What The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, is about

The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, is about a poor and brilliant young man, Julien Sorel, who tries to get ahead in a France that has just shut its honest doors and turns everything, love included, into a military campaign. The question the novel leaves is simple to state and hard to answer: what do we lose when we spend our whole lives trying to prove our worth? This article tells the book in the order in which it unfolds, explains what the red and the black of the title mean, and shows the period that makes Julien understandable.

A France that closed the door

To understand Julien, we need to understand the France of his time. A few years earlier, under Napoleon, the son of a peasant could become a general at thirty: courage and talent were enough. Napoleon is finally defeated in 1815, the kings return to the throne, and the rules change. The good positions now depend on birth, money and protection.

This is the background the book itself takes on. It was coming off the press in the summer of 1830, when a revolution overthrew the King of France, and the subtitle of the edition is Chronicle of 1830. Stendhal does not write a fable about ambition in general: he writes about one concrete young man, at one concrete moment, when talent is no longer enough.

What the red and the black mean

The book never explains the title. The reading that lights up the whole novel is this: the red is the uniform, the path Napoleon used to reach power and that closed. The black is the cassock, the path that was left over.

And Julien does this sum coldly, right at the beginning:

"These days we see priests of forty drawing a salary of a hundred thousand francs, which is three times more than the famous division generals of Napoleon. [...] One has to be a priest." (Stendhal, The Red and the Black, Book I, ch. 5, Penguin Companhia edition, translated by Raquel de Almeida Prado.)

Notice that he does not say he feels a vocation. He says one has to. From this sum comes the rest: a young man who chooses, between the uniform and the cassock, the one the era left open. The uniform, the red, only comes much later, and it does not last.

The summary, in the order of the book

Verrières: the war begins

Verrières is a small town in the French countryside, and the narrator gives its rule in two words, written in capitals: TURN A PROFIT. Julien is eighteen or nineteen, the most fragile son of a carpenter who owns a sawmill, and he is despised by his father and brothers. Instead of working, he reads in secret. One day his father comes up, beats him, and the book falls into the stream:

"He looked sadly at the stream where the book had fallen; of all of them it was the one he valued most, the Memorial of Saint Helena." (Book I, ch. 4)

The Memorial of Saint Helena is the account of Napoleon's exile, Julien's bedside book. He keeps a portrait of the emperor hidden in his mattress. The mayor, Monsieur de Rênal, hires him as tutor to his children, and the young man enters that house the way one enters enemy territory. When he wrings a raise out of his employer, he runs to the woods:

"I won a battle, he said to himself as soon as he found himself in the woods and far from the eyes of men. I won a battle!" (Book I, ch. 10)

It was not a raise, it was a battle. For Julien, his whole life is a campaign, and the hardest one takes place inside the house, with its mistress, Madame de Rênal.

The garden: the night he forgot to pretend

Beneath a linden tree, Julien promised himself that when the castle clock struck ten, he would either hold Madame de Rênal's hand or shoot himself in the head. It is not passion, it is a battle he has decided to win. The clock strikes, he takes her hand, she withdraws it, he takes it again, and the hand stays.

Then what he had not planned happens: the young man who spent the day calculating relaxes. The novel says:

"[...] he spoke, forgot to pretend, and seemed a most amiable man to the two friends who were listening to him." (Book I, ch. 9)

But in the same chapter, Julien has to burn Napoleon's portrait so that no one discovers it, and he thinks: "[...] my reputation is my only treasure, it is only for it that I live... And yet, what a life, my God!" (Book I, ch. 9) That is the price: whoever lives in a campaign cannot lower his guard, not even in his own garden.

The seminary and the first ladder

Julien and Madame de Rênal become lovers. An anonymous letter denounces the affair to her husband, and the town's priest, Abbé Chélan, sends the young man to the seminary at Besançon. There Julien discovers something that leaves him without ground: intelligence, his only weapon, is a danger, and being first in the class is suspicious. A face of blind faith is worth more than knowledge. His classmates give him a nickname for the logic with which he argues: Martin Luther.

That is how Stendhal portrays the seminary: hypocrisy stops being a provincial trick and becomes a method, becomes training. And the background is not invented. In France of those years the Church had returned to the center of power, and the career of many people depended on an association of priests and laymen called the Congregation. That story, of how the Church went through the Revolution and came back to power, is in the ten-volume guide to History of the Church of Christ, by Daniel Rops.

Before leaving for Paris, Julien secretly returns to Verrières, buys a ladder from a peasant, and climbs in the early morning to Madame de Rênal's window. She receives him. But the narrator notes what he did that night: had the return of tender feelings come a little earlier, it would have been a divine happiness; obtained this way, through artifice, it was nothing more than a pleasure (Book I, ch. 30). He does not enter by the door, he enters by the window, and whoever enters by the window, even into the room of someone who loves him, enters calculating.

Paris and the second ladder

In Paris, Julien becomes secretary to the Marquis de La Mole, and the rules change again. In Verrières everything was measured by money; in Paris, by birth and manners. A lively idea, however small, seemed like vulgarity (Book II, ch. 4).

In that salon is Mathilde, the marquis's daughter, bored, proud, in love with the memory of a beheaded ancestor. She decides to love Julien the way one chooses a role, and asks him to climb to her room by a ladder. Julien climbs with a pistol in his hand, more frightened than in love, suspicious of a trap. From then on comes the back and forth: a Russian prince teaches Julien the recipe for winning her, which is to pretend not to care, court another woman, and copy love letters that the prince himself has handed over ready-made. The book calls this Russian politics, which is not state politics but the politics of seduction. And the narrator compares the two women in a single sentence: Madame de Rênal found reasons to do what her heart dictated; Mathilde lets her heart be moved only after finding good reasons for being moved (Book II, ch. 30). One loves without knowing she loves; the other loves her own courage to love.

The letter, the shot and the jury

Mathilde becomes pregnant, and the marquis, furious, eventually gives in and grants Julien lands, a noble name, the Chevalier de La Vernaye, and a lieutenant's commission. Red at last: the uniform. Two days after the commission, victory is no longer enough: "he already calculated that to be commander-in-chief by thirty at the latest, like all the great generals, he had to be more than a lieutenant at twenty-three" (Book II, ch. 35).

The victory does not last two days. For someone who lives in a campaign, nothing is enough. Then a letter arrives: the marquis had asked Madame de Rênal for information about Julien, and the reply says that this poor and ambitious man tried to reach a position and become someone through the most accomplished hypocrisy and through the seduction of a weak and unhappy woman (Book II, ch. 35). Everything falls. Julien rushes to Verrières, buys pistols and enters the church during Mass: "[...] he fired once and missed; he fired a second time, she fell." (Book II, ch. 35) She survives, wounded, and he is arrested.

At the trial, he refuses the defense the lawyer suggests and accuses the court: "Gentlemen, I do not have the honor of belonging to your class; you see in me a peasant who rebelled against the baseness of his lot." (Book II, ch. 41) The jury sentences him to death.

The cell

It is in the cell that the book turns inside out. Julien loses his ambition all at once: he no longer thinks of Paris, nor of Mathilde, nor of the uniform. He thinks only of Vergy, the Rênal country house, and the walks in the woods, and he himself is surprised by what he feels: "it is strange that I have only known the art of enjoying life after seeing its end approach" (Book II, ch. 40). Madame de Rênal comes to see him, the two forgive each other, and he says: "I shall never have been so happy." (Book II, ch. 43) What happens in that cell, and why the ending is so debated, has an article of its own: the ending of The Red and the Black.

The real story behind the novel

None of this was invented from scratch. In 1827, a former seminarian named Antoine Berthet shot his former lover inside a church, during Mass. She survived, like Madame de Rênal. He was tried and guillotined in Grenoble, Stendhal's hometown, in February 1828. Stendhal read the case in the newspaper, and what he added was everything the trial did not have: Julien's ambition, the Paris salons and the speech to the jury.

Who Julien Sorel is, and why he pretends

Julien is a capable young man, scorned at home, who believes in the promise of his time: that each person can make himself on his own. He is not a hypocrite by nature. He learned that, in his world, whoever lowers his guard loses, and so he pretends, until the day the pretense stops being a choice and becomes a method. For the full portrait of the character, see Who Was Julien Sorel?

The lecture sums up the dilemma in a line from Professor José Monir Nasser, from a class of his on the novel: to be someone or something, to be a person or a role, to be a somebody or a thing. It is one of the axes of the work, and the starting point of To be somebody in life: what Julien Sorel wanted and lost.

The video also proposes an image to close the novel between two paintings. Julien's desire could fit inside The Coronation of Napoleon, by David, painted between 1805 and 1807: a general born in Corsica crowning the empress Josephine. In the lecture this comes as a reading by someone who imagines what might go through Julien's head, not as a fact of the novel: the book does not say he knew the painting. And his end, seated in a cell, with no uniform worth anything and nothing left to conquer, recalls Napoleon at Fontainebleau, by Delaroche, the emperor slumped in an armchair, in muddy boots, surrounded by a luxury that no longer serves any purpose.

What the book shows, and what it leaves open

The Red and the Black does not condemn ambition, and it does not absolve it either. What the novel shows is a young man who believed the promise of his time, that each of us can make ourselves alone, and who fails despite all his talent and all his effort. His failure is not in the fall: it is in having spent his whole life in a campaign, without noticing that the happiness he had came in the hours when he stopped pretending.

That happens to us too. We are at a good dinner, in a good conversation, and part of us keeps score: whether we made a good impression, whether we said the right thing. When we get home, the evening is over, and we were not in it.

How to read

Two parts tend to stall the reader: the first chapters, which look like a small-town chronicle, and the back and forth of love in the second book. They, and how to get through them, are covered in Is The Red and the Black good? Where the book stalls. And if you have not chosen an edition yet, the one the Nous uses in its quotations is the Penguin Companhia edition, translated by Raquel de Almeida Prado, the subject of Which Portuguese Translation of The Red and the Black?

To keep

A period closed its door, and a young man chose between the uniform and the cassock. One night in a garden, for a few minutes, he forgot to pretend. In the seminary, hypocrisy became a method, and Julien climbed two ladders to two windows. The victory did not last two days. And only in a cell did he stop pretending and become happy. What the book leaves with the reader is the question the lecture does not settle: can one stop pretending before the cell, in the middle of life, with everything still at stake?

Continue: Who was Julien Sorel? The young man who lived on campaign · Which Portuguese Translation of The Red and the Black? · Is The Red and the Black good? Where the book stalls · Le notti bianche: Visconti films Dostoevsky in Rome
Source class: O Vermelho e o Negro, de Stendhal