Stendhal (1783 - 1842) was the pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle, a French novelist, memoirist and art critic. His novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma are regarded as founding works of psychological realism, tracing the inner calculation and self-deception of their protagonists with a precision that had no real precedent in French fiction. [1]
Early life
Marie-Henri Beyle was born on 23 January 1783 in Grenoble, the son of a lawyer. His mother died when he was seven, a loss he described in his autobiographical writings as the central wound of his childhood, and he grew to detest his father and the provincial clerical society of his upbringing. He excelled at mathematics at the École centrale in Grenoble, which provided his route to Paris in 1799. [1]
Through the patronage of his relatives the Daru family he entered the service of the Napoleonic administration and army. He held posts in Italy, where he fell permanently in love with the country, and served as a military commissary during the 1812 campaign in Russia, witnessing the burning of Moscow and the retreat. [2]
Italy and early writing
With the fall of Napoleon in 1814 Beyle settled in Milan, where he lived for seven years, immersed in Italian opera, painting and society. His first books were written there and in Paris: lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, a history of painting in Italy, the travel book Rome, Naples and Florence, and the analytical essay On Love (1822), which set out his theory of "crystallisation," the process by which a lover invests the beloved with imagined perfections. [1]
Suspected by the Austrian authorities of liberal sympathies, he returned to Paris in 1821 and lived by his pen, contributing criticism to English periodicals and publishing the pamphlet Racine et Shakespeare, an early manifesto of French Romanticism. [2]
The novels
His first novel, Armance, appeared in 1827. The Red and the Black followed in 1830: the story of Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son who attempts to rise through the church and the aristocracy of Restoration France, it dissects ambition, hypocrisy and class with a narrative attention to motive that later critics identified as the beginning of the modern psychological novel. [3]
Appointed French consul at Civitavecchia in the Papal States in 1831, he found the post dull and spent long leaves in Rome and Paris. There he wrote The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), reportedly dictated in a matter of weeks, a novel of intrigue in a small Italian court whose account of the battle of Waterloo from the confused viewpoint of a participant was admired by Balzac and later by Tolstoy. He left unfinished the novel Lucien Leuwen and the autobiographies The Life of Henry Brulard and Memoirs of an Egotist. [1]
Death and legacy
Stendhal suffered a stroke in the street in Paris and died on 23 March 1842. He was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery under an epitaph he had composed in Italian, describing himself as a Milanese who wrote, loved and lived. [2]
Little read in his lifetime, he was taken up from the 1880s by critics who recognised in his method the ancestor of the modern novel of consciousness. The term "Stendhal syndrome," for the physical disturbance some visitors experience before great works of art, derives from his account of his own reaction in Florence. [4]
