Napoleon, in conversation which he once had with Goethe on the nature of Tragedy, expressed the opinion that its modern phase differed from the ancient, through our no longer recognizing a Destiny to which men are absolutely subject, and that Policy occupies the place of the ancient Fate [La Politique est la fatalité]. This therefore he thought must be used as the modern form of Destiny in Tragedy—the irresistible power of circumstances to which individuality must bend.
—Hegel[1]
Ancient political science understood regimes by the rule of the one, the few, or the many. A king reigned or oligarchs held sway unless the people got their say. Ideally, the community would mix these three together to form a middling element within society. In this golden mean, the few would mediate rulers and ruled through their wisely ordering the community towards the common good. However, this account arose in premodern societies that emphasized human inequalities. Perhaps, a modern account with new terms is needed to emphasize human equalities. Rather than kingship, oligarchy, or polity, modern political science understands regimes as aristocracy versus democracy. Politics is discerned not by rule of the one, few, or many, but by the rule of the greatest versus rule of the greatest number. Equality, not quality, is the ruling principle of modern society. This regime change of aristocracy to democracy means a change in hearts, one with levelled loves.
Innate human dignity was inconceivable to pagan antiquity. Thus, Alexis de Tocqueville writes, “it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth” to have “understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.” This religious transvaluation had latent effects. In Christendom, social structures altered over centuries until a democratic revolution commenced. Then, premodern aristocracies fell to democratic nations. “Christianity,” having “rendered all men equal before God,” enabled “all citizens equal before the law.”[2] This religious understanding turned into legal standing. Equality, no mere abstraction, is a social condition: a “sentiment du semblance” or “feeling of likeness.” While beliefs and structures of natural hierarchy dwindled, a crisis in mores began. Aristocratic souls intuit longings for the good and beautiful, yet democratic souls focus on material advantage. Human equality may seem self-evident, but noble and ennobling truths do not.
Less hierarchy means less moral nobility. Aristocrats mediated rulers and ruled. Democrats likewise need institutions mediating the state and equal individuals. De Tocqueville found in 1830s America this self-rule in business, religion, local government, and associations. This civil society educated isolated subjects into fellow citizens. But this ecology is fragile. Equality gave public opinion tyrannical sway democratic nations. “Founded on the ordinary order of things,” it brings masters and servants “to the common level” in sharing an “imaginary equality” despite “the real inequality of their conditions.”[3] But their bodily resemblance entails their spiritual alienation. Gone are old oaths binding loyal lords to their lands and men. These equals are connected on a purely financial basis. Further, an abstract love of universal humanity usurps embodied loves of particular people. And the individualism motivating pursuit of gain battles with voluntary neighborliness.
Restless democratic souls take great effort to fulfill their loves and rebuild social forms. As equals, we must exercise our liberty well. The nature of democracy is a state of nature, but its art renews the social contract. To operate so upon a body politic is_artfully_ performed. Disenchanted by Bourbon France, de Tocqueville searched the United States for this art. Also shaken, Stendhal similarly worries public opinion tyrannizes democratic France. Its mention bookends La Rouge et Le Noir (1830). Chapter One, “Small Town,” features a Hobbesian epigram: “Put thousands together / Less Bad, / But the cage less gay” to describe the “prettiest” provincial town, Verrières. Many people put together is less worse than the alternative, yet the collective cage is less gay. In the new regime, fewer people are happy.[4] Monsieur de Rênal, entitled thanks to Napoleon, is mayor of a town housing a noisy nail factory: an image for the levelling of old things. What has it built?
Of French parochials, Stendhal notes, “these wise fellows wield an incredibly wearisome despotism.” Indeed, “this wretched word makes small towns unlivable” for those “successful in that great republic we call Paris.” French industrial countryside is unlivable to worldly Parisians. What despotism is wielded? “The tyranny of opinion—and such opinion!—is every bit as idiotic in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.”[5] Comparing old world to new, Stendhal diagnoses idiotic “tyranny of opinion” as a new despot. Its final mention goes: “The reign of public opinion” creates “inconvenience,” for while “it secures liberty, it meddles with what it has nothing to do with—private life.” And, “Hence the gloominess of America and England.” To “avoid infringing on private life,” Stendhal invented Verrières along with a bishop, jury, and court in Besancon, “where he has never been.”[6] Public opinion reigns in democratic towns all over.
Despots of the ancien regime were nobles and clerics lording it over everyone else, the old red and black, that is. The new despot, “wearisome” and worrisome, is public opinion. (And, “in the countryside,” the “husbands are in charge of opinion.”) Excessive, idiotic opinion is present in France and America. Its tyranny rules petit-bourgeoise, yet secures liberty. But this tool meddles with things properly outside it: private life, where passions reign and heartstrings play. “Genuine passion,” Stendhal says, “is egotistic.”[7] There, our selves are free to stride and strut, if private life remains sacrosanct from moeurs of political society. Yet, in a democracy, is it so simple? Private life should be distinct from liberty, which is political, and opinion, which is public. Opinion, from provinces to Paris, is a tyranny over private life. What can private life do when it cannot escape weary, despotic, wretched, unlivable, public opinion, a tyranny over freed people? It can revolt.
Note Stendhal mentions America both times. Gloomy England is substituted for France, a switch whose significance suggests the Republic of Paris is not so free of “such opinion,” nor mostly any place in Europe and America. Perhaps public opinion tyrannically took away private life’s liberty. Thus, passion is enfeebled. Feeling a “religious terror” at the “image of democracy” seen in America, de Tocqueville prophesies degraded souls without great longings. The perpetually returning passion for wealth made Americans monotonous. They are not alone. All men resemble each other more by pursuing the same object of gain.[8] Passion for advantage has overtaken love of honor. Honneur denotes the esteem, glory, and consideration a man obtains from his peers, and the rules for how he obtains these goods.[9] The ways to win esteem, glory, and consideration from peers belongs to aristocratic men. Honor means moral judgements not of all but only some men.
Specifically, it sanctions violence for such peers. The general, permanent human interest is to forbid murder, yet some men have particular, temporary interests to excuse or revere it. Honor is that “particular rule” of “a particular state” for how a people or class “distributes praise or blame.” In its preeminent world historical form, medieval aristocratic honor depended upon actor, typically, not actions. As war created feudal aristocracy, medieval nobles glorified valor first. Yet, Americans call “noble and estimable ambition” what medievals had named “service cupidity,” ascribing “blind and barbaric fury” to that “conquering ardor and warlike humor” of daily combats. Instead, democratic souls honor all honest work equally, thanks to “public opinion,” the natural sovereign interpreter of the honorable. As dissimilarities and inequalities of men created honor, it weakens as differences are effaced, to disappear with them.[10] But de Tocqueville has a prescription.
Americans have “so many ambitions” yet “so few great ambitions.” After a revolution, the aristocratic spirit subsists in confused desires because old mores wain. Equality allows all the shot to succeed at everything, but few achieve great things at anything due to competition. Aristocratic ambition is extensive in objects but fixed in its pursuit, whereas democratic ambition is narrow in objects but limitless in pursuit. Democratic souls love unlimited success more than definite glory. Thus, the greatest fear amid “the small incessant occupations of private life” is that “ambition will lose its spark” and “greatness,” with “human passions” both “appeased and debased,” that daily “the social body” is “more tranquil and less lofty.” To remedy this diagnosis, contemporaries should have a “vaster idea of themselves and their species.” Humility is unhealthy. Pride, vicious in aristocracy, is medicinal in democracy.[11] But, as democracy disorients honor, does pride disorient love?
Stendhal explores this possible trouble of prideful love as a potential passion in vain. Love of honor in a bourgeois society is rechanneled when society is pacified after revolutionary violence. De Tocqueville found industry and rights to have replaced honor, and likewise, Stendhal mentions opinion and liberty to have invaded private life. Honor is necessarily public. Its motive is prideful. But what happens to the passions of private life when swayed by passions of public life? Stendhal knew something about the_soul_ which undergoes this democratic transvaluation. Referring to “this last great psychologist” who helps paint “the portrait of the free-spirited philosopher,”[12] Nietzsche quotes Stendhal in his own defense of De L’Amour (1822): “To be a good philosopher, one must be dry, clear, free of illusions. A banker who has made a fortune has something of the character needed to make philosophical discoveries, that is to say, to see clearly into that which exists.”[13]
Philosophy means seeing clearly into what is, and a successful banker can partly do that. This democratic personage peers beyond courts and newspapers “waxing eloquently about brilliant chimeras,” for, Stendhal laments, “the more public opinion will become the queen of France, the more there will be hypocrisy and cant,” which “is one of the inconveniences of liberty.”[14] Public opinion and political liberty have evil twins in hypocrisy and sophistry. The banker can partly see these things as what they are. This democratic man can take advantage of hypocritical cant. Thus, he successfully wins his fortune. Fortunate and unfortunate bankers are distinguished much like successful and unsuccessful lovers. To see market signals, win clients, invest and loan prudently, and keep coffers filled requires a man who understands hypocrisy and cant, even by trading in these children of public opinion. This bourgeois undertaking revels in democratic debasement.
That is a Don Giovanni of finance. But what of the Don of romance? Genuine passion is egotistic, not altruistic, for Stendhal. Thus, love as a passion is not about the beloved, but the lover, and not his mistress, but his pleasing idea of her. Hellenism and Christianity, in contrast, accounted for love as an activity. Ancient Greeks knew four kinds – storge, eros, philia, and agape – loves filial, romantic, friendly, neighborly, and divine.[15] Christians elevated love into charity: the love of God given to men called to love of neighbor. All loves involved affections of the heart, but also benevolence in the will, along with unions of relations. The truth, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” concerns not just inward passions, but real merciful actions by grace ennobling “servants” into “friends,” whom “charity edifieth” even whilst we still “see through a glass, darkly.”[16] But an emotivist account of love reverses its intentionality.
The sophisticated banker and the clarifying philosopher see past chimeras, whereas the successful lover creates his own ideals. Ideal love is a passion, and passion is biological.. The love for kith and kin, for example, has particular objects, but is universally held: “earnest speeches of foreign patriots” have “sentiments which inspire exactly similar statements elsewhere.” But its manifestation differs due to circumstances. “In Constantinople” and “all barbaric countries, this blind and exclusive partiality for one’s own land is a fury which demands blood,” whereas, “among cultured peoples it is a pained, unhappy, anxious vanity, that turns at bay on the very slightest provocation.” Patriotism is everywhere felt, but everywhere felt variously. Likewise, erotic love is universal, various in kind, yet so understandable as to be given “an exact and scientific description of a brand of madness very rare in France.”[17] Love is a rare madness vainly to be found in France.
All love leads to Rome, ideally, in its crystallization. This process conveys “the whole congeries of strange follies about the beloved” that get “regarded as true and beyond question.” The four kinds of love – passionate, mannered, physical, and vanity – can admit even “eight or ten distinctions,” yet while there exist “as many different ways of feeling” as “of seeing,” variations in terms alter not that “every variety of love” is “born, lives, dies, or attains immortality” according to “the same laws.”[18] These laws are metaphorically a journey. In travel from the indifference in Bologna, across the Apennines, then on road to perfect love in Rome, the journeying lover travails from admiration, to acknowledgement, then hope, and lastly, delight. But not all loves are equal. Stendhal clearly finds passionate love not only supreme, but to almost mystically justify living. But is this living not union between lover and beloved, but the man experiencing his desires satisfied?
Beauty is “a new potentiality for pleasure” from the mistress. Her beauty is the sum total fulfillment of all desires formulated about her. It transcends physical attraction as “the promise of a quality useful to my soul.” This fulfilled sum is the crystallization of the mistress in the lover. Here, the beloved is not an object of love, but its product. It encourages the lover to imagine hopeful desires with consequent satisfactions. These associations together constitute being in love, while boredom means the withdrawal of love. One must continue the game. The better lover, like Young Werther, preys upon panics and hopes to sustain crystallization. Fear of losing a pleasure ensures its desirability for vanity, but it must be by effort, otherwise love delights less. Needed is the swaying between opposites: hope and fear, conquest and loss, and war between lovers. Other desires adapt to “cold reality,” but in love desires rearrange to conform not to reality, but desire.[19]
Morals, politics, and religion intrude upon love to end it. The love which lasts continually entertains its mental fixtures, but the love which dies gains full satisfaction with its beloved. Marry the mistress and fall out of love: hence the distinction between Don Juan and Young Werther. Don Juan thinks love “is a feeling,” like “a taste for hunting,” whose “craving for an activity” needs “incessant diversity of stimuli to challenge skill.” New prey is needed. Werther, however, always finds new ways to see his mistress in a thousand fold “magical visions.”[20] Ever promiscuous, Don Juan must possess new realities in new loves, but Werther stays true by ceaseless imaginings. Bankers and philosophers see past these realities, but the worthy lover entertains chimeras. They, like Don Juan, understand the external too well, but Werther ever strives internally in discovering fresh perfections in his beloved at every new turn. This is the passionate love AWOL in France.
Inconstancy is cursed with boredom. Passionate love is cursed with death and despair. Each type has its virtue, yet boredom entails death, a curse to both Juan and Werther. “More brains are blown out for love than from boredom.’ I can well believe it, for boredom strips away everything, even the courage to kill oneself,” Stendhal writes.[21] In the democratic age, boredom is stymied with ever new stimulations, however homogenous and bourgeois. But why do Frenchmen not endow their women with perfections they do not possess? And what occurs when they try? For the old religion, to make an ideal of the mistress is to craft an idol. In the new politics, the old idols were smashed. Revolution meant iconoclasm. So one must restlessly seek out new pleasures and enterprises. The banker attends the bourgeoise, the philosopher their psychology, the lover their ennui. But what of the conqueror? What does Napoleon love?
Does reddening love relate to blackening war? Love “springs from Nature” ordaining “we feel pleasure” while sending “the blood to our heads.” Its growth “evolves” from “feeling” degrees of pleasure relate to the mistress’ perfections and “from the idea that ‘She is mine.’”[22] This crystallization can describe not just love of women, but love of glory, as well. Things were not always thus, that only Greeks sought independence, or just barbarians were furiously partial to their bloodied land, whereas cultured democracies had their passions honor public opinion. Once France had her revolution, terror, and empire. “My love for Napoleon is the only passion remaining to me,” Stendhal wrote in 1836.[23] He chronicles the European misfortune that Napoleon was miseducated in the old regime. Not having read enlightenment writers, he did not learn of “the strength which public opinion confers upon a Government,” for “the mixture of Catholicism and aristocracy” had “ironed out our souls for the past two hundred years.”[24]
Even George Washington would have hesitated to give Frenchmen too much liberty! Experience was nothing to a nation still fundamentally cherishing inherited feudal prejudices. Yet Napoleon was no Solon. “Exceedingly ignorant of the art of government,” Bonaparte, bred on military ideas, judged France too weak for visionary ones. Confident in his superiority and hateful of political discussion, Bonaparte embodied Roman ideals, believing the worst evil was to be conquered, not badly governed: “he was too superb a general to be any good as a politician and legislator.” Afraid of the masses, he never planned, yet his political mistakes bore fruit. “The institutions” he founded “were always liberal,” easily perfected to “bring forth liberty,” and advantageous for France to “forget everything old,” since “Frenchmen needed to be cured of their respect for outworn ideas.” Stendhal gives this judgement upon his countrymen:
‘The French, Napoleon remarked, ‘are indifferent to liberty. They neither understand it nor like it. Vanity is their ruling passion. And political equality, which enables them to feel any position is open to them, is the only political right they care about.’ Never has anything more true been said about the French people.[25] [Emphasis added.]
People inhabiting mediating institutions can withstand the bipolar oscillation of public opinion. Rooted in religious mores, their restless souls can innovate in ways political, economic, and technological, all thanks to their institutional communion buffering them against this soft despotism. But if unrooted and unformed, their desire for social mobility opens their hearts to malformation. Public opinion is that potent. Such Tocquevillean points complement the remarks of Napoleon. Stendhal affirms his opinion: the French, indifferent to liberty, neither understand nor like it. Rather, their ruling passion is vanity, while political equality, the only right they esteem, opens their imaginations that any position is achievable. Vanity grounds love of equality. This love of mobility rules French hearts. Here, Nietzschean psychologist Stendhal shows the consequence of this transvaluation from the democratic revolution. He shows the problem of Napoleonic love.
In_The Red and the Black_, Stendhal shows how pride affects love within a democracy. In a bourgeois society, public opinion creates perverse incentives for prideful desire. Worried Monsieur Valenod, the other richest citizen of Verrières, will engage Julien, M. de Rênal redoubles his desire with Monsieur Sorel to engage Julien instead. Why did “this petty man” with “his petty fears,” Stendhal asks, “bring a man of spirit into his house” and not “someone with a servant’s heart,” whom he needed? Why does M. de Rênal not “know how to pick people?” This chapter, “A Civil Servant’s Sorrows,” begins with the Casti epigram that the pleasure to hold the head high yearlong is surpassed by necessarily enduring “certain fifteen-minute intervals,” that is, when the head must be bowed. La Revolution dreamed every man could hold his head high, but sometimes he must bow. Public opinion creates within the soul a desire for competition when there may not be any.
But democratic souls have replaced aristocratic souls. Hiring a spirited man, Julien Sorel, this petty Verrières Mayor cannot properly run his household as custodian to public opinion. Usual nineteenth-century procedure “is that, meeting a man of spirit, a powerful nobleman, promptly” kills, exiles, imprisons, or humiliates him to death, yet, “here, by accident,” the man of spirit suffers not so. Greatly misfortunate, small French towns and “places governed by elections (like New York)” cannot escape from the Rênals. In middling cities, “these men” like de Rênal “shape public opinion,” for “public opinion is a frightful thing in a country thing that has a constitution.” Thus, in a democracy, “A noble-souled, generous man” who should be “your friend” but lives 500 miles away, “judges you by the public opinion of your city” as “formulated by fools” whom chance gave good birth, riches, and security. The lesson is “woe to the man who stands out from the rest.”[26]
Thrasyboulus’ lesson, “to murder the prominent men of the city,” is a democratic one.[27] Public opinion means, Madame de Rênal advises Julien, “Be sweet, be polite, don’t be nasty even to the must vulgar people,” for “they’re going to decide our fate.” It means, M. de Rênal tells his wife, “the strange condition of public opinion in Verrières,” which is to be “misled by the envious.” It entails, for fifty Besançon seminarians, “whom public opinion had made mindful of living reality,” the “Jacobinism” ready, “lying in ambush behind every bush.” (It is, for Stendhal, pressure from publishers to satisfy readers by having his characters talk politics, otherwise “they’ll cease to be the Frenchmen of 1830, and your book will no longer be a mirror.”) It is, per Monsieur de La Môle, “who and what must be crushed,” specifically “journalists, voters, public opinion—in short, youth and all who admire it” who “stupefy themselves with the noise of their empty words.”[28]
Already, Stendhal charges thrice that the mechanism of public opinion damages private life. Further, public opinion is accounted as things ranging from the courtesy due to the vulgar who decide fates, envious folk who mislead mayors, anticlerical Jacobinism, public pressure on authors, and journalists, voters, and youth stupefied by their empty noise. It is altogether a moral degradation that muddles men of spirit and elevates petty men. When M. Valenod befriends the_Congrégation_ to become the ultraroyalist candidate, M.de Rênal decides to become a defected liberal. Competition creates an opposite mimicry, where principle easily shifts and honor can be bought. Fulcoz and Saint-Giraud converse about the causes for the troubles of provincial life. For Saint-Giraud, that “ghastly life” is a crime thanks to the deposed emperor. In decades hence, politicians will be smarter but not more moral while reformers and conservatives will remain seeking office.
Regarding “the Ship of State, everyone wants to steer, because the job pays so well,” he remarks, “But will there ever be some little spot that’s open to an ordinary passenger?” The open competition means the elites still grab power that remains closed to ordinary citizens. Saint-Giraud, “tired of the perpetual comedy” all “play, in Paris,” a play called “nineteenth-century civilization,” got “thirsty for goodwill and simplicity.” Yet the priests and aristocrats caused this apolitical man to become a liberal due to the lawsuits. Losing money and selling his house, Saint-Giraud wants “out of that inferno of hypocrisy and petty troublemaking,” and instead to seek countryside “peace and solitude” where only in France such things are “found, a fourth-floor apartment overlooking the Champs-Elysée.”Only in central Paris can pastoral peace and quiet be had. But, Fulcoz replies with angry sorrow, “All that wouldn’t have happened, under Bonaparte.” Yet, Saint-Giraud dissents.
“Everything I endure today stems from what he did.” This decent harmless man at 40 with 500,000 Francs cannot peacefully live in the provinces due to despotic priests and aristocrats. The Emperor is to be blamed, yet Fulcoz notes: “France never stood so tall, in the eyes of the world, as it did in the thirteen years of his reign. Back then, there was something grand about everything we did.” Napoleon won honor for France, yet he also sold it. As Napoleon was friendly to clerics and lords, Saint-Giraud says, he had to leave his property. “It’s Bonaparte” who had “put the Rênals and Chélons in power, and it’s them who gave us the Valenods and the Maslons.”[29] Napoleon granted aristocratic titles based on income, not birth or service. Honor could be bought, but the whole point of honor is to be higher than money. What is not for sale? “Nothing can so distinguish a man as a death sentence,” Mlle. Mathilde notes. “It’s the only thing one can’t buy.”[30]
Their conversation awoke Julien from his usual mental chimeras. After hearing them speak, Julien “silently swore never to abandon his beloved’s children; he’d leave everything in order to protect them, should priestly arrogance ever bring on a republic and persecution of the aristocracy.” Here his intellectual confusion is on full display, that priests would support a republic to persecute aristocrats, their bedfellow victims in the Reign of Terror. Yet further, that his passion is for his beloved, Mme. de Rênal, and her children, is also confused. As Stendhal comments, “Real passion always thinks of nothing but itself. That is why, it seems to me, passions are so ridiculous in Paris, where your neighbor acts as if you’re always deeply attentive to him.”[31] Passion is always egotistic. It is essentially not selfless. But in his crystallization, Julien holds to his fantasies. This conversation reveals Napoleon, who sought aristocratic imperial glory yet whose institutions were perfected to liberty, preconditioned the content of public opinion reigning in Bourbon France.
The bildungsroman of Julien Sorel is straightforward. His journey begins among provincial nouveau aristocrats, then later among established Parisian nobility. In Verrières, his first beloved is Mme. de Rênal, and his first employer yet romantic roadblock is M. de Rênal. In Paris, his second beloved is Mlle. Mathilde de La Môle, and his second employer yet romantic roadblock is the Marquis de La Môle. After his first amour, he attends seminary in Besancon, and after his second amour, he attends his trial. This son of a carpenter knows the Latin New Testament without sanctity or understanding: “instead of these wise reflections, Julien’s soul, wandered in imaginary places. He’ll never make a good priest, nor a great administrator. Souls stirred like this are good, at best, for making artists. Here, Julien’s vanity bursts into the full light of day.”[32] His vanity is his art. His hypocrisy is his brush. And his personal life is his canvas. Will his paintings see the light of day?
Not fit for priesthood nor administration, he is best fit for artistry with his vain wanderings. Yet Julien is supposed to be a man of spirit, despite his “extraordinary ignorance” and “coarseness of his manners,” later receiving Father Pirard’s lessons in the diction of the Parisian nobility. His soul is a confused mixture of pride acquiring love but negating its flavor tasted. Because, “amid those sweetest moments” with Mme. de Rênal, he “remained victim of his bizarre pride” in “pretending to be a man accustomed to subjugating woman,” Julien “made unbelievable attempts to spoil what was loveable.” Unmindful yet remorseful, Julien had “the notion of duty” gripping “his attention,” afraid of remorse and scorn should he abandon his “ideal model” of himself. Stendhal concludes: “exactly what made Julien a superior being” prevented his “enjoying” his newfound “happiness.” A superior being of spirit, Julien is yet ignorant, coarse, but learning.
Victim to bizarre pride with illusions of virility, Julien keeps spoiling the loveable. Still, he must attend to duty, but duty to what? Stendhal says Julien is “like a young girl of sixteen, with a magnificent complexion, who before she goes to a ball” foolishly will “daub herself with rouge.”[33] Julien is a superior being whose makeup, his ideal model, inhibits his joining the happy few. Why? Well, his ideal life is modelled after Napoleon. Getting inspiration from the ancien regime, Mme. de Rênal looks to Catholicism, the black; Mlle. Mathilde looks to warrior ancestor, Joseph Boniface de La Môle, the red. Julien looks to enlightenment ideas contra religion and military glory contra royalism. When M. Sorel finds Julien reading idly, he beats his son and throws Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène into a river. “There were tears in his eyes, less from the physical pain than for the loss of his book, which he dearly loved.” Julien is in love, not with Napoleon, but his idea of Napoleon.
But Napoleon is not alone. “His repugnance” at proletariat life Julien got from “Rousseau’s Confessions,” the “only book that in any way helped him imagine the great world,” which alongside a “Grand Army bulletin” collection “and Memories of Napoleon on Saint-Helena, completed his personal Koran.” Ready to die “for these three books” and “never believe in any others,” Julien deemed “every other book in the world a pack of lies, written by swindlers trying to get ahead.” Despite his memorizing the Latin Vulgate and reading On the Pope by Joseph de Maistre, with “no more belief in the one than in the other,” in his intellectual confusion, “together with his fiery soul, Julien possessed one of those stunning memories so often linked to stupidity.”[34] His stupidity is the rouge he uses, the social convention that puts chains on man born free, for Julien in his solitary walks is a natural man with romantic dreams whose democratic covering debilitates his superiority.
Perhaps. It might be at least said, Julien Sorel feels, therefore Julien Sorel is.[35] Napoleon haunts not just Sorel, but the novel, which mentions his name over sixty times. Neither the red nor the black of aristocracy, the Catholic New Testament nor the reactionism of de Maistre, sway Julien, who is charmed instead by the red and the black of democracy, Bonaparte and Rousseau. How do these types fuse together inside his superior stupidity? Napoleon means the glories of imperial victory, while Rousseau means a sentimental education by experience. Thus the external heroic conquest turns inward into a spiritual struggle. Passion is rare in France, but in Julien? His nobility is not landed gentry, but spiritual. The aristocrat is the ultimate passionate man, but the Bourbon aristocracy, old and new, is devoted to vanity. All have vanity, but not all have passion. Whom do we imitate in a democracy, the New Testament and the Catholic Church, Joseph Boniface de La Môle and Joseph de Maistre, or Napoleon Bonaparte and Jean-Jacques Rousseau?
Democratic souls when in competition get envious at each as each seeks to be godlike. The nobility mistakenly try to retain its privileges by imitating the bourgeoise, thus the aristocracy becomes democratic through its hatred of democracy. This ruling class covers its cheeks with rouge before going to the ball. There is hypocrisy for vanity, such as how Julien and Mlle. Mathilde spar, and there is hypocrisy for profit, the successful banker. Put the two together, the doomed selfish striving for passion and the public climb to recognized success, and what one gets is Julien. Hypocrisy is how he makes his Napoleonic conquests of society. His duty to hypocrisy is his passion in vain amidst the tyranny of public opinion after Napoleon. Further, pride overtakes and corrupts romantic love without traditional hierarchies meant to channel pride. Our psychologist shows the tragedy of Julien Sorel is born of the perverse use of pride enabled by democracy.
Julien Sorel holds to new ideals of excellence, yet these ideals are historically acquired. New idols replaced old ones even in the countryside where Napoleon aided the two estates. Since his fall, “provincial manners rigidly suppress anything that smacked of gallantry.” As people fear dismissal from office, rogues seek support from the ultraroyalist Congregation of the Holy Virgin. Yet, for all types of persons, “hypocrisy has made excellent progress,” even among the liberals. As “boredom grows and grows,” only reading and farming remain available pleasures.[36] In this setting, what are upstarts to do? One way is to be class-conscious, which Julien had already gleaned from Rousseau. His knowledge of his societal status is tied up with his hypocrisy. “At church, all I ever see is God,” Julien tells his father, “a bit hypocritically, yet a fair and decent maneuver,” to avoid a paternal beating. Religion is a hypocrisy for justified social maneuvers, and Julien is a pro at it.
“And what would I be paid?” Julien, financially ambitious, asks his father, for he is aware of his petite-bourgeois standing: “I’m not interested in being a servant.” But, M. Sorel asks, “Why would I want my son to be a servant?” Clearly, his aggravated father wants his son to advance. Yet talk of mobility may go only so far. “But who will I be eating with?” Julien asks, embarrassing his father fearful “he might say something rash.” His father knows some topics are not to be broached, especially class politics. Objecting to his expected domestic status, for one of Napoleonic ambition and Rousseauian sensibility, he lacks honest self-awareness to strategically advance. Affectionless for the children adoring their good tutor, Julien banished household boredom but “his mind was elsewhere” in his “hatred and horror for the high society” where “he had been admitted—at the foot of the table,” true, which would “explain the hate and the horror.”[37] He detests as he climbs.
His prideful desires even inhibit his taking advantages of opportunities for his success. In refusing the marriage proposal by the Rênal chambermaid, Mademoiselle Elisa, whose “coming into some money” would provide the dowry for an enjoyable middle-class lifestyle. Julien refuses the offer, for “my secret ambition” is “to make my fortune.” But now he could have his fortune, yet this felicitous domestic offer is not the fortune he envisions. His duty for vanity means refusal to marry within his class. Money alone will not satisfy his desires. His refusal shows his pride conflicts with his luck. So what does it mean to be fortunate? How does a banker gain his fortune to become a savvy philosopher? But, Stendhal claims, “there is no need to prophesy terrible things for Julien.” His excuse, in slandering Mlle. Elisa, was “nicely created language” of “a crafty, prudent hypocrite,” which “at his age” was “hardly wickedness.” If the reader detects sarcasm, he should.
But Julien displayed integrity in his hypocrisy. Having sworn to say only what appeared fallacious, he was still amateurish in speech. Because “gestures” he used came from “country folk, he had never had the opportunity to watch the great models.” However, “given the chance to mingle with these gentlemen, he would become equally polished in both gesture and word.”[38] He would learn from the great models for how to be a better, more gentlemanly, hypocrite. Still, Julien can only learn so much by imitation. He remains impulsive for a fight: finding “all the apparatus of a provincial financier who considers himself a Don Juan” had “only made him think, once again, of the cudgeling he owned the man.” In this scene, Julien understands, “He had acquired the manners, but not the heart of his social status. For all his hypocrisy, so frequently practiced, he felt a heavy tear rolling down his cheek.”[39] And practicing hypocrisy is the paradigmatic virtue of Julien.
Finally leaving his father, Julien “thought that making a stop at church would be important to his hypocrisy.” At this first mention of his hypocrisy, Stendhal asks, “that word surprises you? Before arriving at so horrible a conclusion, the young peasant’s soul had traveled a long road.” He had seen dragoons from the Italian campaigns, heard tales of battle from the old surgeon-major, witness a church built, and heard of reactionaries punish liberals. When the surgeon-major died, Julien concealed his talk of Napoleon and declared his wish to become a priest, for, “Those who were on God’s side had won.” Stendhal exclaims, “Who could have imagined that this girlish face, sweet and pale, concealed an eradicable determination to risk a thousand deaths rather than fail to make his fortune!” And “making his fortune meant, first of all, leaving Verrières.” For his hometown “chilled his imagination.” His Napoleonic imaginings encourage his priestly vocation.
Since early childhood, Julien experienced “moments of exaltation.” Dreaming of delights to be found among Parisian ladies, “he would know how to attract their attention by some brilliant act.” These grandiose dreams were due to Napoleon. Why should not a Parisian woman love Julien like the Mme. de Beauharnais loved Bonaparte “while he was still poor.” Almost every hour for years, Julien recited: “Bonaparte, an obscure, poverty-stricken junior officer, had conquered the entire world with his sword.” This faith consoled him for his misfortune and doubled his pleasures. The church construction and the local justice of the peace inspire Julien, that since clerics wielded greater power than judicial officers, he chose black over red: “So the thing is: to become a priest.”[40] Or rather, his idea of the red gave him his first idea ever, to join his idea of the black. This faith in Napoleon allows Julien to imagine greater possibilities for his life than working like his father did.
Napoleon was a godsend, so Julien tells Mme. de Rênal. “God obviously sent Napoleon for the youth of France!” However, his fall from power gives cause for worry. “Who can take his place?” he wonders out loud. Without Napoleon, what will other miserable young men do, who, though richer than Julien, who have enough money for good educations, but not enough, at 20, to bribe the right people for a career? Julien sees Napoleon not as an inspiration for conquest, but as an example to emulate for boys to rise from obscurity so to master the world by their deeds alone. In contrast to the aristocratic model of heroic inspiration, where ancient deeds are emulated to inculcate modern virtue,[41] now democratic passions are the new fields of battle. Can Julien win the war there? “Whatever we do,” Julien deeply sighs, “this fateful, imperishable memory will forever keep us from being happy!’” The unhappy “us” can refer to the lovers, or all Julien Sorels.
Probably, Julien fears he and his beloved will not be one of the happy few in the modern era. The memory of Napoleon is the reason for why so few are happy. No one can replace his glory. But souls can try to feel like he did, but in vain. The reaction of Mme. de Rênal explains why it is so. At this speech, she frowns with “a cold, disdainful air,” since “that way of thinking” was “better suited to servants.” However, thankfully, since she was “raised with the idea that she was extremely rich, it pleased her to assume that Julien had been, too.” Her faux aristocratic pride is integral to her idea she was nobly born into riches, and she assigns this idea of inherited wealth to Julien. Of course, Julien was no born so. However, love covers multitudes of sins, or at least factual inconveniences. Thankfully, “she loved” Julien “a thousand times more than life itself, and never gave a thought to money.”[42] Only the wealthy can give no thought to money. But all may mistake love over life.
This triangle of the lover, the beloved, and an ideal we see again and again. Consider our hero on a Rousseauian solitary walk, a way to escape decadent society and return to our true nature. Julien standing on mountain rock gazes at the August sunlit sky. When the crickets finish singing, Julien is “surrounded by absolute silence.” Looking over leagues of countryside, he watches sparrow hawks fly in quiet circles. Julien eyes these “bird of prey,” as “the hawks’ quiet, powerful movements impressed him; he envied their strength; he envied their utter isolation.” Now comes his ideal. “That had been Napoleon’s destiny. Would it be his, one day?”[43] Napoleon is in his mind the perfection of what the solitary walker sees: the utterly isolated but strong hawk. Julien wishes not to escape society, but rule it. That is his fortune. And he strategically triangulates his loves like a bird of prey, or so he imagines. This is a chimera. And the perfect lover always invents new ones.
Julien is hawkish at his social hypocrisy. His “whole congeries of follies about the beloved” which he regards “true and beyond question” is his own Napoleonic life, all in his head, which he connects to new prospects. Yet his pride, the rouge, is his ruin. First, Julien turned down the offer of marriage by Mlle. Elisa and her newfound wealth. Second, he turns down the offer by Monsieur Fouqué to begin together a lucrative timber business. He could make a great conquest in love by nuptials, or make a great conquest in riches by business. Yet he moderates not his longings. With the money, Julien would “be in a better position to become a soldier, or a priest, whichever would be better, or whatever’s more in fashion, then.” Further, “alone up on this mountain,” Julien would cease encountering the “awful ignorance” of “high society.” But this mountain is not high enough. In both cases, a better lover of conquest continues his imaginings rather than seize real objects.
Can Julien achieve the destiny of Napoleon? Perhaps in his inward struggles. Wondering while wandering if he can soar as high, he also falls melancholically that he will not achieve greatly. This oscillation is reasonable given his character. Julien mountain hikes again, but feels no peace thanks to those proposed business plans. Julien, “like Hercules,” feels “poised in the balance—not between good and evil, but between the mediocrity of assured livelihood and all his heroic, youthful dreams.” An assured livelihood is mediocre compared to youthful heroic dreams. Beyond good and evil, he chooses between bourgeois fortune or dreams of grandeur. Julius Caesar wept when at age 32, Alexander had ruled supreme, but he had not yet accomplished as much.[44] Julien weeps as well: “I have no real steadiness,” which “makes doubt all the more dangerous.” For “not made of the wood from which great men can be carved, so I worry that eight years spent earning my bread might deprive me of the sublime energy which makes extraordinary things possible.”[45]
Napoleon represents new possibilities in the democratic age for bourgeois Frenchmen. But even with education and career, who can equal his achievements? As Fulcoz says, France stood her tallest in the eyes of the world in his reign of thirteen years: “Back then, there was something grand about everything we did.” But this nostalgia now corrupts the vain passions of equal citizens. Only a historical few extraordinaries can match Napoleon. Can only such few souls be happy in a democracy? Can they even appear in a democracy? Julien is extraordinary, but in spirit. His wars are within. He is not meant for sainthood nor lawgiving, but artistry through his inner personality. Since Rousseau cannot match Napoleon in battle, he provides new frontiers in educations of love. So Julien adapts his stratagems, as he climbs the social ladder, to the life of the mind. His quarrels make for good literature, but they would not make history. He conquers his world, not the world.
Julien is one of the few spiritually superior to the many with his Napoleonic love affairs. As his feelings encounter reality, his heroism is his willed hypocrisy, which in Rousseauian fashion contradicts social conventions. Physis is his heart, and nomos must bend towards it. It is his duty to himself. In this regard, Julien has unswervingly principled hypocrisy in fulfilling his Napoleonic complex. One summer night while speaking, “gesturing, he happened to touch Mme. de Rênal’s hand,” an accidental brush which lites the fuse of dynamite. Julien quickly withdraws his hand, but “it seemed his duty to arrange matters so that this hand would not be drawn back when he touched it.” He did not intend to start a love affair, but it was his duty of superior hypocrisy. “This notion of duty” Julien “was required to accomplish,” alongside his fear of ridicule to feel inferior if he did not finish his mission, “instantly drove all pleasure from his heart” when before enjoying himself.[46]
With women, Julien struggles between his sense of duty and his nervous attitude. In the Great Battle of the Hands with Mme. de Rênal, Julien has “too much contempt for himself and for others not to be aware of the state of his soul.” As a commander, he is still too ignorant, and nervous: “the frightful battle he had to wage against timidity was too far painful for him to notice anything outside himself.”[47] It comes to love or death. Furious at his cowardice to not dare yet make a move, Julien swears, “at the stroke of ten, either I will do what I had been promising to myself all day, or I’ll go upstairs and blow out my brains.”[48] Keeping her hand in his, “happiness flooded across his heart,” not because he loved her, but the “horrible torture was over.” In his mind, Julien “has done his duty, performed his act,” so happy enough to read exploits of Napoleon, yet he feels his duty is, saying “casually” on way to lunch, “I have to tell this woman I love her.”[49]
Thus far, his pride has won over his timidity. And these handholding skirmishes have tired our hero. Warrior Julien needs his sleep. While Mme. de Rênal fell asleep from her happiness, Julien was “mortally exhausted by the struggle in his heart, all day long, between shyness and pride.” Pride reveals all things, as Julien confesses his love of Napoleon to his first lover. But his internal triumph has an external effect. As their love affair continues which they consummate, Julien thinks he deserves better. He leaves her to go back to his room, having “thought it better suited his dignity to leave her in broad daylight, with an infinite recklessness.”[50] His pride triumphs, even at risk of exposure, which Mlle. Elisa enacts. After seminary, Julien meets his match in Mlle. Mathilde. He worships Napoleon, and she her ancestor. Both pridefully play hard to get out of their vanity. Their war games shed light on how democratic pride uplifts and deforms the passions.
Mlle. Mathilde is an example alongside Julien of passion distorted by pride. She demands proofs: “This young girl of high society let her heart be moved when, for good reasons, it ought to be moved.”[51] Now, love as a process can be scientifically understood, according to Stendhal. But to demand logic of what the heart wants is to misunderstand crystallization. Her love is born from her reason. One night, her enrapture by music had Mlle. Mathilde thinking of Julien as Mme. de Rênal had done before. It was love mentally constructed, but not by sentiment: “Mind-made love is of course subtler than true love, but its moments of enthusiasm are limited: it understands itself too well; it is always passing judgement. Rather than deranging the mind, it throbs only to the beating of thought.”[52] Mme. de Renal thinks of Julien by the heart, but Mlle. Mathilde by the head. This contrast suggests why Julien reverses his love from his second beloved to his first.
Public opinion still has its sway. Thanks to lessons from Prince Korasoff, Julien wins the jeu d'amour, as Mathilde later carries his child. The Marquis relents and gives Julien an aristocratic title and makes him a military officer. He shall successfully wed into the aristocracy. His inner wars and outer advancement have succeeded. The novel could end here, as Julien moves from one beloved to another, from the black to the red. In fact, the Marquis’ initial acquiescence mimics the earlier aristocratic desperation of the Chevalier de Beauvoisis. The misunderstanding for the duel, that he is not the man Julien saw at the café, illustrates how interchangeable these social types are. But the Chevalier must by honor duel an equal. In an aristocracy, aristocrats are equals. Here, this class straddles into democracy. Comically, Julien and the Chevalier think over in respectful but awkward talk how to find grounds of honor to duel. As honor can be bought, it can also be faked.[53]
The guillotine, however, cannot be bought. How Julien reacts to the letter by Mme. de Rênal exemplifies democratic love. Immediately riding on his horse to shoot her in church, Julien before forgot entirely Mme. de Rênal when he pursued Mathilde, yet, now the reverse occurs. He falls out of love with Mathilde, forgetting his betrothed and mother to his son, to be back in love with Mme. de Rênal. His crime, seemingly foolish, makes sense not as a love born in the head, but in the heart: such passion throbs beyond the beating of thought, it deranges the mind. But is Julien deranged in desiring death? He attempted to kill, and demands to be killed immediately: “Article 1342 of the Code is clear,” he tells the judge, “I deserve a sentence of death, and I expect it,” for “I’m making myself as guilty as you could ever want,” without difficulty nabbing the chased victim. Julien wants not out of jail but life: “Spare me, please, having to deal with you.” This is madness.
But does it have method? Used to misery, is death that bad? As Stendhal records, “His whole had been nothing but a long prelude to misery, nor did he have to worry that he might forget what commonly passed as the greatest event of all.”[54] An inversed Boethius, Julien takes the perspective of a “philosophical melancholy,” as he explains, “I never learned the art of enjoying life until I could see its end closing in on me.” He even refuses the hope to escape which Mathilde and Fouqué provide. Despondent, he rebukes his lawyer: “What do other people mean to me? My relationships to other people are going to be abruptly cut off.”[55] His death sentence is a suicide. He chooses “this greatest event of all.” It is not crazy, but deliberate. Why? His remarks feel that, Stendhal comments, thanks to “no exercise,” Julien gained “the lofty-minded, wan nature of a young German student.”[56] Maybe, Julien Sorel has joined the ranks of bankers and philosophers.
But has his pride entirely left Julien? No. Remorseless, he plans “to scatter pieces of gold among the crowd, as I go to the gallows. Thus joined to the idea of gold, my memory would be, for them, a truly resplendent thing.”[57] Still Napoleonic, he chooses a death for fame, not with the bourgeoise or aristocrats, but with the people instead. True, His melancholic philosophy partly results from learning Mme. de Rênal survived her attempted murder. Yet he constantly thinks of her, even having Mathilde give away her child to Mme. de Rênal: “In fifteen years, Madame de Rênal will adore my son, and you will have forgotten him.”[58] This bloodless command comes from his pride and love. His attempted murder was due to pride and love, as is his death wish and his desire to remembered by his true peers, the proletariat he defended at his trial, those who valorize Napoleon. And his new desire for forgiveness is also from these vain passions democracy mixes.
Still, the visit of Mme. de Rênal to the prison is ambiguous. She is pious, having repented of her adultery and exposing Julien Sorel. She sincerely believes in God, but “I believe, just as fervently, that the sin I’m committing is frightful.” She recalls he fired two pistol shots at her, yet they kiss. She confesses: “As soon as I see you, my whole sense of duty disappears, all that I am is my love for you—though the word love is much too feeble. What I feel for you is what I ought to feel only for God: a mixture of respect, and love, and obedience.” If Julien told her to attack the jailer with a knife, she would do it before she would know it. Julien has the power to command his beloved to sin. She worships him. He is equal with God to her, if not an idol replacement. She is maybe sacrificing her religion, at least her marriage by her visits. Perhaps Julien is affected by this charity. Love conquers all, says Virgil.[59] Could love for another person enlarge his heart:
Her voice was so sad that Julien embraced her with a happiness utterly new to him. This was not love’s drunkenness, but extraordinary gratitude. He had just seen, for the first time, the full extent of the sacrifice she’d made for him.[60]
This transformation can be interpreted variously. The pessimistic interpretation is that Julien has his vanity fulfilled. His inner battle is won. Having death means he has won at life. His vision of his identity is now complete. His apotheosis at the end, as Mathilde reenacts the legend of Queen Margot kissing the forehead of her beloved Joseph Boniface de La Mole, and then erects a shrine at his tomb, suggests his godlike status, as Mme. de Rênal suggested by her love. And her death, possibly from a broken heart, only three days later proves his conquest over both women. And he grows with his melancholic philosophy to see clearly about the nature of love. As he tells Mathilde, “You surely agree, my dearest, that passions are accidental, in these lives of ours, but they are accidents that happen to superior souls.”[61] Passions like love are accidents. Hope dies, faith fails, love ends. But love the passion exists only in superior souls, and Julien Sorel has felt it.
The lessons to learn from this interpretation of literature apply to political science, that of the danger of pride in democracy when not properly channeled.[62] It upsets normal affections, and must be given its proper due, so that the loves of life can be molded into virtuous habits of the heart. But there is a more hopeful lesson, that at death Julien is freed from his worldly pride. His recognition of the sacrifice his beloved makes changes not just how he feels, but how he is. His ability to love is renewed by being loved. René Girard gives this parable: “The conclusions of all the novels are reminiscent of an oriental tale in which the hero is clinging by his finger-tips to the edge of a cliff; exhausted, the hero finally lets himself fall into the abyss. He expects to smash against the rocks below but instead he is supported by the air: the law of gravity is annulled.”[63] In this hopeful interpretation,[64] Julien has an apotheosis closer to the books he rejected yet knew well.
But why is there only a happy few in a democracy? “To the Happy Few” was a phrase Stendhal frequented.[65] That dedication alludes to The History of Henry V, Act 4, Scene 3, where Shakespeare has King Henry give his “St. Crispin’s Day” Speech before his men at the Battle of Agincourt (1415). There he proclaims with aristocratic gusto, “If it be a sin to covet honor, / I am the most offending soul alive.” He further exclaims his ennoblement of the few men who fight for their conquering king upon this day, unlike the majority of gentlemen asleep in England: “This story shall the good man teach his son; / And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, / From this day to the ending of the world, / But we in it shall be remember’d. / We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; / For he to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile/ This day shall gentle his condition.” King Henry enlarges nobility to those who fight in war.
In that battle, the few were happy. The French have 60,000 men, the English have 12,000, yet the happy few win gloriously. The English longbow had defeated the French cavalry. If Julien indicates the tendency of democratic passions, then few are happier in democracy than aristocracy, perhaps. For Stendhal, there is some reprieve of spontaneous passion in Fabrizio del Dongo, an Italian aristocrat. In his travel memoirs, Stendhal identifies Italy with aristocratic enchantment.[66] The democratic levelling, like the longbow, removes aristocratic hierarchies that properly channel pride. Even where Tocquevillean democracy seems flourishing, there were losses. In America, as in France, public opinion intrudes into the private lives of democratic souls. Yet de Tocqueville knows that a democratic nation needs to emphasize inherited aristocratic elements to chasten its citizens. This premodern moral capital finances the republican principles for self-rule to flourish.
Stendhal creates fictions to protect private life. Yet, he says in_The Charterhouse of Parma_—“‘Where I am going,’ I told my friends, ‘there will be no parties like this one, and to while away the long evenings I shall make a novel out of your story’.” Unlike life at the Canon’s Salon, where Stendhal parties with the nephew and learns a story about the Duchess Sanseverina, no such goods happen in France. Public opinion reigns in France, England, and the United States, but in Italy? The contrasts between France and Italy are stark. Stendhal must be careful, for “this tale is anything but moral,” and “the French” take “pride” in “gospel purity.” The dichotomy within France is French pride in gospel purity versus “the reputation of an assassin.” To speak of Italian private life in a story wins ill repute. In Italy, things are different: “hearts in that country differ altogether from those in France.” Public opinion has not yet invaded. Democracy has not yet arrived.
The dichotomy between French hearts and Italian hearts is stark. Italians, “sincere, honest people,” when “not intimidated will say what they think,” and “only intermittently are they subject to vanity,” which on such occasion “becomes a passion” by name of “puntiglio,” but this passion does “not hold poverty up to ridicule.” The Italians are not tainted by love of commercial interests that coincide with democratic peoples. The gospel pure French are opposite, without the Italian “irregularities of nature,” having (sarcastically) “lofty morality and the graces” who “love money above all things and never sin out of love or hate,” while “Italians in this tale are virtually opposite.” The French public is in love with financial gain, while the sincere, occasionally vain, Italians sin out of love and hate, passions, that is. This dichotomy of nations extends further to regimes.
It is Italy versus England, France, and America, where public opinion reigns. In Italy, private life still subsists. Stendhal reinforces this point: “each time we venture two hundred leagues from South to North, we confront a new novel as well as a new landscape.”. Here in Parma is seen the alternative to The Red and the Black, a different novel and landscape where “characters, seduced by passions” Stendhal cannot share, happen to “descend to profoundly moral actions,” for “such things are no longer done in a country where the sole passion surviving all the rest is for money, the means of vanity” (105). So is puntiglio aided by passion for the money? Is private life here also eaten up by monetary effects of public opinion reigning on heartstrings and purse strings? This issue of private life versus public opinion, passion versus money, consolidates into the ruin of aristocratic, old world honor privately held in conversational esteem by democratic levelling.[67] Does democracy gone wrong beat and bloody men of spirit until they turn black and red all over?