How The Red and the Black drew on Confessions
A documented line of influence: Stendhal demonstrably engaged Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1782
EnlightenmentThe influenced
The Red and the Black
Stendhal · 1830
RomanticismRelevance
9/10
On The Red and the Black’s page
- To understand Julien Sorel, read the book Julien reads: Rousseau's Confessions is the one volume that shapes his imagination, his pride, even his love affair
- Stendhal names it outright — Julien's "horror of eating with the servants" is lifted from Rousseau, his entire sense of wounded merit borrowed from it
- The Red and the Black is in part a study of what the Confessions did to the young men who took it as scripture
On Confessions’s page
- Stendhal makes Rousseau's Confessions the secret bible of Julien Sorel — "the only book by whose help his imagination endeavoured to construct the world"
- Julien's class resentment and his "horror of eating with the servants" are borrowed straight from Rousseau, named in the novel itself
- The Confessions taught a generation of ambitious provincials to read their own lives as drama — Julien is what that reading does to a sharp, poor young man