The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
Summary
Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son in a small town in eastern France, has a photographic memory for the Latin New Testament, a secret worship of Napoleon, and a cold determination to rise in a society that has closed the military road to men of his class. The church remains, so the seminary it is. Hired as tutor to the children of the town's mayor, he seduces the mayor's wife, Madame de Renal, partly from ambition and partly from a love he cannot admit is real. Exposure sends him through the seminary at Besancon to Paris, as secretary to the Marquis de la Mole, whose proud, bored daughter Mathilde he conquers by a campaign of calculated indifference. On the brink of everything he wanted, a letter from Madame de Renal denouncing his character destroys the marriage, and Julien rides back and shoots her during Mass. She survives; he refuses to defend himself at trial, tells the jury of respectable men exactly what his real crime was, a peasant who rose, and goes to the guillotine at peace with the one love that was never strategy.
Stendhal narrates all this from inside, tracking every calculation and self deception as it happens, in prose so dry and quick it can read as if written yesterday. The psychological interior monologue that fiction now takes for granted starts here more than anywhere.
Published in November 1830 with the subtitle Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century, it closes with a dedication borrowed from Goldsmith: To the Happy Few.
Historical Context & Significance
The title's red and black are generally read as the army and the church, the two careers open to ambition under the Bourbon Restoration, and the novel is a precise anatomy of that stalled, hypocritical decade, published in the very year revolution swept the regime away. Stendhal dedicated his writing to what he called the happy few; Andre Gide later called the book a novel ahead of its time, and the twentieth century duly claimed him as its own nineteenth century novelist.
Its psychological method, emotion and calculation tracked line by line, made it a foundation of the modern novel of consciousness. The book's dangerous reputation has occasionally turned literal: after the 1964 coup in Brazil, military commanders had it burned as subversive. A 1993 BBC adaptation starred a young Ewan McGregor as Julien.