67 pages • 2-hour read
The Red and the Black
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Themes
Love as a Mirror of the Self
Julien Sorel is the protagonist of The Red and the Black. Throughout the book, the contours of his character are defined through his interactions with others. His relationships with his various father figures—Abbé Pirard, the marquis, and his actual father, the first, second, and third estates, respectively—illustrate his view of other people as steppingstones or obstacles in his own path of social advancement. He resents his father’s lowly birth, for example, while being deferential to the priest and aristocrat. His romantic relationships offer the most insight into Julien’s character, often because he can veer wildly in and out of love depending on a choice phrase or action. Julien’s relationship with Mme. de Rênal is a formative part of his life and shows Julien’s struggles to truly understand himself. Both Julien and Mme. de Rênal struggle to communicate their feelings. They are naïve with regards to love, so they misinterpret one another’s feelings on a regular basis. Julien is capable of convincing himself that a cold comment or a period of emotional distance from Mme. de Rênal means that she does not love him; she is capable of misinterpreting Julien’s own actions in a similar fashion. Thanks to the narrator’s psychological insights into the true feelings of the characters, the audience understands the juxtaposition between actual and imagined disposition. In this way, each character’s misunderstanding of love becomes a reflection of their true self. Julien, in his relationship with Mme. de Rênal, comes to understand himself better than he ever manages to understand her.
Mathilde is much like Julien, particularly in the intensity and suddenness of her emotions. Much like Julien, she often longs for whatever she cannot have, only to discover that—when she does get what she wants—she no longer wants it. She falls in love with Julien from afar. Eventually, she invites him into her bedroom and, just as she declares her love for him, an offhand comment is enough to make her fall out of love with him. For Julien, the prospect of embarking on an affair with the marquis’s daughter is absurd; he is not even sure he loves her. When he comes to view the relationship as a demonstration of his own social mobility, however, he decides that he loves Mathilde very much. Like Mathilde, he gets everything he wants, only to want something else. After a long campaign of winning back her heart by making her jealous, he is on the cusp of being given money and titles to marry the pregnant Mathilde. This future is dashed by Mme. De Rênal’s letter, only for Julien to land himself in prison for trying to murder her. Mathilde visits him every day, pledging herself to him with the guarantees of love that he sought. Her actions illustrate the depth of her love, only for Julien to decide that he loves Mme. de Rênal more. The fickleness of Julien’s love reflects his character more than it says anything about Mathilde. He does not know what he wants, yet he relishes the intensity of emotional certainty. His romantic relationships become more about himself than his partners, serving as a mirror to himself rather than a true emotional connection.
Across two romantic relationships and many more platonic ones, Julien’s character is refined through interaction. As the novel functions as a satirical mirror of the society of the Bourbon Restoration, Julien’s world serves as an ironic mirror of his own self. He resents the cynical, self-serving world he sees around him, but this resentment is ironic in that he himself is the most cynical and self-serving figure in the book. Mme. de Rênal loves her children, while Mathilde loves her family. Julien has no such relationship. His first romance with Mme. de Rênal and his relationship with Mathilde show how he is able to fall in love with climbing the social ladder and satisfying his ambitions; his second romance with Mme. de Rênal is Julien falling in love with the nostalgic past. Rather than loving other people, he is only capable of loving what their reflected adoration says about him in any given moment.
Social Class as a Violent Struggle
The Red and the Black is a complex depiction of class struggle. The protagonist, Julien Sorel, is a young man of humble background who dreams of social elevation in a society rigidly divided by birth, wealth, and tradition. The novel captures a society still haunted by the Revolution’s promise of equality but dominated once again by a restored aristocracy and a conservative Church. The Napoleonic meritocracy that once enabled ambitious men of humble birth to rise has been replaced by stagnant hierarchies. In this context, Julien’s ambitions are both noble and tragic: He is a product of Revolutionary ideals living in a society that has largely betrayed them. His tragedy is not merely personal but symbolic of the futility of trying to transcend class in a world determined to preserve it. Julien’s entire identity is shaped by his class position. Born the son of a coarse, abusive carpenter in the provincial town of Verrières, Julien detests the narrowness and brutality of his origins. He is acutely aware of his inferiority in the eyes of the elite, and he compensates with intellectual ambition, Napoleonic hero-worship, and carefully cultivated manners. From the outset, Julien views life as a battlefield of social struggle, where advancement depends not on character or merit but on strategic deceit and self-presentation. His decision to enter the clergy is less a spiritual calling than a calculated move to gain respectability. For Julien, religion and morality are tools of social climbing, and they are to be wielded as the struggle demands. His hypocrisy, however troubling, reflects a society where the lower-born must disguise themselves in order to be accepted. Stendhal presents Julien’s class struggle not only as an individual story but as emblematic of broader structural tensions in post-Revolutionary France.
Julien’s affairs with Madame de Rênal and Mathilde de La Mole are deeply shaped by class dynamics. With Madame de Rênal, Julien wields power through seduction, but their relationship is marked by guilt, shame, and the constant threat of exposure. It is a romance shadowed by social taboo. In contrast, his courtship of Mathilde is dominated by an elaborate game of power and pride. Mathilde is drawn to Julien precisely because he is of lower birth: She romanticizes his obscurity and imagines herself as a tragic heroine defying convention. Stendhal uses these relationships to highlight the insidious way that class expectations shape even the most intimate human bonds. Julien’s relationship with Mme. de Rênal gives him a glimpse of power through seduction, but it also exposes the fragility of his position: One hint of scandal threatens to destroy his social progress. When Julien moves to Paris and enters the service of the Marquis de La Mole, he reaches the pinnacle of his social ascent. Yet here, too, his success is conditional and precarious. The aristocrats tolerate his presence, even admire his intelligence, but they never fully accept him. They are bound by the rigid class structure of the Bourbon Restoration, a society predicated on the eradication of social mobility as well as other developments of the French Revolution. In this context, Julien’s affair with Mathilde, the marquis’s daughter, makes this division unmistakably clear. Though the marquis grudgingly agrees to honor the relationship for the sake of his daughter’s reputation, Julien’s execution at the novel’s end signifies that the doors of true social acceptance remain violently closed.
While Julien’s struggle is central, the novel also offers glimpses of other characters caught in the same system. Clergy members are often portrayed as careerists more concerned with influence than faith. The nobility, though elegant and refined, are shown to be shallow, insular, and indifferent to merit. The bourgeoisie, whom Julien both scorns and fears, are depicted as materialistic, conservative, and envious of those above them. No class escapes Stendhal’s scrutiny. He presents a society riven with insecurity and self-interest, where each class guards its position while resenting the others. In this divided world, authenticity is stifled, and hypocrisy becomes the dominant mode of survival. As such, ambition and survival are depicted as part of a violent struggle, with Julien seeing himself as the Napoleon of his own individual life.
The Tension Between Authenticity and Ambition
The Red and the Black portrays a persistent tension between authenticity and a pervasive ambition that often gives rise to hypocrisy, both within individual characters and in the social structures they navigate. Julien embodies this central tension. He is a young man of intelligence and ambition, raised in a provincial town and determined to escape his humble origins. Yet from the beginning, Julien is forced to perform roles that contradict his inner feelings. As a working-class youth with aspirations of greatness, he sees deception as the only way to ascend socially. He memorizes Latin and theological texts not out of faith, but to impress his clerical superiors. He pretends to be devout in public while privately idolizing Napoleon and despising the Church’s mediocrity. Even his romantic relationships—first with Madame de Rênal and later with Mathilde de La Mole—are colored by calculation and self-conscious posturing. Julien does experience genuine emotion, but he often subordinates it to strategic behavior. In this way, he reflects the post-revolutionary world around him, where sincerity has little currency and appearances determine opportunity.
Stendhal uses Julien’s duplicity not to condemn him, but to critique the social world that demands it. The Restoration-era society portrayed in The Red and the Black is dominated by two institutions that exemplify hypocrisy: the Church and the aristocracy. The clergy, ostensibly guardians of moral truth, are shown to be concerned mainly with status, wealth, and political influence. Julien’s rapid advancement in the seminary is due less to piety than to his rhetorical skill and obedience to dogma. The nobility, for its part, clings to its inherited privileges while masking its decline behind the trappings of decorum and tradition. Within this setting, authenticity becomes both a moral ideal and a fatal liability. When Julien speaks truthfully—whether in moments of passion or rebellion—he is punished. His attempted murder of Mme. de Rênal, is the one moment in the novel where the mask drops completely and Julien acts without pretense. Pointedly, it is also a failure—an act of unjustifiable violence that lands him in prison without resolving any of his problems. Ironically, it is only after this act that he begins to experience something like moral clarity. In prison, stripped of ambition and public pretense, Julien finally embraces his feelings honestly. He accepts death with a degree of dignity and seems to recognize—perhaps for the first time— the full weight of his emotions, especially his love for Mme. de Rênal. This, however, comes at the expense of Mathilde, from whom his love is withdrawn and who is left to bury Julien in an elaborate but hollow performance of romance, feigning authenticity to adhere to a romantic myth from the past.
The other characters in the novel also highlight the costs of sincerity. Mme. de Rênal, a deeply emotional and kind woman, initially lives in accordance with the expectations of her class and religion. However, her affair with Julien reveals a more authentic self: one driven by desire rather than convention. Her genuine affection and moral conflict stand in stark contrast to the hypocrisy of the town’s clergy and gossips. Yet her attempt to conform to social expectations by denouncing Julien ultimately leads to tragedy. Mathilde, in contrast, is theatrical and fascinated by romantic heroism. She oscillates between calculated rebellion and sincere love for Julien, but her behavior is so filtered through aristocratic performance that it is difficult to distinguish authentic emotion from role-play. Both women, in different ways, reflect the novel’s concern with the instability of authenticity in a world governed by spectacle. Stendhal’s use of irony reinforces this theme throughout the novel. His narrative voice often draws attention to the gap between what characters say and what they feel, or between how they present themselves and what motivates them. The chapter epigraphs—many of them invented or misattributed—add another layer of ironic commentary, calling into question the truthfulness of language and the authority of moral platitudes. Through these epigraphs, Stendhal not only critiques the hypocrisy of his characters but also implicates the reader in the search for authenticity amid layers of literary artifice.
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