If it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between Stendhal’s descriptions of the solitary yet frightfully ambitious Bonaparte and his descriptions of the solitary yet frightfully ambitious Sorel, that has a lot to do with the fact that Julien obsessively emulates the Napoleonic example. At eighteen, he is an expert in the history of Napoleonic campaigns and an avid reader of Emmanuel de Las Cases’s Le mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (The Memorial of Saint Helena), which chronicles the author’s conversations with the deposed emperor and reflects on various aspects of Napoleon’s military career and political legacy. More than that, Julien measures his every step through the comparison with Napoleon: “for years now, Julien had never let an hour of his life pass without telling himself that Bonaparte, an obscure lieutenant without fortune, had made himself master of the globe with his sword.” And if Napoleon could do it, why couldn’t he do the same?
The difficulty is that, although the Napoleonic example looms large in the popular imagination, Julien begins his conquest in a decisively anti-Napoleonic era, in which power resides with the conservatives for whom Napoleon is hardly more than a usurper. Julien will have to adapt: “[W]hen Bonaparte first made a name for himself, France was afraid of being invaded; military prowess was necessary and in fashion. Nowadays you find priests of forty earning a hundred thousand francs, in other words three times as much as the famous generals in Napoleon’s army. … The answer is to be a priest.” Given that in Restoration France the path to success goes through the Catholic Church, he must be able to impress with the strength of his religious devotion. He begins by memorizing the whole New Testament in Latin and then goes on to develop a convincing acting routine: “[W]hat endless trouble he took to attain that facial expression of fervent and blind faith, ready to believe and suffer anything, that is so often encountered in monasteries in Italy, and of which Guercino has left us laymen such perfect models in his church paintings.” The look in his eyes, the position of his hands as he walks—those are the signs of faith, and those he must meticulously practice if he wants to get anywhere.
But applying Napoleonic lessons in this world hostile to Napoleonic legacy inevitably leads to an internal conflict. In Julien’s eyes, Napoleon is not simply an exceptionally successful parvenu who has managed to rise to the top of the pyramid of power, but rather a man who has managed to impose his own revolutionary social vision on France and on Europe. A stark contradiction therefore defines Julien’s project: he relies on the revolutionary figure of Napoleon, whom he adores, in order to secure a place among the reactionary elites whom he despises. To do so, he will have to dissociate ambition from inward belief and become something of a professional hypocrite, a fact underscored by the narrator’s constant reminders that he has learned by heart the title role from Molière’s comedy Tartuffe, or The Impostor.
However, we are not in Balzac’s universe just yet. In Balzac’s works, principles mean nothing: in Illusions perdues and Splendeurs, both personal and ideological loyalties are easily discarded in the name of success. In Stendhal’s, we can still register what Franco Moretti describes as “a sensation of being bound, despite lies and compromises, to one’s ‘laws of the heart.’” The dramatic opposition between inward beliefs and outward appearances still requires a resolution, and Stendhal hints at one by offering Julien the opportunity to bring his fantasies of upward movement closer to the Napoleonic model that he cherishes.
Toward the end of the novel, he is preparing to marry Mathilde de la Mole, who now carries his child. In order to avoid the embarrassment of giving his daughter’s hand to a carpenter’s son, the marquis provides Julien with a false noble identity: from now on he is to be known as Monsieur le Chevalier Julien Sorel de La Vernaye. Julien immediately interiorizes the character that the marquis hastily invented for his use: “[C]ould it really be possible, he wondered, that I might be the natural son of some great lord driven into exile in our mountains by the terrible Napoleon? This idea seemed less improbable to him with every passing moment. … My hatred for my father would be proof of it. … I shouldn’t be a monster any more!” What attracts him even more is the fact that his title comes with an officer’s rank. Although he has no military experience—he has only recently learned how to ride a horse—Julien immediately begins to fantasize about military achievements: “[H]e was hardly a lieutenant, promoted through favouritism a mere two days ago, and he was already calculating that to be a commander-in-chief at thirty at the very latest, like all great generals, it was essential at twenty-three to be more than a lieutenant. He thought of nothing but glory, and his son.” As Julien begins to think of himself as a great military leader in waiting, the reader is tempted to conclude that he is losing his mind and that dissimulation has started to verge on delusion. And yet, this is a moment of symbolic fulfilment: a young lieutenant, he is precisely where Napoleon was at the beginning of his career, which means that he is finally able to imagine his own ascent in properly Napoleonic terms. He is not just successful, but on the way to greatness.
Unfortunately, not for very long. Just as Julien begins to indulge the fantasy of becoming a heroic figure, the novel takes a sharp melodramatic turn: his prospects are ruined by a scathing letter from the former lover, Mme de Rênal, which exposes Julien as a shameless hypocrite who will stop at nothing in his desire “to acquire status and to turn himself into a somebody.” Denounced to the marquis in such a way, he attempts a very theatrical murder of Mme de Rênal in a crowded church. Even though he fails, and even though the woman he has tried to murder forgives him and becomes his most ardent defender, Julien is executed.
Paradoxically, it is in this defeat that Julien gets to embody the Napoleonic example most fully. Among many other things, Napoleon was also a man who rose to a position of highest prominence, disturbing the traditional order of things throughout the Continent, only to be declared an outlaw and exiled to a godforsaken island by an unprecedented coalition of old European monarchies. In March 1815, as he was mounting his final attempt to reconquer Paris, his efforts were denounced by the leading European powers as a “last attempt of criminal and impotent delirium.” The Declaration of Vienna, signed by the representatives of Britain, Russia, Austria, Sweden, Portugal, Prussia, and Spain states that “Napoleon Bonaparte has placed himself without the pale of civil and social relations; and that, as an enemy and disturber of the tranquility of the world, he has rendered himself liable to public vengeance.” Speaking in the name of “all the Sovereigns of Europe,” the Declaration really speaks for the old monarchical order that the French Revolution and Napoleon’s emergence disrupted; it is in many ways a statement of rejection through which the exclusive club of the great European royal houses refuses the attempt of the usurper Bonaparte to claim his place among them, despite the fact that he was by then married to the daughter of the Austrian emperor.
It is precisely this sense of exclusion from a world to which one unsuccessfully tries to belong that colors the ending of Le rouge et le noir. Without denying the murder charge laid against him, Julien insists that he is really persecuted for his ambition: “I see around me men who have no time for any pity that my youth might deserve, and who will wish to punish in me and for ever discourage this generation of young men who, being born into an inferior class and in some sense ground down by poverty, have the good fortune to get themselves a decent education, and the audacity to mingle in what the rich in their arrogance call society.” As with Napoleon, the underlying crime is that he has tried to upset the established order of things.
The reasons for Julien’s demise are structural: as Maurice Samuels has argued, in the universe of Le rouge et le noir, the Restoration is a suffocating era of rigid political control that offers no place for the great ambitions and grand achievements that marked the Napoleonic period. To the novel’s central question—how does a man of humble origin become someone in Restoration France?—Stendhal offers the obvious answer: he doesn’t. What is more difficult to fathom, however, is Julien’s willingn
ess to embrace his own defeat in the wake of Mme de Rênal’s damning letter. Critics have long been puzzled by the fact that he makes no attempt to undo the damage and continue his conquest. Quite to the contrary, he appears to relish the sudden loss of control. Following the almost instinctive shooting of Mme de Rênal, Julien refuses to mount any kind of meaningful defense during his trial and begins to look less like a disciplined social climber and more like a defeated Romantic rebel, intermittently resigned and emotionally exuberant, self-destructive, and melancholy. This split can be explained by the fact that Le rouge et le noir stands at an important ideological and aesthetic threshold. On the one hand, it professes a commitment to a realist aesthetics—Stendhal’s narrator famously compares the novel to a mirror carried along the road to reflect various aspects of reality—while on the other, it refuses to fully let go of an essentially idealized, heroic image of social conquest, rooted simultaneously in the historical example of Napoleon and the literary legacy of Romanticism.
Balzac leaves little space for such ambiguities. In his mature novels, the commitment to analytical rigor seems absolute. As he writes in the 1842 introduction to La comédie humaine, “[S]ocial species have always existed, and will always exist, just as there are zoological species. If Buffon could produce a magnificent work by attempting to represent in a book the whole realm of zoology, was there not room for a work of the same kind on society?” While by no means averse to chance and melodrama, Balzac wants a system; he wants the laws of society clearly expounded and social types classified. In many ways, this is precisely what he delivers: a uniquely comprehensive vision of French society as a complex system in which the interaction between a variety of social groups—from bankers to journalists and from idealist writers to petty merchants—is described in painstaking detail. And yet, Balzac’s project seems to transcend its own analytical assumptions: as he works to describe an ordered system, Balzac discovers an equivocal social universe whose laws are many and inconsistent, a universe full of economic and political uncertainty, riddled with innumerable intrigues, and one in which upward social movement is no longer a uniquely audacious endeavor, but everyone’s fantasy. At the heart of this complex world, we find Lucien de Rubempré.
Like Julien Sorel before him, Lucien is young, ambitious, poor, and buried deep in the provinces, where he fantasizes about future glory: “[S]ooner or later his genius would shine, like that of so many other men, his predecessors who have triumphed over society.” For Balzac too, the source of such fantasies is the Napoleonic example, which, “unfortunately for the nineteenth century, inspired great ambitions in so many mediocre men.” And while Napoleon will continue to be a key reference point in both Illusions perdues and Splendeurs—Lucien’s failures are compared with Napoleon’s withdrawal from Russia and his defeat at Waterloo—history is present in the novel in a more intricate way, a fact reflected in Lucien’s family background. Lucien’s father, Monsieur Chardon, was a republican military surgeon turned provincial chemist. Lucien’s mother, the last living member of the noble family de Rubempré, has miraculously survived the mass beheadings of 1793, soon thereafter becoming Madame Chardon. And in a further step down the social ladder after the sudden death of her husband, the woman who once bore the illustrious name de Rubempré became the village nurse, known simply as Madame Charlotte. Given this family history, Lucien can perhaps claim a connection to a noble house, but not more than that. The transition of titles generally follows the male line, and for all intents and purposes he is the chemist’s son, Lucien Chardon. To claim otherwise is to commit a punishable offense, in theory at least.
But theory seldom applies. Although Lucien’s narrative, like Julien’s, takes place during the Restoration, at the time when royal prerogatives—among them the right to dispense noble titles—are taken seriously, no one can quite forget that the genie was let out of the bottle, that just a few years earlier a new nobility was created, and that Napoleon generously gave away the titles of barons and dukes. In fact, one of these new nobles, a certain Baron du Châtelet, will be the first to introduce Lucien to the world of aristocratic salons. In a sense, du Châtelet is self-invention embodied. Born simply Sixte Châtelet, and without any actual aristocratic pedigree, he had added the particle du, which indicates nobility, before his last name during the early days of the empire. Soon, he started to rise through the ranks of imperial bureaucracy, receiving from Napoleon the title of baron. After the fall of the empire, we find him in a self-imposed exile, but he is soon back to become a part of the Parisian high society that Lucien seeks to penetrate. More than that, by the end of Illusions perdues, the Napoleonic baron is made a duke by a royal patent. No doubt, Châtelet is meant to embody a paradigmatic destiny: a usurper turned into a baron by the greater usurper Bonaparte, then turned into a count under the restored monarchy. And if du Châtelet can do it, why shouldn’t Lucien?
It is not entirely surprising, then, that Lucien is incited to follow du Châtelet’s example. As his protectress, Louise de Bargeton, tells him early on in Illusions perdues, the sooner he begins the process by taking his mother’s family name, the sooner he can hope to have his decision legitimized by royal patent. The logic, it soon becomes clear, goes something like this: a noble name is a tremendous source of social capital; along with Lucien’s beauty, his poetic talent, his status as a protégé of a fashionable lady, this should be enough to secure him a place in high society. Louise further elaborates: “You cannot imagine how helpful it is to young talent to be placed in the limelight of high society! I will get an introduction for you to Mme d’Espard; no one has ever found it easy to get an entrée into her drawing room, where you will meet all the great: ministers, ambassadors, orators of the Chamber, the most influential peers, wealthy and famous people of every kind.” Somewhere along the way, as Lucien’s fame grows, the king will officially sanction the use of the name de Rubempré. And once he earns the royal stamp of approval, becoming a “proper” rather than a self-made nobleman, new opportunities will arise. He could certainly count on a rich marriage, perhaps even a position in the king’s court. And after that—who knows? Even the unapproachable Mme d’Espard seems to support a version of this doctrine: “[I]f you announce at a reception where there are English girls worth millions, or wealthy heiresses, “M. Chardon,” that is one thing, but “M. le Comte de Rubempré” is quite another matter. If he is in debt, a count finds everyone willing to help him, and his good looks are brought out like a diamond in a rich setting. We have not invented these ideas, we found them in force everywhere, even among the middle classes.” Self-invention, it seems, is the way of the world.
In the universe inhabited by so many self-made noblemen, a single powerful assumption preoccupies the heroes of the French realist bildungsroman: you are not who you are, you are who you appear to be. After all, if a Corsican lieutenant was able to call himself the emperor of the French, why shouldn’t a son of a chemist call himself de Rubempré? Stendhal’s Julien Sorel had already mastered the art of appearance when he managed to get himself noticed by assuming the pose of religious devotion. Balzac’s heroes follow his lead. In Goriot, Rastignac quickly abandons his law studies, understanding full well that what he needs to master in order to make a career is not the penal code but the code of conduct in fashionable salons. In Illusions perdues, Lucien repeatedly puts all of his efforts (and all of his money) into looking like a man who belongs in fashionable society. To strike the right pose, to speak in the proper idiom, to wear the appropriate clothes, in a word, to look like you belong there: those are the keys to Parisian high society.
Lucien will spend most of Illusions perdues and Splendeurs attempting to achieve this alchemical transformation of nothing into something, and of something into something more. His first steps are rather unpersuasive. Introduced to the illustrious Mme d’Espard and her circle, he is quickly recognized for what he is: an ambitious provincial with no understanding of proper etiquette. As Mme d’Espard tells Louise de Bargeton, who br
ought Lucien to Paris, “[Y]ou must wait until the son of a chemist is really a celebrity before you take him up.” Forced to withdraw from the Parisian stage, Lucien tries to reenter it through the back door of journalism: he will attempt to make his name as a newspaper critic and a political commentator, accumulate a certain amount of social power, and try to use his influence to regain a place in the world that banished him. Perhaps then he will be enough of a celebrity to procure the royal patent and legally call himself de Rubempré. And yet, after much nasty scheming he has achieved precisely nothing, squandering in the process an extravagant amount of money, most of it not his own. Exiled back to the provinces, at the end of the novel he can only try to repeat the initial trick: dress well, go into a salon, and hope for the best. Once again, to no avail.
Perhaps Lucien has been a bit too hasty, and perhaps he has taken things too literally, but is he fundamentally wrong in assuming that he can get hold of his mother’s name and carve for himself a niche in the Parisian salons? It will take Balzac another voluminous novel to answer that question. At the beginning of Splendeurs, Lucien emerges as a protégé of Vautrin, the mysterious criminal who had unsuccessfully tried, in Goriot, to enlist Rastignac as his apprentice. In Splendeurs, this man, whom Lucien describes as worse than the devil, hides under the guise of a Catholic priest, Abbé Carlos Herrera, and engages in intricate criminal schemes that put Lucien’s own inept journalistic intrigues to shame: he steals, forges, blackmails, and organizes abductions. The push to turn Lucien into a member of the Parisian elite is now a large-scale criminal operation that stops at nothing: the bulk of funds needed to sustain Lucien’s lifestyle comes from effectively prostituting Lucien’s lover Esther Gosbeck to the rich Baron de Nucingen. But in the eyes of Vautrin, these are trifling matters. As he notes, “[H]ow many generals died in the prime of their life for the Emperor Napoleon?”
A History of Modern French Literature Page 52