The Red and the Black by Stendahl

It took me more than a month after finishing Kafka’s The Trial to read The Red and the Black. Stendahl’s novel is neither particularly long nor difficult but I was busy with post-COVID lockdown visits to two sets of parents and because, frankly, I didn’t find the novel particularly interesting. After working rather slowly through the first three hundred pages (and reading should never be “working” – that’s a tell!) I picked up the novel again a few days ago with determination to finish it and found that the last third of the novel suddenly moves very quickly and with intensity, the tone shifting from laconic to melodramatic. The change didn’t improve the experience.

The Red and the Black is the story of a young man, Julien Sorel. His father owns a small lumber-mill in a (fictional) French village near the Swiss border but the novel also calls the father a carpenter, so don’t think wealth: the family is peasantry, or we might say, working-class. Julien’s two older brothers are happy to follow their father into a life of labor, but Julien, more slight of build, handsome, intelligent, and ambitious, wants something more.

In France during the Restoration (the novel is set mostly in 1830) for a child not born to nobility the paths to advancement are only two: the military or the clergy. Either become a soldier, distinguish oneself in battle and rise to an officer position, or enter the seminary and secure a placement as bishop in some cozy parish with a generous stipend. Julien, as an admirer of Napoleon, would prefer the military. But Napoleon had died in exile in 1821 and the monarchy had been restored in 1814, after Napolean’s defeat at Waterloo to Louis XVIII, the brother of Louis XVI who had been guillotined with his Queen, Marie Antoinette, in 1793, during the first revolution. With no glorious battles currently available to prove himself, Julien instead follows the route of the church.

I chose to read The Red and The Black after having read War and Peace and James’ The Portrait of a Lady, earlier this year. Stendahl’s novel gives more of Napolean’s history, although from the French rather than the Russian side, and Napoleon only appears in Julien’s heroic memory, not as a character as he does in Tolstoy. The Red and the Black is often cited as the first psychological novel, that is, a novel like James’ story of Isabel Archer where the subject is a complex character whose interest is in developing or discovering themselves. In a psychological novel the plot grows out of the character’s journey of self rather the author manipulating his characters at the service of what they must do for the story. In this new form of novel the characters do what they might do for themselves in the way real people are self-motivated.

And so Julien is self-motivated, primarily by his ambition to rise above his class, but also by his ego, by his determination not to have his honor insulted, and by his attraction to women.

As a young man in his small village he is educated in Latin by a local priest. That achievement is sufficient for him to be placed as a tutor in the household of M. Renal, the wealthy mayor of the town. Julien tutors the mayor’s children, but also involves himself in an affair with the mother of the children, Madame de Renal. Most of the first half of the novel (it’s divided into two books) takes place in the small village where M. Renal is the mayor and at a nearby setting where the mayor has a larger home, and tells the story of Julien negotiating his illicit affair. I found the affair to be ridiculous and tedious. Professions of passion and doubt, “it’s impossible” dance with “I’ll give up everything to be with you”. The moral and proper exchange places with the foolishness and reckless. It’s all very adolescent, which befits Julien who is an adolescent, though I wonder about Madame de Renal, a somewhat older woman who should certainly know better.

Julien is supposed to be on a path to the priesthood. He’s called “Abbe”. And his involvement with the church grows during this time, although only for mercenary, not spiritual, reasons. Finally, the affair is exposed through some anonymous letters and the lovers break it off. Julien is enrolled in a seminary in a larger town, Besancon, and the reader imagines that Madame de Renal has exited the novel.

At the Seminary, Julien is befriended by the Seminary head, Abbe Pirard, and through him is placed as a secretary in service to a M. de la Mole, an upper class landowner and diplomat with a household in Paris who needs help with his correspondence. Julien’s intelligence and skill endear him to his employer, while his good-looks and arrogant manner endear him to the employer’s daughter, the Mademoiselle de la Mole.

The second book of the novel then is a story of a second affair: now two actual adolescents. This affair conducted even more on the lines of pretending to ignore in order to attract, frank declarations of real feelings being the ultimate deal-killer, while manipulations, play-acting, and incitements to jealousy win the day. There are many parallels between the two affairs, including a repeat of a scene in which Julien uses a ladder to enter his lover’s second-story room from the garden. I was reminded here of Proust, whose characters play all the same love-games. But Proust does it so much better. (The descriptions of upper-class lives spent in Parisian drawing rooms, salons, and balls, also made me think of Proust.) In Proust I feel frustration at these impossible people, but I also laugh, and I get the sense that people really do behave like that. In Stendahl I just felt annoyance. Yes I do know people like that, but Stendahl’s characters aren’t people I want to know.

Class issues are important here, too. Julien continues to strive upward. The Mademoiselle is really too far above him, and their secret affair would be ruinous to both of them if discovered. For her part, a willful teenager, she thrills to the transgression of loving a man with no family or money and pays no heed to the consequences.

She gets pregnant and now the affair must become public. This is when the pace of the novel picks up quickly. The father is shocked, of course, but soon comes up with a scheme to invent a rich father for Julien. He also finagles an officer position for Julien in a regiment in Strasbourg, and Julien enjoys two-days of happiness in Strasbourg where he suddenly achieves the class position, and money, he has always pursued.

Then disaster. The father receives a letter from Madame Renal revealing Julien’s shameful character. She has always been pious and after revealing her affair with Julien to her confessor the confessor obliges her to write the letter. The father can no longer support his daughter’s marriage to the disgraced Julien and calls it off. In a rage, Julien travels back to the village where the story began, finds Madame Renal in the church during Mass, and shoots her twice – once through her hat, the second time in her shoulder. The Madame survives, and even forgives Julien, her flame for him continues to burn, but Julien is arrested. During the trial several of Julien’s old rivals pretend to support him, and accept bribes from Mlle. de la Mole, but secretly, gleefully, turn on him. Julien himself sometimes accepts his punishment as just – he did shoot her and did mean to kill her – and sometimes imagines escape, or suicide, or a successful appeal. In the end he is guillotined. The Mademoiselle gets to re-enact her romantic reveries of a tragic lover’s death from the heroic age of earlier centuries, while Madame Renal, we are told, will raise the illegitimate child of her executed lover.

I enjoyed the second half of the novel much more than the first. And I suppose The Red and the Black should be respected for its significance as introducing the novel to the psychological concerns which would be the path of literature going forward. But I found the characters unappealing, the plot silly, and the writing without style.

For some reason I had always thought The Red and the Black was a war novel and that the colors in the title represented the two armies. I’m glad to have read it now if only to clear up that misconception. But what does the red and the black actually signify? It’s never specified in the novel. Julien wears black suits: the required costume of the clergy. At one point, M. de la Mole, who has grown fond of him, buys him a blue suit, an aristocratic color, and asks Julien to wear the blue suit when they are meeting as friends and wear the black when he performs his work for him. But the novel isn’t called black and blue, it’s black and red, and no one ever wears a red suit. Perhaps red is the color of the military and the black and the red signify the two paths available for Julien’s ambition? It’s also possible that the black and the red refer to the two colors in a deck of cards and Stendahl’s allusion is to the role that playing the game, and luck, contribute to one seeking their fortune in life.