Portrait of Stendhal -- Pierre-Joseph Dedreux-Dorcy and Henri-Joseph Dubouchet (1884). Public domainOn the back of my copy of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830), novelist Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, says: “I was in my twenties when I found The Red and the Black – and a friend.” It was the same for me – and I still think of the novel as a friend. It’s not because anything much good happens in it. The Red and the Black is a story of almost unrelenting hypocrisy and corruption. Rather, the friendship is with Stendhal himself – or at least his wry persona.Stendhal leads us through the adventures of the passionate yet Machiavellian Julien Sorel, as Julien attempts to rise above his low beginnings in 1820s Restoration France. Despite being two centuries distant, Stendhal’s excoriating depiction of the cruelties of seduction, pious institutions and unprincipled ambition is evergreen. For anyone bemused by such things in our own world, The Red and the Black might be just the friend you need.A beguiling protagonistStendhal was the nom de plume of Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842). Born and raised in the regional city of Grenoble, Beyle rebelled against his conservative upbringing, attracted by the revolutionary energy of Napoleonic France.In 1799, he left Grenoble for Paris, where he joined the army in 1800. He witnessed the fall of Napoleon in 1815 and the return of the old aristocracy, which closed off almost every path of advancement for men of modest birth. The Red and the Black – Le Rouge et le Noir in the original French – denotes the two political factions during the Bourbon Restoration. The “Red” refers to the military uniform of the Napoleonic soldier and stands for the Liberals, who, like liberals today, support merit, business and progress. The “Black” refers to the cassock of the clergy and stands for the Ultra-royalists, who support … well, holding onto the power that had been challenged during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. The Liberals include Julien, who has “extreme hatred” for the rich. They look better on paper. Yet both factions, and Julien himself, do not fare well.The Red and the Black, while not as well known among English speakers, ranks among the very best French novels, alongside Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Its success derives not so much from its account of the politics of Restoration France, but from the beguiling Julien. In the pantheon of fictional protagonists, he might be the very best instance of a despicable figure whom we sympathise with and, sometimes, even cheer along; others include Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and, in contemporary popular culture, Don Draper from Mad Men and Walter White from Breaking Bad. This is the novel’s supreme achievement. In inclining us to sympathise with the clear-sighted, emotional, yet ruthlessly ambitious Julien, The Red and the Black, like many of the best works of literature, encourages us to reflect upon our own corruptions.The storyJulien lives in the fictional town of Verrières, which lies southeast of Paris. He is the son of a timber merchant – a brutal, illiterate man who has reached the lower fringes of the bourgeoisie through hard manual labour and shrewd dealings. Old Sorel and Julien’s brothers despise Julien, who reads books when he should be monitoring the timber mill, and who is pallid and slight (yet still “well-proportioned”). Julien is our champion against such deplorables, along with the already mentioned rich. He gains a position as a tutor for the children of the mayor of Verrières, the ultra-royalist M. de Rênal, after memorising the New Testament and reciting passages as a kind of party trick. This is one of many instances of Julien’s pursuit of appearance over substance. He performs well, and seduces M. de Rênal’s wife, the almost-innocent Madame de Rênal. The seduction lies at the heart of the story.When his position with M. de Rênal becomes untenable, Julien spends time in a seminary, where he eventually excels. From the seminary, he secures the superior position of private secretary for the Marquis de La Mole in Paris. Throughout the novel, Julien leaps from one outrageous success to another. Julien then seduces the marquis’ daughter, Mathilde, who is prone to the romantic fantasising that would come to be be called Madame Bovary syndrome. He thus achieves his goal: From his earliest childhood he had experienced moments of rapture. Then, he would dream with delight that he would one day encounter the beautiful women of Paris, and would compel their attention by some famous deed. Why should he not be loved by one of them, as Bonaparte, while still poor, had been loved by the brilliant Mme de Beauharnais?Even when his forbidden liaison is discovered, Julien is propelled upwards. He is awarded a high position in the military, so he may pass as a decent enough husband for Mathilde, who is pregnant. But following an unexpected crime of passion, about which I will say no more, he is sentenced to death. While there are ways for him to evade execution, he redeems himself by accepting his fate.The seminaryJulien, despite his moral failings, is highly competent. Unfortunately, his inclination to think for himself appears to the priests of the seminary as “the most frightful Protestantism” and he quickly gains a reputation for having a “sceptical mind”. He is “guilty of the monstrous vice that he thought, he judged for himself – as opposed to blindly following authority and example”.Almost too late, Julien recognises that “learning counts for nothing” in the seminary. What matters is performing “drawn-out exercises in ascetic piety” and learning the innumerable smaller displays of faith, from how one walks to how one eats an egg. Portrait of Stendhal – Olof Johan Södermark (1840) Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Why is all of this necessary? Because the clergy is a racket – a grift, as we say these days. “I’ll be selling places in Heaven to the faithful,” says Julien. “How will that place be rendered visible to them? – by the difference between my appearance and that of the laity.” Julien realises that if he conforms, he will “eat well and have warm clothes in winter”. And he learns the invaluable lesson that “difference breeds hatred”.So: say the words and perform the rituals and you will appear worthy, be rewarded with a place in the system, and be elevated above others. Think for yourself or question the system, and you will be purged.Every time I read the seminary episode in The Red and the Black I think: this is uncannily like universities today. Indeed, it was my friendship with The Red and the Black that helped me understand and survive the bewildering world of academia when I was a PhD student. In recent times, people have been referring to academics and related professionals as the “clerisy”. Sociologist Musa al Gharbi has provided a clear discussion of the distinction between appearance and substance as it applies to the “symbolic capitalists” of our academic “priestly class”.Seduction and crueltyAbove all else, The Red and the Black is about seduction and its many cruelties. When I read it, I cannot help but think of Tony Montana in Scarface (1983). While Julien could not be less like Tony in manner, their goals are almost identical. “In this country, you gotta make the money first,” Montana famously says. “Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.”Across hundreds of pages, The Red and the Black explores the almost limitless minutiae of seduction, including not just the moves, but the various psychological states that Julien himself struggles with. Depending on which way you tilt it, the novel is a manual or an indictment of the seductive enterprise, which has endured across the centuries, despite our enlightenment. Journalist Neil Strauss’ book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005), itself part-manual and part-indictment of seduction, reveals uncomfortably similar dynamics to The Red and the Black. Early in the Mme de Rênal seduction (which I will focus on, rather than the later seduction of Mathilde, which is equally cruel), we read that one evening Julien, while speaking energetically in company, accidentally brushes Mme de Rênal’s hand. Being a good wife, she quickly withdraws it. Julien thinks in response that it is now “his duty to ensure that this hand not be withdrawn when he touched it” and, if he fails to accomplish this, he will endure a “feeling of inferiority”. At their next meeting, we read: “he observed her as though she were an enemy”. And later, after enduring the “frightful combat that duty” – meaning the “duty” to pursue Mme de Rênal – “fought against timidity”, Julien takes and firmly holds her hand. She resists, but eventually yields. Having succeeded in this first step, Julien’s soul is “flooded with happiness, not because he loved Mme de Rênal, but because a frightful torment had come to an end”. In contrast, after she submits to Julien, Mme de Rênal experiences “an epoch of happiness”. There is an obvious and tragic alienation in the gulf between Julien’s cold ambition and Mme de Rênal’s serenity.Such blows are relentlessly delivered to the reader. The next day we hear that Julien “woke at five; and – what would have been cruel for Mme de Rênal had she known it – gave her scarcely a thought. He had done his duty, a heroic duty”.There is so much subtlety. For example, Julien is all the more successful because of his inconstancy towards Mme de Renal. “Had she been sure of Julien’s affection”, Stendhal writes, “perhaps she would have been able to gather force enough to resist him”. Julien enacts the pickup strategy of “push pull” – that is, showing interest, then removing it. He knows exactly what he’s doing, but he doesn’t care. “Here lies a woman of the loftiest spirit reduced to the depths of misery on account of knowing me”, he thinks.What do we make of the fact that so little changes in the dynamics between men and women? Shakespeare, 200 years before Stendhal, described the moral abyss within male lust in Sonnet 129. Lust is … perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.The poem concludes with the lament: All this the world well knows; yet none knows wellTo shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.The recent movie enters similar territory. In Obsession (2025), the nervous and thus unattractive Bear is granted a wish that his longtime crush, Nikki, will fall in love with him. But a repressed part of Nikki, not subsumed by the wish, is horrified and it periodically – and gruesomely – rebels. The confronting point is that successful seduction, with all its deceptions, is a sort of magic trick. As we see with Julien, the successful seducer is someone who has learned the tricks. Watching Obsession while reading The Red and the Black, my impression was that Nikki’s horrified repressed self represents how many women would feel if they acknowledged how little regard their seducers had for them.Jamie Q. Roberts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.