Marie henri beyle biography of william shakespeare

Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal was a French psychological novelist best known for “Le Rouge et le Noir” (The Red and the Black) and “La Chartreuse de Parme” (The Charterhouse of Parma”). He developed from Romanticism to Realism. He was born on 23rd January 1783 in Grenoble, France and died on 23rd March 1842, Paris, France aged 59.

Major Works

“Histoire de la Peinture en Italie” (History of Painting in Italy) (1817)
“De l’Amour” (On Love) (1822)
“Le Rouge et le Noir” (The Red and the Black) (1830)
“La Chartreuse de Parme” (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839)

Biography Timeline

Marie-Henri Beyle, better known to the world under one of his many pseudonyms as Stendahl, was born on 23rd January 1783 in Grenoble, France. (He created the name from the German city of Stendal, birthplace of Johann Joachim Winckelmann a famous art historian of the day). His father Chérubin Beyle was a landowner and a barrister in Grenoble’s High Court of Justice and known for his reactionary views. Stendahl disliked him intensly. His mother was Henriette Gagnon, whom he loved and was Italian in origin. He was educated at the Ecole Centrale in Grenoble until 1799 where he was interested in literature mathematics.

1790: His mother dies in childbirth.

1799: He goes to Paris theoretically to prepare for the entrance examination for the Ecole Polytechnique but his secret ambition is to become a playwright. However, one of his relatives gets him a position as a Second Lieutenant in the French Army and he is stationed in Italy.

1802: He resigns from the army and moves back to Paris where he studies the philosophers Helvétius and Cabanis. He also enrols in a drama class still hoping to become a playwright but his endeavours come to nothing. He falls in love with the actress Mélanie Louason and follows her to Marseille.

1806: Pierre-Antoine, Count Daru is appointed intendant-general of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army and sends Stendahl as a military commissary to Brunswick in Germany. 

1807: He stays near Stendal, and falls in love with a woman called Wilhelmine, although he calls her Minette.

1808: He contracts syphilis in December and the barbaric cures he undergoes for the rest of his life give him much pain and anguish.

1810: He is named an auditor with the Conseil d’Etat on 3rd August and becomes part of the French administration.

1812: He is with Napoleon in Moscow and sees the city go up in flames and participates in the long winter retreat back to France. He becomes known for his clear headedness in difficult circumstances.

1813: He arrives back in Paris and helps organise the military defence of the province of Dauphiné.

1814: When the French empire falls, he decides to settle in Milan in Italy. He makes friends with Milanese liberals and patriots, reads the “Edinburgh Review” and studies music and art. 

1815: He publishes his first book “Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase” (Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio).

1817: He publishes “Histoire de la Peinture en Italie” (History of Painting in Italy – the only book ever published under his own name) and the early tourist guide “Rome, Naples, et Florence” – under the pseudonym M. de Stendhal, Officier de Cavalrie. He falls in love with but is rejected by Métilde Dembowski, Countess Dembowska.

1818: He completes his “A Life of Napoleon” but it is not published until 1929.

1821: He is forced to leave Milan because his liberal political beliefs and friendships are not appreciated by the new Austrian occupiers. He moves back to Paris where he experiences financial problems.

1822: His unsuccessful love affair with Méthilde Dembowski inspires him to write the autobiographical “De l’Amour” (On Love) which he claimed studied love dispassionately and objectively and uses a trip to Rome as an analogy of how love works.

1823: He publishes the first part of “Racine et Shakespeare” in which he praises Shakespeare as superior in psychological analysis to Racine. He also writes articles for several periodicals.

1824: He publishes “Vie de Rossini” (Life of Rossini).

1825: The second part of “Racine et Shakespéare” appears.

1827: He writes his first novel “Armance” which is not popular with his friends or the public. It concerns the sexual impotence of the male hero who eventualy commits suicide.

1829: He publishes “Promenades dans Rome” (Walks in Rome) and begins writing the early part of “Le Rouge et le Noir” (The Red and the Black).

1830: During the July Revolution in France the constitutional monarch King Louis-Phillipe takes the throne. 

1831: Stendhal is appointed by the new administration as the French consul to Trieste and Civtavecchia in the Papal States, Italy although he is not a popular choice with the Austrian Metternich. Although bored by the humdrum post he has time to visit Rome and discovers in the archives stories of crimes of passion and executions which inspires his book “Chroniques Italiennes” (Italian Chronicles). “The Red and the Black –Chronicle of 1830” is published and depicts the French social order under the Second Restoration between 1815 and 1830. Stendhal was an admirer of Napoleon and the novel has been seen as his tribute to the Emperor.

1832: He writes the novella “L’Abbesse de Castro”.

1835: He completes the novel “Lucien Leuwen” but it is not published until 1894. Other works around the time and also unpublished are “Souvenirs d’Egotisme” (Memoirs of an Egotist) and the “Vie de Henry Brulard” (The Life of Henry Brulard).

1836: He takes extended leave from his job as Consul and returns to Paris. His “The Life of Henry Brulard” is completed but not published until 1890.

1837: He begins writing “Chroniques Italiennes” and the unfinished novel “The Pink and the Green”.

1839: He writes another biography “Vie de Napoléon” (Life of Napoleon) and another travelogue “Mémoires d’un Touriste”. (Remembrances of a Tourist).He returns to his Consular post in Italy. At the end of the year he completes in two months his major work “La Chartreuse de Parma” (The Charterhouse of Parma). It uses Renaissance chronicles and contemporary events such as Napoleon in Italy, the Battle of Waterloo and the Austrian occupation of Milan as a backdrop. A young aristocrat, Fabrice del Dongo, an admirer of Napoleon, goes to Paris to join the French army. He returns to Parma in Italy and joins the church and many affairs and events happen there ending in del Dongo’s death. He begins work on his last novel “Lamiel” but it too is never completed.

1840: He leaves the novel  “Lamiel” unfinished.

Stendahl died on 23rd March 1842 in Paris after suffering a stroke in the street whilst on another of his leaves of absence. He was buried in the Cimetiere de Montmartre in Paris with only three friends in attendance, including Prosper Merimee. During his lifetime he was more known for his travelogues and his fiction only became more widely read in the twentieth century. Friedrich Nietzsche was later to refer to him as “France’s last great psychologist” in his work “Beyond Good and Evil”.

Influences

The major influence of the life and work of Napoleon Bonaparte cannot be overstated on Stendahl but in his creative writing he read widely and made many references to authors such as Friedrich Schiller, Voltaire, William Shakespeare and the seventeenth century French dramatist Jean Racine. He was also influenced by the work of the philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Locke.

Music was also a great passion particularly the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn and Giocchino Rossini and he even wrote a biography of the last named in 1824 “Vie de Rossini”.

Stendhal is an enigma. He was a romantic who kept himself distant from Romanticism and veered towards realism. He was antiauthoritarian but with a love of the pre-Revolutionary world and idealised the aristocracy. He was a dreamer who portrayed himself as a hardened cynic. His thoughts are best expressed in his novels but these remain baffling with their ironic style hiding what lies beneath. He described his own philosophy as “Beylisme” after his original surname. “Beylisme” meant cultivating a private sensibility whilst at the same time developing the art of hiding it.

The antagonism between individuals and society is the main subject of his 1830 novel “The Red and the Black”. The hero JulienSorel is the dreamy son of a carpenter who worships Napoleon. It is ostensibly the story of a young provincial who is a student of Plutarch and Napoleon, although Plutarch ends up being entirely useless as a guide to becoming a great man in the modern world. It blends together comedy, satire and ironic lyricism and is rare for the time in its sensitive portraits of its female characters. Simone de Beauvoir even cited him as a feminist author in “The Second Sex” published in 1949. 

Stendhal’s contemporaries often found it difficult to appreciate his ironic tones and the novelist Honore de Balzac was the only one to recognise his genius at the time in an article about “The Charterhouse of Parma” published in “La Revue Parisienne” in 1840. His main fame came in the later part of the nineteenth century and after his death this steadily grew. He has now become recognised as one of the great French masters of the novel.

The French historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine noted that the psychological portraits of Stendhal’s characters are real, because they are complex, many-sided, particular and original and Emile Zola also agreed with this view. In “Beyond Good and Evil” in 1886 Friedrich Nietzsche declares Stendhal as “France’s last great psychologist”. Ford Maddox Ford thought him to have advanced the art of the novel and the German scholar Erich Auerbach thought that “serious realism” began with Stendhal.

Although the America critic Michael Dirda thought him “the greatest all round French writer and author of two of the top twenty French novels plus a highly original autobiography (“Vie de Henry Brulard“) and a superb travel writer” not everyone agreed. The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov dismissed him as overrated with a “paltry style” and on a low par with John Galsworthy and Thomas Mann. However, the young Leo Tolstoy was influenced by his psychological technique as were French realist novelists Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola. Andre Gide stated that “The Red and the Black” was a novel far ahead of its time and English and American novelists of the early twentieth century, such as Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf likewise owed him a huge debt.

His “Histoire de la Peinture en Italie” was published in 1817 and had a huge influence on a number of romantic artists and in particular Eugène Delacroix. In 1817 Stendhal was so overcome by the cultural richness of Florence in Italy that he described a psychological condition and palpitation of the heart in his book “Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio”. The condition was formally diagnosed and called Stendhal syndrome in 1979 by the Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini and included the symptoms of racing heartbeat, nausea, confusion, fainting, and irrational behaviour when encountering great works of art or architecture for the first time.

Further Information

List of most famous works by Stendahl.