Who was Julien Sorel? The young man who lived on campaign

Julien Sorel is the protagonist of The Red and the Black, by Stendhal: an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old, the son of a carpenter who owns a sawmill in Verrières, who secretly reads the account of Napoleon's exile and discovers that the France he was born into has shut the door he would have walked through. The word that best defines him is one the Nous class keeps repeating: Julien lived on campaign. He treats his employer's house as enemy territory, a woman's hand as a battle to be won, and his whole life as a war in which no one may lower his guard. This article shows who he was, how that habit was born, and why the novel does not treat him as a hypocrite by nature.

An eighteen- or nineteen-year-old in Verrières

Verrières is a small town in the French countryside, and the narrator gives its measure in two words, written in capitals: to turn a profit. It is in this place that Julien lives. He is the weakest son of a carpenter, scorned by his father and brothers, and instead of working, he reads, hidden at the top of the sawmill.

One day his father climbs up, beats him, and the book falls into the stream. The novel says that Julien

"looked sadly at the stream where the book had fallen; of all his books, it was the one he prized most, the Memorial of Saint Helena." (Stendhal, The Red and the Black, Book I, ch. 4, Penguin Companhia edition, translated by Raquel de Almeida Prado.)

The Memorial of Saint Helena is the account of Napoleon Bonaparte's exile, and it is Julien's bedside book. He also keeps, hidden in his mattress, a portrait of the emperor. For the son of a carpenter, Napoleon is not only a hero: he is proof that someone without a name can reach the top.

The calculation of the uniform and the cassock

The trouble is that Julien is born too late. A few years earlier, under Napoleon, the son of a peasant could become a general at thirty; courage and talent were enough. Napoleon is defeated in 1815, the kings return, and the rules change: good positions come to depend on birth, money and protection.

The book never explains its title, but the reading that illuminates the novel is this: red is the uniform, the road that carried Napoleon to power and that has now closed, and black is the cassock, the road that was left. Julien makes this calculation coldly, right at the beginning:

"Nowadays we see priests of forty drawing salaries of a hundred thousand francs, three times as much as Napoleon's famous division generals. [...] One must be a priest." (Book I, ch. 5.)

Notice that he does not say he feels a vocation. He says one must. What drives Julien, in that calculation, is entering a world that has decided not to let him in, and the cassock is only what the age left open. The full design of the title is in What The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, is about.

The young man who lived on campaign

When the mayor, Monsieur de Rênal, hires Julien as tutor to his children, the young man enters that house as if entering enemy territory. And he names exactly what he is doing. When he wrests a raise from his employer, he runs into the woods and says, in the words of the man he admires:

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

It was not a raise: it was the victory of a battle. For Julien, his whole life is a military campaign, and the hardest front is indoors, with the lady of the house, Madame de Rênal. Under the linden tree in the garden he promised himself one thing: when the clock strikes ten, either he holds her hand or he goes up to his room and puts a bullet through his head. It is not passion. It is a battle he has decided to win.

The pattern repeats. Before leaving for Paris, he buys a ladder from a peasant and, before dawn, climbs up to Madame de Rênal's window. In Paris, he climbs a ladder to Mathilde's room, pistol in hand, more frightened than in love, suspicious of a trap. 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.

And for someone who lives on campaign, nothing is enough. When he receives the lieutenant's commission, the uniform he has always wanted, the victory does not last two days: he is already calculating the next rank.

Is Julien a hypocrite?

The novel uses the word, and without euphemism. But the Nous class draws here a distinction that changes the reading: Julien is not a hypocrite by nature. He understood the mechanism of the society he lived in, and in that society, whoever lowers his guard loses.

The narrator himself, when he reaches the word, asks the reader for patience:

"Does the word surprise the reader? Before arriving at that dreadful word, the soul of the young peasant had to travel a long road." (Book I, ch. 5.)

The road is that of the military career, which was closed to him. At the seminary of Besançon, hypocrisy stops being a provincial trick and becomes a method, becomes training. There Julien discovers that intelligence, his only weapon, is a danger: being first in the class is suspect, and a face of blind faith is worth more than knowledge. His classmates give him a nickname because of the logic with which he argues: Martin Luther.

"So learning is worth nothing here? [...] My only merit consisted in [...] absorbing this nonsense. [...] And I was foolish to be proud of it!" (Book I, ch. 26.)

Whoever learns to pretend the way one learns a language did not pretend from the cradle. And the proof that pretending is not his nature lies in the hours when he lets his guard fall. On the night in the garden, after she leaves her hand in his, the young man who had spent the day calculating relaxes, and the novel says:

"[...] he talked, forgot to pretend, and seemed a most agreeable man to the two friends who listened to him." (Book I, ch. 9.)

As for her, Madame de Rênal "thought of nothing, let herself live". But in the same chapter Julien has to burn Napoleon's portrait so that no one will discover it, and he thinks:

"[...] my reputation is my only good, it is for it alone that I live... And yet, what a life, my God!" (Book I, ch. 9.)

This is the price of living on campaign. One of the few hours in which Julien was happy was the one in which he was distracted from his own plan. The Nous class draws the parallel with what happens to us: we are at a good dinner, in a good conversation, and part of us keeps score, checking whether we made a good impression. We go home without having been there for the evening.

How Julien ends

What comes next is told, with spoilers, in The ending of The Red and the Black: happiness in the cell. In short: a letter brings everything down on the eve of triumph, Julien shoots Madame de Rênal in the church, refuses to mount a defense at his trial and accuses the court, and is sentenced to death. It is in the cell that the book turns inside out: with no future left to calculate, he stops pretending and says he has never been so happy.

Did Julien Sorel exist? The Berthet case

Julien is an invention, but the crime in the plot is not. In 1827, a former seminarian named Antoine Berthet shot his former lover inside a church, during Mass. She survived, as Madame de Rênal did. Berthet was tried and guillotined in Grenoble, Stendhal's native city, in February 1828. Stendhal read the trial report in the newspaper, and what he added was everything the trial did not contain: Julien's ambition, the Paris salons and the speech to the jury.

Hero or villain: what the book answers

The Red and the Black neither condemns ambition nor absolves it. What the novel shows is a young man who believed in the promise of his time, that each person can make himself alone, and who fails despite all his talent and effort. His failure does not lie in the fall. It lies in having spent his whole life on campaign, without noticing that the happiness he had came in the hours when he stopped pretending.

Hence the question the class leaves for the reader: what do we lose when we spend our whole lives trying to prove our worth? It is the subject of To be somebody in life: what Julien Sorel wanted and lost.

Continue: What The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, is about · To be somebody in life: what Julien Sorel wanted and lost · The ending of The Red and the Black: happiness in the cell · Mark Antony's speech
Source class: O Vermelho e o Negro, de Stendhal