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The Red and the Black draws a colorful mosaic about the required hypocrisy to climb the ladder of social status in the France of the .
Chronicled by an omniscient narrator, who meets every requisite to be Stendhal himself, the reader follows the story of Julien Sorel, a young man of humble origins whose only ambition is to ascend in the social hierarchy in a world still dominated by the Machiavellian politicking of the clergy and the nobility after the downfall of the Emperor.
Despised by his family because of his “extravagant�� taste for reading, Julien makes of Napoleon his surrogate father and plans his future with militaristic, almost obsessive precision. The army (The Red) is no longer in fashion and so he chooses his career among the pious men of faith (The Black). First as a seminarist and then as a tutor of Latin, Julien will learn the bearing, the deferential poise and the conversational skills to achieve his so much desired goal that will lead him to Paris, the capital of sophisticated Savoir-Faire.

Straddling literary naturalism and romanticism, a tragicomedy of the most entertaining nature unfolds in a quick paced prose not short of acerbic satire and wry humor, where all sort of characters are presented as caricatures of the motley social strata of the convoluted era. Liberals and monarchists, Jansenists and Jesuits, aristocrats and peasants, radicals and conservatives; with all their disparate positions and beliefs, all the characters have the common traits of nepotism and debauchery that acquire allegorical connotations in the development of Julien’s personality, which evolves ceaselessly in the course of the story.

Half romantic hero, half despicable villain, Stendhal’s protagonist becomes an emblem of the author’s contempt for the gullible disposition of men. Julien’s actions in society don’t correspond to his personal views and so he passes through life in a constant performance. He treats his masters with proud dignity to hide his sense of inferiority, he falls in love with the idea of seducing women of noble descend to cover his need for validation, he conceals his vulnerabilities and cheats himself with delusions of grandeur, and so his moods fluctuate between his artificial objectives and his true feelings, cleaving him in two.

Is Julien a victim or the outrageous product of his time?
He certainly falls prey to the false morality that Stendhal’s denounces openly with disarming jocularity. But there is much more than that in this uncategorizable book, because underneath the superficial parody, there is a philosophical undercurrent that grows more evident in the last chapters, which appear untitled, maybe as a symbol to represent Julien’s progressive unveiling, for his fate seems to be determined by birth and not by his honest resolutions.
In the blink of an eye, Stendhal flips the tone of his narration and the reader finds himself facing the paradox of a protagonist that can be either understood as an arrogant moron or as a valiant idealist.
As the declared romantic I am, I lean towards the second option and choose to see Julien’s last acts as a proclamation of his rightful independence. Having dropped the masks, he can see clearly into his heart and avoid "this desert of selfishness which is called life.��