18
PARTISAN REVIEW
After all, I was only a man...."At the last Julien does seem to
have learned that the individual man has never been able success·
fully to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
In the political realm Stendhal reveals the same confusion;
to reduce to logic his innumerable utterances on the political
events and ideas of his time is impossible. In childhood his sym·
pathies were republican, and he was seized with an acute sensation
of joy upon the execution of Louis XVI. But it is clear that this is
but one more expression of the revolt against his father-like his
anti-clericalism. Denunciation of the class that the Revolution
actually pushed into power abounds everywhere in his writings–
the treatment of the de Renals and the diatribes against "middle–
class meanness." And of the people he has this to say, " I abhor the
mob (that is, any contact with them) while at the same time, under
the name of 'the people,' I have a passionate desire for their hap·
piness." Nothing better states the contradiction between the snob
who boasts of his liaisons with duchesses and the child who exults
in the death of kings. In the novels, as we have seen, cynicism and
abuse are distributed almost equally among all classes of society
and all shades of political opinion. Stendhal is much interested in
politics;
The Charterhouse
and
Lucien Leuwen
are novels with
political backgrounds; but he was interested in politics as in life as
in "a game of chess." The truth is that he could not remain faith·
ful to any political party or even program for the reason that he
was incapable of any kind of allegiance. The refusal to accept any
responsibility
in
his relations with society is of a piece with his
attitude toward his father and toward women. His politics, like
his ethics, end up in a completely naive anarchy.
Certainly French society of the 'thirties and 'forties-with the
old guard scheming to hold power even at the expense of selling
France to the Prussians and the liberals barricaded behind their
meretricious press-was not such as to elicit much faith
in
man as
a social animal. And the Church, somewhat dazed by events, but
also struggling for power, offered few securities of a moral or
spiritual variety. But there were other possible modes of adjust·
ment; Balzac, Baudelaire, and even Flaubert, each in his way and
to a greater or less extent, achieved some sort of private solution in
spite of the public chaos. What is noteworthy in Stendhal is the
manner in which the private history and the public history are
