The Red and the Black

Julien Sorel, a carpenter’s son in Restoration France with a memorised Latin New Testament and a private cult of Napoleon, climbs by way of the seminary and a nobleman’s household — and is destroyed by the same ambition that lifted him. The red and the black are the two available ladders, the army and the church, in a society that has just closed the first one. It belongs in a curriculum about citizenship as an anatomy of careerism: what happens to a talented young man when merit has no legitimate route upward.

Context: Stendhal was the pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle (1783-1842), who served under Napoleon and wrote the novel as a “chronicle of 1830,” the year of its publication and of the July Revolution.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• Stendhal — the author.
• Ambition — the engine of the plot, and its undoing.
• Institutions — the unwritten rules doing the real governing.