Stendhal, pseudonym of Henri Beyle (born in Grenoble on January 23, 1783), is one of the most important French writers of all time. Born to a rich bourgeois family, at only seven years he was struck by the mourning of his mother, a woman who loved a visceral way. Relations with his father (a lawyer in Parliament), on the other hand, were always bad, being the latter a precursory example of a bigoted and conservative man.
Sixteen years old, he went to Paris with the intention of enrolling in the Ecole polytechnique. He renounced it immediately and, after having worked for some months in the war ministry thanks to the support of his cousin Daru, in 1800 he reached the Napoleonic army in Italy, which he soon recognized as his country of choice.
Cavalry sub-lieutenant, then aide-de-camp to General Michaud, from 1806 to 1814 was part of the imperial administration, with both civil and military functions that forced him to move from Italy to Austria, from Germany to Russia. Fallen Napoleon, he retired to Italy. where he met his first love (Angiola Pietragrua) and where he remained seven years, mainly in Milan, taking an interest in music and painting. Disappointed in his love for Matilde Dembowski (known in 1818) and suspected of carbonarism by the Austrian authorities, he returned to Paris (it is 1821). In order to make up for the expenses of a worldly life greater than his economic resources, he collaborated with some English magazines, such as the "Journal de Paris", with articles of art and music criticism; he also urged governmental employment in vain.
After the revolution of 1830 and the advent of Louis Philippe, he obtained the appointment of consul in Trieste, but, due to the opposition of the Austrian government, he was destined to Civitavecchia. The consular work left him much free time, which Stendahl employed, as well as writing, on trips and long stays in France. Asked in 1841 for health reasons, he returned to Paris and here, a year later, died suddenly due to an apoplectic attack on March 23, 1842.
Stendhal, after a certain number of essays (among which of some interest the "Sull'amore" of 1822 and "Racine and Shakespeare" of the following year), and a strong passion for music and painting (which induced him to write also in this field notable essays, as well as fictional lives of great composers), he began his work as a writer with the novel "Armance" (1827) and with the story "Vanina Vanini" (1829).
But it is above all with "The Red and the Black" (1830) novel that narrates the struggle of a young and ambitious young man, Julien Sorel, against the hostile society (France of the restoration) that inaugurates the season of the great realistic novel.
His other great masterpiece, in this direction, is represented by the unforgettable "La certosa di Parma", a vast fresco in which the defeat of individual aspirations is narrated by a society that here represents, under the appearances of an Italian court of the age of restoration, the typical structure of modern despotism.
Stendhal's work usually becomes part of the romantic movement, but it is a romanticism conditioned by the illuminist training of the writer, by his atheistic and materialistic philosophy. Propion for this, moreover, Stendhal is usually considered as the founder of that modern realism that represents man within an evolving social reality, and the ideas and passions of individuals as conditioned by political and economic trends era.
Stendhal's work usually becomes part of the romantic movement, but it is a romanticism conditioned by the illuminist training of the writer, by his atheistic and materialistic philosophy. Propion for this, moreover, Stendhal is usually considered as the founder of that modern realism that represents man within an evolving social reality, and the ideas and passions of individuals as conditioned by political and economic trends era.