The Red and the Black

The carpenter's son Julien Sorel, brilliant, proud and ambitious in a France where the army's red is closed to him and only the church's black offers a poor man a ladder, climbs through hypocrisy and seduction toward a ruin of his own making. Stendhal maps a real Restoration France: the provincial town of Verrières in the Franche-Comté, the seminary at Besançon, and the aristocratic Paris where Julien's rise and fall play out.

Mme de Rênal

Verrières

The tutor

In the little manufacturing town of Verrières, the mayor Monsieur de Rênal takes on the pale, bookish carpenter's son Julien as tutor, and Julien, half from ambition and half from wounded pride, seduces his employer's gentle wife. Stendhal opens on the stifling hypocrisy of provincial society, and on a hero who treats love itself as a campaign in his war on the class that despises him.

Book I, the opening

inspired by Verrières, the provincial town where Julien becomes tutor to the Rênal children, is Stendhal's fictional town drawn from the Franche-Comté near the Jura; sited there.

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