STENDHAL. - Pseudonym of Henry Beyle, French writer, b. at Grenoble on 23 Jan. 1783, d. at Paris on 23 March 1842.
Of a good bourgeois family and related to the great Napoleonic intendant P. A. Daru (1767-1829), S. had his access facilitated to the military administration (1799) and then to the army (1800), in which he saw incarnated his childhood enthusiasms for the revolutionary principles, vainly opposed by the severe conservatism of his father. He remained in Italy as a second lieutenant of the dragoons from 1800 to 1802; he left the service to devote himself, in Paris, to disorderly studies and literary attempts, and, in Marseilles, to an unhappy commercial experiment. Having returned (Oct. 1806) to the military administration, he was placed on the retired list by the Restoration, and spent in Milan the years he defined as the best of his life, in admiration of the art and the beauties of Italy. The Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase (1814) were followed by the Histoire de la peinture en Italie and 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, where he had returned twice, between 1823 and 1828, hostilely watched and finally removed by the Austrian police.
Recognizing in the novel the authentic painting of the true, S., of the keenest sensibility beneath an appearance of skeptical irony, found the best path of his own art. A crime news item (the attempted assassination of Mme Michoud by the cleric tutor of her children, Berthet) suggested to him the plot of Le rouge et le noir (2 vols., 1831), where the intention of offering a picture of contemporary society even through the most recondite and unconfessable feelings of the protagonists finds its counterpart in a stylistic construction abhorring every literary artifice. Equally gripping is La chartreuse de Parme, written and published after a long stay in Italy by S. sent as consul to Trieste (1830), where the exequatur was denied him by the Austrian government, and to Civitavecchia (1831-1836 and 1839-41). The novel, S.'s masterpiece, is set in a small Italian state ruled by a cruel tyrant, in the early years of the Restoration; its love story concludes with the protagonist's entry into the cloister. It had been preceded by two works of autobiographical analysis, Souvenirs d'égotisme (1832: on the decade spent in France up to 1830) and Vie d'Henri Brillard (drafted between 23 Nov. 1835 and 17 March 1836: childhood and youth), and by two other novelistic attempts, Une position sociale (1832, left at the first pages), and, equally autobiographical and unfinished, Lucien Leuwen (1834-36); all four published posthumously in 1892, 1890, 1927 and 1894 respectively. Other tales accompanied and followed the writing of the Chartreuse, also inspired by chronicles of crimes mostly of the sixteenth century and of Roman setting, studiously collected by S. during his stay in the Papal State, gathered in 1855 under the arbitrary title of Chroniques italiennes; the longest and most significant is the Abbesse de Castro (1839).
Inspired by a cult of energy and of the individual sentiment vaguely dreamed of or minutely analyzed (which in him intersects with that for the ideals of equality and liberty banned by the Revolution and embodied by Napoleon, on whom he undertook a work whose fragments were published in 1876), S. stands clearly apart from the tendencies prevailing in contemporary Romanticism, particularly after 1830. The resonance of his work was consequently, for decades, quite limited; it rose instead (as he himself had foreseen) to the importance of a true movement of ideas and taste in the last twenty years of the 19th century, as a model of a « cult of the self » later perpetuated in in various forms in twentieth-century literature, and which has nonetheless contributed not a little to a full understanding of the writer, his introspective depth, his stylistic novelty. These same characteristics, far more than his hostility to the political and religious order of Restoration Italy (which he nonetheless passionately loved as an inexhaustible reserve of anarchic energy), make his work the most significant prelude to certain tendencies of twentieth-century taste, substantially anti-Christian. Stendhal's novels and love stories were placed on the Index by decrees of 4 March 1828 and 20 June 1864.
