Hidden behind a romantic novel written by Stendhal one finds a social novel, a ‘novel of the real’, which offers an in-depth analysis of the nuts and bolts of the society of the time, that of the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy. In his latest book (Stendhal, une sociologie Romanesque, published in the ‘La Decouverte’ series), Jacques Dubois presents the author of The Scarlet and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma from the new and impassioned point of view of sociology.

At heart, was Stendhal really a novelist? It is a provocative question when one considers the position occupied in the pantheon of francophone writers by the author of The Scarlet and the Black. It is not the quality of the body of Stendhal’s work in the novel genre that is called into question, however, but Jacques Dubois wants to stress the fact that ‘after all, he only wrote five novels, two of which were unfinished.’ One can certainly compare Stendhal with Balzac in this respect, and in the final analysis novel writing only occupied the second half of Stendhal’s life. As a young man, Stendhal served in Bonaparte’s army, first as an officer, then in an administrative capacity. He only published his first novel (Armance) in 1827, at the age of 44, at a time when professionally he – the republican, the liberal, the Bonapartist – seems to have been trying to find a role or place in the restored monarchist regime. It is as if his aversion to the society installed from 1814 onwards persuaded him to pick up his pen.

Is that to say that Stendhal was first and foremost a committed journalist or an early sociologist – before the word was used in its contemporary sense – who used the novel as a means of expression to talk about the society of his day, to describe it, but also to criticise it? It is this idea that runs throughout Jacques Dubois’ book, even if the writer does not want to deny Stendhal – despite what has just been written – his status as a great novelist. What Jacques Dubois wants to tell us is that Stendhal is inscribed in a line of authors running from Balzac to Simenon, passing through Flaubert and Proust, and whose work is particularly realist. Jacques Dubois calls them ‘novelists of the real’. They use their pens more to dismantle the important structural frameworks of society, as well as the relationships between groups and classes, than they wield them to portray the psychological intimacy of human behaviour or the fantastic epic sagas of an extraordinary character. By way of contrast, in the nineteenth century we find, in opposition to the novelists of the real, for example, the adventure novels of Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo) or the historical-romantic frescoes of Victor Hugo (Notre Dame de Paris).