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Abstract
This article presents a new and topical reading of Julien Sorel as a fanatic, and questions, in the process, Julien’s traditional status as an exemplar and embodiment of Stendhalian values (energy, imagination, freedom). In particular, it sets out how Stendhal’s account of fanaticism proves unexpectedly ‘double’, for fanaticism produces both freedom (as in the case of the exemplary Charlotte Corday) and servitude, to a person (Napoleon) or to an idea (honour, duty, heroism). Only in some very limited respects will Julien emerge as the new Charlotte Corday (a tyrannicide); rather he stands principally revealed as Napoleon’s delusional victim, the new Séïde (from Voltaire’s Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète): an unthinking would-be killer who passes like a storm, doing harm seemingly at random, and achieving nothing.
Notes
1 See Romain Colomb’s account of how Le Rouge came by its title (1845: 73–74) and Stendhal (2005–14, ii, 262; hereafter Orc), to cite only one example, for the continued use of Julien. Carol A. Mossman pays a great deal of attention to the onomastics of Julien (1984: 80 and passim). Mathilde and its declensions (Matilde, Métilde), might be seen as the more interesting name from a Stendhalian perspective. In the same way that Le Rouge is Julien’s story, La Chartreuse de Parme is transparently Fabrice’s, opening with the circumstances surrounding his conception and seemingly closing with his death. Yet the novel opens and closes also with Gina, and the ‘Avertissement’ very startlingly refers to it as ‘l’histoire de la duchesse Sanseverina’ (Orc, iii: 141): ‘l’aimable nièce du chanoine avait connu et même beaucoup aimé la duchesse Sanseverina, et me prie de ne rien changer à ses aventures, lesquelles sont blâmables’ (Orc, iii: 142; my italics). It is more than possible that Le Rouge et le Noir is likewise Mathilde’s story: it certainly reads better that way. Scott (Citation2005) is revelatory in this respect.
2 Stendhal’s notion of great men henceforth emerging from the criminal classes was derived from the Italian tragedian Vittorio Alfieri, whom he quotes to this effect in the 1826 edition of Rome, Naples et Florence (Stendhal, Citation1973: 426).
3 See Ansel (Citation2001: 152–57) for a careful account of Julien’s affective relationship with Napoleon, and also with Mathilde’s exemplars. See Manzini (Citation2004: 293–331) for what I now think is an unconvincing account of Julien as not just Napoleon’s imitator, but also his emulator.
4 See Durand (Citation1959), for a one-eyed comparison of Julien and Lucien; see Hemmings (Citation1964: 132–62) for a much more balanced view.
5 ‘Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society’ (Marx, Citation1984: 11). ‘Les grands hommes de la Révolution furent les victimes de Plutarque. Toujours l’art d’après l’art, la politique d’après la politique’ (Cocteau, Citation1957, i: 50).
6 ‘C’est un jacobin qui parle’ (Orc, i: 787).
7 The debate, reopened by Žižek, emerges clearly enough already from John of Salisbury’s influential, albeit left-field, defence of tyrannicide in Policraticus (c. 1159).
8 See also Trousson (Citation2008) and Kelly (Citation2008) for analyses of the divergent attitudes to fanaticism exhibited by Voltaire and Rousseau.
9 Stendhal appears to have long engaged with Voltaire’s tragedies, and in particular Mahomet. On 1 January 1803, Stendhal drew up a schematic table of tragic situations in which he foregrounded the opposition of ‘religion’ and ‘fanatisme’, seemingly in a nod towards Voltaire’s Zaïre and Mahomet (Stendhal, 19[67–]74, xxxiii: 82–83). On 9 August 1803, Stendhal noted: ‘Faire une tragédie morale sur le pouvoir du fanatisme. Un druide faisant massacrer un roi’ (xxxiii: 212). In April 1804, Stendhal observed that ‘Toutes les superstitions sont amies’, citing by way of example ‘Tartufe et Mahomet persécutés’ (316): both these plays were banned at various stages under both the Empire and the Restoration (xxxvii: xxiii). Mahomet is cited semi-approvingly in Racine et Shakspeare II (1825) as a (neo)classical play that will last alongside the works of Corneille and Racine (xxxvii: 81). However, Stendhal worried about the over-emphatic quality of Voltaire’s verse, particularly in Mahomet, his most oft-cited example (xxxvii: 81 [Racine et Shakspeare II], xlvi: 144 [Letter for the English Press of 14 October 1825]).
10 See Brombert (Citation1988: 164–82) for an account of Stendhal as a reader of Rousseau.
11 Julien’s ‘Ainsi la mort, la vie, l’éternité, choses fort simples pour qui aurait les organes assez vastes pour les concevoir’ (Orc, i: 799) draws on Rousseau’s ‘Nous n’avons point la mesure de cette machine immense, nous n’en pouvons calculer les rapports’ (1966: 348); earlier in the same chapter (book 2, chapter 44), Stendhal also paraphrases both Du contrat social and La Nouvelle Héloïse (Stendhal, 19[67–]74, ii: 618–19).
12 Stendhal cites an example of Linguet’s wit in his Journal (19[67–]74, xxviii: 194); it is later in the same entry for 21 November 1804 that he announces his intention to ‘dérousseauiser mon jugement’ (195). In 1829, however, in Les Gens dont on parle, he comments on the absurdity of contemporary (as opposed to posthumous) literary reputations: ‘En 1788, on parlait autant du journaliste Linguet que de Voltaire’ (xxxv: 176). In an article for the English press of 8 February 1830, he goes still further: ‘Aucun homme de lettres, actuellement vivant, n’est aussi célèbre que Linguet, auteur d’un journal et de quelques ouvrages ridicules, ne l’était en France, quelques années avant la Révolution’ (XLVI: 186). Stendhal proceeds to discuss Linguet’s politic prudence in not attacking the clergy, despite the anticlericalism of his private views (186).
13 This is the name ascribed by the Crusaders to Rashid ad-Din Sinan, the leader of the sect of the Assassins, as well as the title of a minor work by Voltaire (1772). Voltaire refers to ‘Le Vieux de la montagne’ critically in his entry on ‘Fanatisme’ in the Dictionnaire philosophique (1964: 190).
14 The original passage, from a review of the Mémoires de Lekain, had appeared in the Journal des Débats on 4 July 1801.
15 See Butler (Citation2000) for an account of Antigone’s revolutionary significance, especially in feminist terms.
16 Alfieri had brought the story of Antigone up to date in a different way, by composing a tragedy in her honour in 1782. Stendhal lists this amongst Alfieri’s works in the 1817 edition of Rome, Naples et Florence (1973: 163).
17 See Marcandier-Colard (Citation1998: 121–29) for an account of Charlotte Corday’s place in the Romantic imaginary.
18 See Blin (Citation1958) and Scott (Citation2013) for highly productive readings of Stendhal partly inspired by existentialism.
19 See also Manzini (Citation2014) for an account of political inconséquence in Stendhal.
20 Cincinnati presumably because this city was settled by veterans of the successful American Revolution and named after Cincinnatus, the farmer who briefly became a military dictator only to return to being a farmer the moment Rome’s enemies had been defeated; Stendhal compares Washington to Cincinnatus in the Promenades dans Rome (1973: 815).
21 See Crouzet (Citation1987) for a peculiar attempt to rehabilitate fourberie as a Stendhalian value.
22 Stendhal devotes three chapters of the Vie de Napoléon to Napoleon’s account of the circumstances surrounding the Duc d’Enghien’s arrest and execution (1998: 59–64).
23 Stendhal draws a parallel between Mahomet and Napoleon in the Vie de Napoléon (1817–18): ‘Vaut-il la peine de rapporter les objections des gens qui se croient délicats et qui ne sont que faibles? Ils disent que le ton avec lequel le général Bonaparte offrit la liberté aux Italiens était celui de Mahomet prêchant l’Alcoran la sabre à la main’ (1998: 24). Stendhal uses the same work to dismiss rumours of Napoleon’s conversion to Islam (33–36): ‘L’idée qu’il a voulu se faire passer sérieusement pour un second Mahomet est digne d’un émigré’ (36).