieve that status. It is the best single work in which to study Stendhal.

The plot of The Red and the Black (like those of many other French novels of the 19th century) is based on a widely reported criminal case of the day. Stendhal adopted its outline, changing the names of the characters and providing his own account of their motivations. His hero, Julien Sorel, of a peasant family, is placed as tutor in the minor noble family of the Rênals in a small village in Savoy, the region in which Stendhal had passed his childhood. Julien seduces Madame de Rênal, leaving her when scandal is about to break out in order to enter a seminary and pursue studies for the priesthood. He next becomes the secretary of the aristocratic Marquis de la Môle in Paris, where he seduces the marquis's daughter, Mathilde. As he is about to marry her, Madame de Rênal writes a damaging letter to the marquis. Julien, infuriated, makes an unsuccessful attempt to kill Madame de Rênal. For this crime he receives the sentence of execution.

The "Black" of the title represents the Roman Catholic Church; the "Red" is a broader symbol, suggesting the Revolution, the Republic, the Empire of Napoleon, and more generalized concepts of courage and daring. Julien, a fervent admirer of Napoleon, is born too late for the Red; but he "knows how to choose the uniform of his century" and opts for the priesthood, the Black. The novel is, in this regard, a satiric portrayal of France under the Restoration, the conservative reaction that followed the Empire and that depended for its continuance upon repressing young men like Julien. In his flaming speech at his trial Julien accuses his accusers of being no better than himself and of punishing him for being "a plebian in revolt."

Julien Sorel's Character

Julien's character is complex but clearly delineated, so that The Red and the Blackis also, and more importantly, a study of love. Physically weak, Julien is scorned by his father and brothers; he early loses his mother. He uses his keen intelligence to serve his ambition and little understands how much he seeks a mother in all women. His need is to dominate, not only society but especially a woman. Madame de Rênal is a maternal type of woman; he plans her seduction coldly. But Stendhal wisely has Julien win her only when he lacks the strength to continue his foolish stratagems and bursts into tears in her bedroom. For almost the first time, Julien is honest with himself and with her. Julien thus also provides that moment of the unexpected (l'imprévu), which Stendhal deemed essential to love. For a brief time Julien passes from self-love to real love, but soon his wounded vanity drives him back to ambition. The two themes, love and the revolutionary spirit, blend in a terrifying spectacle as his sufferings make him an enemy dangerous to society and fatal to any woman who loves him. His chosen method, hypocrisy, gains him rapid success, but it denies him the possibility of full love.

In Julien's affair with Mathilde, on the one hand, Stendhal satirizes the decadent Parisian nobility of the Restoration and, on the other, with the rigor of a mathematical demonstration, he pushes Julien into the seduction. The relationship offers the occasion to contrast an ambitious and calculating love to Madame de Rênal's selfless devotion. Julien can control Mathilde only by keeping his emotions constantly in check; it is always a battle between them for domination, and the revolutionary theme returns.

After his attempted murder of Madame de Rênal, Julien, contrasting her devotion with the self-seeking vanity of Mathilde, discovers the real nature of love. Renouncing both ambition and hypocrisy, he gives himself wholly to Madame de Rênal, who forgives him and returns his love. She spends long hours in prison with him, thus allowing Stendhal to depict his concept of one person's fully developed love for another person. Julien is serenely happy despite his death sentence. His will to power has been set aside for higher goals; his pursuit of happiness has been successful.

In its acceptance of love as the supreme experience of life, The Red and the Black is romantic. In its sensitive and sympathetic analysis of motives and of feeling and response, it derives from the 18th century. It foreshadows the return of psychological analysis in the novel, a return that characterized France at the end of the 19th century, when The Red and the Black began first to be appreciated. In the delicate irony of its presentation (not always translatable into English) it is, however, Stendhal's work alone.

The Charterhouse of Parma

In 1831 Stendhal returned to Italy. In 1834 he began his novel Lucien Leuwen (not published until 1890), an attack on the July Monarchy. In 1839 he published his second great work, The Charterhouse of Parma. A complex novel set in Italy, it analyzes, even more delicately than does The Red and the Black, the variations and nuances of love. Again a prison serves as the paradoxical setting. The book is also important for its satiric portrayal of the Battle of Waterloo, at which the hero, Fabrice, is in fact present without ever being sure whether the action is really a battle or not.

More important is the detailed portrait of Fabrice's aunt, La Sansévérina, who is in love with him but whose love is not returned. Her quiet self-command, the fullness with which she lives a major role in the court at Parma, and her ease in handling her lover, the Prime Minister, and the ruler, who also loves her, make her one of Stendhal's most complex characters, perhaps his best delineation, and certainly one of the greatest female characters in French fiction. The ending of this novel is seriously truncated. Its last words are a dedication (in English): "To the Happy Few." The novel, little admired on its publication, did at least receive praise from Honoré de Balzac.

On March 22, 1842, Stendhal died in Paris. Almost a hundred years passed before he was understood as a major figure of world literature.

Further Reading

Autobiographical works by Stendhal are The Life of Henri Brûlard (trans. 1939), Memoirs of Egotism (trans. 1949), and The Private Diaries of Stendhal (trans. 1954). Jean Dutourd, The Man of Sensibility (trans. 1961), is a series of essays on various aspects of Stendhal's personality. Robert M. Adams, Stendhal: Notes on a Novelist (1959), contains a short biography and general criticism of the fiction. Introductions to Stendhal's work are Howard Clewes, Stendhal: An Introduction to the Novelist (1950), and Wallace Fowlie, Stendhal (1969), which emphasizes Stendhal's contributions to the evolution of the novel.

Useful studies include Frederick C. Green, Stendhal (1939);Matthew Josephson's excellent Stendhal: or, The Pursuit of Happiness (1946), which lays great weight on psychological factors; John Atherton, Stendhal (1965), an analysis of the concepts which motivate and form the personalities of Stendhal's characters; Armand Caraccio, Stendhal (trans. 1965), divided into a biography and a perceptive study of the novels; and Victor Brombert, Stendhal: Fiction and the Themes of Freedom (1968).

Varied critical opinion on Stendhal appears in Victor Brombert, ed., Stendhal: A Collection of Critical Essays (1962). Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (1963), contains a penetrating chapter on Stendhal; and Stendhal figures prominently in Joseph Wood Krutch, Five Masters: A Study in the Mutations of the Novel (1930), and Raymond Giraud, The Unheroic Hero in the Novels of Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert (1957). For background see Martin Turnell's two works, The Novel in France (1951) and The Art of French Fiction (1959).

Additional Sources

Alter, Robert, A lion for love: a critical biography of Stendhal, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986, 1979.

Fineshriber, William H., Stendhal, the romantic rationalist, Philadelphia: R. West, 1977 c1932.

Jameson, Storm, Speaking of Stendhal, London: Gollancz, 1979. May, Gita, Stendhal and the Age of Napoleon, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.

Stendhal, Memoirs of an egotist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1975.

Stendhal (pseud. of Henri Beyle) (1783-1842). Though most widely known as the author of two great novels, Le Rouge et le noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, Stendhal wrote prolifically in many prose genres: travel literature, essays, journalism, art history, biography, and autobiography. All of these, together with his journals and correspondence, constitute a remarkable picture of Beyle the individual. The self is omnipresent in the writing, and it is this individual voice which most appeals to ‘Stendhalians’; for Stendhal has been the object of a cult in the 20th c. He wrote for the ‘Happy Few’, and after a period of relative neglect posterity has justified his faith in a manner which he might have found embarrassing.

He grew up in Grenoble, a town he detested as a symbol of narrow French provincial life. The black picture painted in the autobiographical Vie de Henry Brulard of his childhood, stressing the early death of his mother, his antagonistic relations with his father, and his hate of priestly reaction, needs to be viewed with caution, but he was happy when his proficiency at mathematics took him to Paris in 1799 to study at the École Polytechnique. As it turned out he worked in the War Ministry, and in May 1800 joined Napoleon's armies and crossed the Alps to Milan. Italy was hence forward to be for him the anti-France, a place of beauty, opera, passion, and happiness, and he lived much of his life there.

From 1802 to 1806 he lived in France, mainly Paris, receiving a pension from his father, reading intensively, and training to be a writer; his unfulfilled ambition was to be a comic playwright. His Journal of this period marks the beginning of the self-scrutiny (and self-creation) that was a dominant concern; he later applied to it the new word égotisme. From 1806 to 1814 he was much involved in political and military life in the service of the emperor, towards whom he developed ambivalent feelings which are reflected in many of his works (he wrote two lives of Napoleon, 1817, 1836). His service took him all over Europe, culminating with the Moscow campaign, of which he was one of the few survivors.

On Napoleon's fall Stendhal went into exile in Milan, whence he was expelled as a revolutionary (carbonaro) by the Austrian government in 1821. Without being a plotter, he was hostile to the reactionary governments of post-1815 Europe; his works are full of political satire and liberal sentiments, yet as he himself admitted, he was for all his republicanism a natural aristocrat in his tastes, a believer in the value of superior beings, and in the beauty and passion which modern liberal democracy stifles.

Stendhal once composed his own epitaph beginning: ‘Errico Beyle, Milanese: visse, scrisse, amò.’ (Henri Beyle, Milanese: he lived, wrote, loved.) It was in Milan that he began to write for publication: derivative lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio; his Histoire de la peinture en Italie (1817); and the joyful travel notes, Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 (1817, enlarged edn. 1826), in which he begins to elaborate his Italian myth, with a great stress on opera. Rome, Naples et Florence marks the first appearance of the pseudonym Stendhal—perhaps to rival Staël, perhaps for other reasons, but in any case deep psychological causes made Beyle a great user of masks and false names.

Love-affairs, successful or unsuccessful, were the second main business of his life (see the opening of Vie de Henry Brulard). Stendhalians have mapped his various liaisons in great detail. In Milan he had a stormy affair with Angela Pietragrua (1811-15), but was most marked by his unconsummated passion for Matilde Dembowski (Métilde), which is reflected in De l'amour (1822). Thereafter his most important loves were for the countess Clémentine Curial (1824-6) and for Giulia Rinieri (1830-3).

Between 1821 and 1830 he lived mainly in Paris, with visits to England, Italy, etc. At this time he acquired a reputation as a brilliant and ferocious conversationalist. Poorer than before, he wrote many important essays for the English press (Chroniques pour l'Angleterre). He took a keen interest in politics and literature, championing his own version of Romanticism in Racine et Shakespeare (1823-5). A second travel book, Promenades dans Rome, is more concerned with politics and society than Rome, Naples et Florence—this tendency was continued in the Mémoires d'un touriste (1838), a fictitious travel journal which is one of the first serious attempts at a description of France. The Parisian period also saw the beginnings of Stendhal's most famous body of work, his fiction, with Armance (1827), Vanina Vanini (written 1829), and his first masterpiece, Le Rouge et le noir (1830).

After the July Days of 1830 he became French consul at the small port Civitavecchia in the Papal states, where he served until just before his death. It was a tedious posting, relieved only by trips to Rome and a long period of leave in Paris and France (1836-9). But this was his most productive period as a writer. In 1832 he wrote his first autobiographical work, Souvenirs d'égotisme, concerning his life in Paris in the 1820s. This was soon followed by the incomparable account of his childhood, Vie de Henry Brulard. And in the same period he worked on four major works of fiction, Lucien Leuwen, Chroniques italiennes, La Chartreuse de Parme, and Lamiel, on which he was working just before his death.

Stendhal originally wanted to be the Molière of his time. The comic element is strong in his writings, which are full of critical, often biased, accounts of contemporary life. He had a low opinion of post-Revolutionary France, its hypocrisy, vanity, and oppression. Always an enemy of power (he says he danced with joy on learning of the execution of Louis XVI), he wrote to celebrate liberty. However, although he remained faithful to a more or less radical political position, liberty for him was above all a matter for the individual spirit. In Vie de Henry Brulard he describes the liberating effect of reading Shakespeare, Ariosto, and Cervantes as a child; they represent art, beauty, and life. To them should be added Rousseau; Stendhal's ironic realism, like his brilliant conversation, was often a mask for Romantic idealism. His ideal, which he tended to locate in other times and other places, was one of generosity of spirit; it involved the ability to feel and to act daringly, to pursue happiness without hypocrisy. Madame Roland, who met death nobly, was an ideal female figure, and it is striking how often death, sacrifice, and suicide give the final nobility to his life-loving heroes and heroines.

At the same time, he knew how Romantic aspiration can become a pose. He ridicules the windy eloquence of a Chateaubriand, and takes refuge either in humour and irony (loving the mixture of laughter and passion in Mozart's operas) or in a sharp, bare style, where no time is wasted on fine writing. To feel like Rousseau but write like Montesquieu was his aim. It is in this mixture of the hard and the soft, the cynical and the tender, the ironic and the passionate that the particular charm of his writing lies.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• M. Bardèche, Stendhal romancier (1947)
• M. Tillett, Stendhal: The Background to the Novels (1971)
• S. Felman, La ‘Folie’ dans l'œuvre romanesque de Stendhal (1971)
• M. Crouzet, Stendhal et l'italianité (1982)
• R. Pearson, Stendhal's Violin (1988)

IN BRIEF: n. - French writer whose novels were the first to feature psychological analysis of the character (1783-1842).

Quotes:

"Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion."

"To describe happiness is to diminish it."

"The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same."

"True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things."

"In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future."

"Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world -- a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society."

See more famous quotes by Henri B. Stendhal

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