The Red and the Black is a portrait of Julien Sorel, a young working class boy who finds himself thrust into the intrigues of a bourgeois world that he both relishes and abhors. Julien's natural intellectual talents are considerable, but his education consists almost entirely of reading Rousseau, The Bible (in Latin), and the adventures of Napolean Bonaparte. Stendhal's contribution to our understanding of the corruption of bourgeois society side by side with the deleterious effects of Rousseau's influence is a bird's eye view of several historical and theoretical strains of 19th Century France.
