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Psychological Time and Revolutionary Action in Le Rouge et le noir
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Extract
THIS PAPER seeks to investigate the social and revolutionary implications of a predisposition toward violence (variously called “virtu” or “énergie”) so typical of Stendhal's characters. It will aim at showing that when the individual's psychological need for action is frustrated by a stagnant society, he will attempt to shatter the structure that confines him to inaction. Such a temperamental predisposition is all the more likely to become a revolutionary act when the “times are out of joint.”1 Indeed, an important aspect of the revolutionary mentality is what one might call the “chiliastic” experience of time.2
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973
References
1 In the preface to his classic work on the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky analyzes the “chronic lag of ideas and relations behind new objective conditions,” and characterizes a revolution as “that leaping movement of ideas and passions” which bridges the gap. The History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman (Garden City, ?. Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), p. x. The Restoration, worse than lagging behind objective conditions, was a conscious attempt to widen this gap by moving backwards in time. What Trotsky calls the “swift, intense and passionate changes in the psychology of classes . . . [which] directly determine the dynamic of revolutionary events” would therefore appear to redouble in speed if the two movements head in opposite directions.
2 Karl Mannheim has traced the association of chiliasm and revolution to the German Anabaptists of the 16th century, and in particular to Thomas Miinzer. According to his analysis, “Chiliasm has always accompanied revolutionary outbursts and given them their spirit. When this spirit ebbs and deserts these movements, there remains behind in the world a naked mass-frenzy and a despiritualized fury. Chiliasm sees the revolution as a value in itself, not as an unavoidable means to a rationally set end, but as the only creative principle in the immediate present, as the longed-for realization of its aspirations in this world,” Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, 1967), p. 217.
3 “Matérialisme et Révolution,” in Situations in (Paris:Gallimard, 1949), p. 216.
4 Many interesting, though perhaps deceptive, parallels could be drawn between Sartre's allegorical, fly-infested Argos and the social setting of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir: Aegisthus' sway over the city is a kind of Restoration of divine prerogatives, offiicaldom's longing for order has in both cases become a ritualization of the past; and the hero, in his search for commitment and identity, feels hamstrung by the rigidity of his society. One could even make a case for the similarities between Sartre's “liberating act” and Stendhal's cult of energy. But Julien, unlike Orestes, is not in every sense Everyman: his existential quest for identity pits him not so much against the limitations of the human condition as it does against the political realities of the Restoration and the social restrictions imposed upon his class. The consciousness he gains in his struggle to rise to the top of the social ladder is very specifically a consciousness of class.
5 Une position sociale, 1832, quoted by Claude Roy in Stendhal par lui-même (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1951), p. 111.
6 “Compagne d'un homme tel que Julien, auquel il ne manque que de la fortune que j'ai, j'exiterai continuellement l'attention, je ne passerai point inaperçue dans la vie. Bien loin de redouter sans cesse une révolution comme mes cousines, qui de peur du peuple n'osent pas gronder un postillon qui les mène mal, je serai sûre de jouer un rôle et un grand rôle, car l'homme que j'ai choisi a du caractère et une ambition sans bornes” (p. 353). Later on, in the letter to her irate father, Mathilde again refers to Julien's role in the coming revolution: “S'il y a révolution, je suis sûre pour lui d'un premier rôle. Pourriezvous en dire autant d'aucun de ceux qui ont demandé ma main?” (p. 433). (All quotations of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir are taken from the Garnier edition, Paris, 1961).
7 “Julien, s'exagérant cette expérience, croyait à Mlle de La Mole la duplicité de Machiavel. Cette scélératesse prétendue était un charme à ses yeux, presque l'unique charme moral qu'elle eût. L'ennui de l'hypocrisie et des propos de vertu le jetaient dans cet excès” (p. 318). “Ce machiavélisme la frappait. Qu'elle profondeur! se disait-elle; quelle différence avec les nigauds emphatiques ou les fripons communs, tels que M. Tanbeau, qui tiennent le même langage” (p. 413).
8 For the Stendhalian conception of time and the simultaneity of feeling and action, see Georges Poulet, Mesure de l'instant (Paris: Pion, 1968), pp. 238–41.
9 According to the Hegelian conception of History, the idea of a historical reality becomes visible only after the event. In the final paragraph of his preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel addresses himself to social reformers: “Only one more word concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose, philosophy, at least, always comes too late. Philosophy as the thought of the world does not appear until reality has completed its formative process and made itself ready,” trans. J. W. Dyde (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1896), p. xxx. One might comment that even though philosophy cannot rejuvenate the past (the way Stendhal's heroes cannot relive their own lives), the creative author can vicariously be born again through his fictional characters. All of his heroes live the kind of life Stendhal would have wished for himself.
10 Georg Lukâcs discusses the novelist's method of creatingcharacters whose role is similar to that of Hegel's “worldhistorical individuals,” except that the fictional character is not necessarily as conscious of his historic mission. See The Historical Novel (Boston: Beacon, 1963), p. 38.
11 Mesure de l'instant, p. 241.
12 The word “consecrated” should be understood in its full etymological significance, since a willful disruption of the sacred order of nature and divine providence possesses, for the conservative mind, something of the sacrilegious. Julien's precipitate drive to the top (itself a revolutionary undertaking since he refuses to be immured within the confines of his class) challenges both the secular order and the religious sanctions lying behind it. It is no wonder that Mme de Renal should experience her adultery with Julien as a direct challenge to God, or that Mathilde should feel a perverse joy at defying her religious upbringing. But more than a challenge of the divine command against adultery, their love for Julien is a transgression of the social command against intimacy with an inferior.
13 Mesure de l'instant, p. 235.
14 Mannheim, p. 235. See also the same author's indispensable study Das konservative Denken.
15 The sole exception might be Michel Chrétien, who appears episodically in Illusions perdues as one of d'Arthez's dedicated companions, and whose violent death during the July Revolution is evoked in Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan. It is clear, however, that Chretien's mildly liberal opinions have nothing particularly revolutionary about them—and his death during the July battles is one of those romantically noble gestures void of any social importance. Peter Demetz (in Marx, Engels and the Poets) mentions Michel Chrétien as one of those figures whose political opinions might explain the continued fascination of Marxist criticism with Balzac. But he goes on to show that even this hero—the most “revolutionary” Balzac ever created—is far from incarnating advanced political thoughts.
16 In his prison cell, Julien reproaches himself for being so unfeeling toward a passion which, only two months previously, had been so powerful: “Il est singulier, se disait Julien, un jour que Mathilde sortait de sa prison, qu'une passion si vive et dont je suis l'objet me laisse tellement insensible; et je l'adorais il y a deux mois!” (p. 270).
17 This is what happens in the typical novel of Balzac. His “ambitious young men” usually “sell out to the Establishment,” as the current jargon has it. Both Lucien de Rubempré and Rastignac eventually become tainted by their surroundings.
18 This is the definition of “ignis fatuus” given by Webster's New World Dictionary.
19 Gaston Bachelard, La Psychanalyse du feu (Paris :Gallimard, 1938), p. 115. See also page 21 : “Si tout ce qui change lentement s'explique par la vie, tout ce qui change vite s'explique par le feu.”
20 Stendhal's topographical imagery for Julien's ambition reminds one of the famous lines in Julius Caesar, n.1 :
But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face,
But when he once attains the utmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scourning the base degrees
By which he did ascend
21 Walter Benjamin, “Uber den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Die Neue Rundschau (1950), p. 568.
22 Denis de Rougemont, L'Amour et l'occident (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1962), p. 44.
23 Julien's affirmation of life in the face of death reminds us of the Sisyphus of Camus. It is from this moment, when the individual faces up to the absurdity of life, that he truly begins to live. Henceforth, life becomes the continuous affirmation of an irreducible, absurd contradiction: the contradiction between man's infinite desires and the realization of his finitude.
Camus goes on to show in L'Homme révolté that “La première et la seule évidence qui me soit. . . donné à l'intérieur de l'expérience absurde, est la révolte. . . . Elle crie, elle exige, elle veut que le scandale cesse…. Son souci est de transformer,” L'Homme révolté, in Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 419. We are not concerned here with Julien's metaphysical revolt against “la condition humaine,” although it is of course impossible to make an absolute distinction between this kind of revolt and socialpolitical revolution.