A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his penname Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer, recognized as one of the great French novelists. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism. The works of the French author mark the transition in France from romanticism to realism. His masterpieces-- The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) --provide incisive and ironic depictions of love and the will to power. Stendhal also wrote travel books, literature and art reviews, and biographies about such composers as W.A. Mozart and Joseph Haydn. Stendhal's subjects are often melodramatic, but they form a fascinating frame for his psychologically deep stories of selfishness and different paths towards self-discovery. Beyle used the pseudonym "Stendhal" (amongst over 100 others) and most Stendhal scholars believe he borrowed his nom de plume from the German city of Stendal as a homage for Johann Joachim Winckelmann. He grew up in Grenoble, France, hating his father and the Jesuit, Royalist atmosphere in his home, and mourning his mother who died when he was small. His closest friend was his younger sister, Pauline, with whom he maintained a steady correspondence throughout the first decade of the 19th Century. At the age of 16 Stendhal moved to Paris to study and to become a playwright. One of his relatives, Pierre Daru, was an influential adherent of the First Consul. The military and theatrical worlds of the First French Empire were a revelation to Beyle. In 1800 he became a dragoon in Napoleon’s army, and the invasion of Italy took him to Milan. He was named an auditor with the Conseil d'État on August 3, 1810, and thereafter took part in the French administration. By 1802 he was back in Paris, where he pursued the amorous adventures that continued to interest him all his life. He read widely and kept notes and journals, which have been published. He traveled extensively in Germany and was part of Napoleon's army in the 1812 disastrou invasion of Russia, bragging an individual head count of over 20. After Napoleon’s fall in 1814, Stendhal went to Milan, remaining there until 1820. There he began his literary career. He formed a particular attachment to Italy, where he spent much of the remainder of his career, serving as French consul at Trieste and Civitavecchia and writing. He preferred Italy to his native land, for, probably erroneously, he believed it a more fertile soil for the cultivation of the passions. In Lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio (1814) and in Rome, Naples, and Florence in 1817 (1817), his travel book and the first publication for which he used the pen name Stendhal, he borrowed facts freely from other writers, but the point of view and wit were his own. His books were better known in England than in France, and from c.1817 he wrote for British journals. In this period, when he was suffering from his most genuine and most unhappy love affair, he wrote On Love (1822), a rational analysis of romantic passion that was based on his unrequited love for Mathilde, Countess Dembowska, whom he met while living at Milan. This study of love, today highly prized, sold only 17 copies during his lifetime. It is a rationalist's account of the ultimate emotional experience. Stendhal's Racine and Shakespeare, a minor foray into the developing battle of romanticism in France, appeared in 1823. Stendhal’s first major novel, Armance (1827), a psychological study marred by a lack of clarity (a fatal fault in such analyses), was scorned by the critics. Stendhal was exiled from Milan by Metternich's police. In 1821 he settled again in Paris, trying to make his name in the salons. During this period he had an affair with countess Clémentine Curial, who wrote 215 letters in two years to her lover. After the accession (1830) of Louis Philippe, Stendhal was appointed consul at Trieste, but because Metternich objected to his books and liberal ideas, he was shifted to Civitavecchia in the Papal States in 1831. He wrote constantly there, although he did not publish; among the works of that period are Memoirs of an Egotist and The Life of Henry Brulard, both autobiographical, and Lucien Leuwen, a novel dealing with the corruption under Louis-Philippe. All these were unfinished works and published posthumously. In 1831, taking advantage of a momentary easing of the censorship, Stendhal published The Red and the Black, the first of his two great novels. Although it is today acclaimed as a masterpiece, it had to wait 50 years and long after the death of its author to begin to achieve that status. The "Black" of the title represents the Roman Catholic Church; the "Red" is a broader symbol, suggesting the Revolution, the Republic, the Empire of Napoleon, and more generalized concepts of courage and daring. It is, baldly, the story of a sensitive but calculating youth, Julien Sorel, who pursues his ambitions by seduction and is eventually guillotined for shooting his mistress. Its sympathetic and acute character analysis and its picture of the period make it one of the world’s great novels. Stendhal was a dandy and wit about town in Paris, as well as an inveterate skirt-chaser. His genuine empathy towards women is evident in his books and contrasts with his obsession with sexual conquests. He seems to have preferred the desire to the consummation. This fusion, or tension, of clearheaded analysis with romantic feeling is typical of Stendhal's great novels; he could be considered a Romantic realist. Contemporary readers did not fully appreciate Stendhal's realistic style during the Romantic period in which he lived; he was not fully appreciated until the beginning of the 20th century. During a three-year leave of absence (1836–39), which he spent in Paris or in traveling about France, he wrote what many consider his greatest novel, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). The Charterhouse of Parma, written in 52 days, is set in Italy, which he considered a more sincere and passionate country than Restoration France. Its hero, Fabrizio del Dongo, like Julien Sorel, possesses a special egoism (termed Beylism by Stendhal) that derives its great energy from passion, has its own moral code, and consists of unswerving pursuit of happiness in the form of love or power. Stendhal returned to Paris a few months before he died. Nearly 50 years after his death, his unprinted works were discovered and published. An elusive personality, the end product of a process of disillusionment, Stendhal showed a mocking exterior, ironic and skeptical, that masked his sensitive and wounded heart. He gradually elaborated a doctrine he called "egotism" or "Beylism." The doctrine, the name of which is deceptive to speakers of English, urges a deliberate following of self-interest and views the external world solely as a theater for personal energies. Although this is an admittedly elitist doctrine, Stendhal excused and justified it by his total sincerity. It ultimately proposes self-knowledge, not self-interest, to enhance the cult of the will, and it proposes the energy to develop an ever present sense of what one owes to oneself. To Stendhal, Italy and Napoleon were the supreme models of his doctrine. In 1817 Stendhal reportedly was overcome by the cultural richness of Florence he encountered when he first visited the Tuscan city. The condition was diagnosed and named in 1979 by Italian psychiatrist Dr. Graziella Magherini, who had noticed similar psychosomatic conditions (racing heart beat, nausea and dizziness) amongst first-time visitors to the city. His psychosomatic reaction to the overdose of beautiful art, disorientation, powerful emotions from confusion to hallucinations, is nowadays called 'Stendhal syndrome'. Stendhal's political views were full of contradictions: his lack of success fueled his hostility towards the prevailing order but later, after achieving fame, he became a moderate conservative. However, he never found his place in the post-Napoleonic world. Stendhal was an avid fan of music, particularly the composers Cimarosa, Mozart, and Rossini, the latter of whom he wrote an extensive biography on, Life Of Rossini (1824), now more valued for its wide-ranging musical criticism than for its historical accuracy. From 1841 Stendhal was on sick leave from his post, living in Paris. He died on March 23, 1842 in Paris, smitten by apoplexy in the street and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre. His work was rediscovered in the 1870s. It has influenced among others George Gissing, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson. |
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