Of good bourgeois family and related to the great Napoleonic intendant P. A. Daru (1767–1829), Stendhal owed to him facilitated access to the military administration (1799) and then to the army (1800), in which he saw embodied his childish enthusiasms for revolutionary principles, uselessly opposed by his father’s stern conservatism. He remained in Italy as a sub-lieutenant of dragoons from 1800 to 1802; he then left the service to devote himself, in Paris, to disordered studies and literary attempts, and in Marseille to an unhappy commercial venture. Re-entering (Oct. 1806) the military administration, he was pensioned off by the Restoration and spent in Milan the years he called the best of his life, administering the arts and the beauties of Italy. To the Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase (1814) succeeded the Histoire de la peinture en Italie, à Rome, Naples et Florence (1817), then, after his return to the French capital (June 1821), the treatise De l’amour (1822), the two parts of Racine et Shakespeare (1823–25), a Vie de Rossini (1824), a first novel, Armance ou quelques scènes d’un salon de Paris en 1827, and in 1829 the Promenades dans Rome, a new portrait of Italy, whither he had twice returned between 1823 and 1828, watched with hostility and finally expelled by the Austrian police.
Seeing in the novel the authentic painting of truth, Stendhal, of the most acute sensibility beneath an appearance of sceptical irony, found the best road for his art. A news item of crime (the attempted murder of Mme Michoud by the tutor-cleric of her children, Berthet) furnished him the plot of Le rouge et le noir (2 vols., 1831), where the intention to offer a picture of contemporary society, even through the most hidden and unavowable feelings of the protagonists, is matched by a stylistic construction averse to every literary artifice. Equally compelling is La chartreuse de Parme, written and published after a long sojourn in Italy when Stendhal, sent as consul to Trieste (1830)—where the Austrian government denied him the exequatur—and to Civitavecchia (1831–36 and 1839–41). The novel, a masterpiece of Stendhal’s, is set in a small Italian state ruled by a cruel tyrant in the early years of the Restoration; its love story ends with the protagonist’s entry into a monastery. Preceding it were two works of autobiographical analysis, Souvenirs d’égotisme (1832: on the decade spent in France up to 1830) and Vie d’Henri Brûlard (written between 23 Nov. 1835 and 17 March 1836: childhood and youth), and two other novelistic attempts, Une position sociale (1832, left at the first pages), and, likewise autobiographical and unfinished, Lucien Leuwen (1834–36); all four were published posthumously in 1892, 1890, 1927 and 1894 respectively. Accompanying and following the drafting of La Chartreuse were other tales, also inspired by chronicles of mostly sixteenth-century crimes and Roman settings, diligently collected by Stendhal during his stay in the Papal States and gathered in 1855 under the arbitrary title Chroniques italiennes; the most significant is L’Abbesse de Castro (1839).
Inspired by a cult of energy and of individual feeling, both yearned for and minutely analysed (which in him intersected with that for the ideals of equality and freedom proclaimed by the Revolution and embodied in Napoleon, on whom he undertook a work whose fragments were published in 1876), Stendhal stands sharply apart from the prevailing tendencies of contemporary Romanticism, especially after 1830. The resonance of his work was therefore for decades quite limited; absurd, however (as he himself had foreseen), was the importance it assumed in the last twenty years of the 19th century as a model of a cult of the self, perpetuated thereafter in various forms in 20th-century literature, and which has nonetheless contributed not a little to a full understanding of the writer, his introspective depth, and his stylistic novelty. These same characteristics, far more than hostility to the political and religious order of Restoration Italy (which he passionately loved as an inexhaustible reserve of anarchic energy), make his work the most significant prologue to certain orientations of 20th-century taste, essentially anti-Christian. Stendhal’s novels and tales of love were placed on the Index by decrees of 4 March 1828 and 20 June 1864.