The story of the novel “The Red and the Black” originated from a newspaper article related to a death penalty case from February 29, 1828. During the era of the Napoleonic Empire, red and black signified “military” and “church”. “respectively. Those are the two ways of walking of the ambitious young Frenchmen.

This novel is ahead of its time. “The red and the black” is one of the founding works of European realism. The novel focuses on the personal struggle and ultimate failure of the protagonist Julien Sorel, especially in the description of his love and romantic life. He showed the successive governments, the nobility, the darkness of the church and the despicable upstarts. Although the story focuses on Julien’s love stories, it is still “political fiction” after all.

Stendhal is a literary master when it comes to visualizing major social issues through romance and love. Julien’s two love stories are closely related to the related situation. It is a sample of the conflict with the different classes. Although he formed true feelings of love towards Monsieur de Rênal’s wife, but at first, it was only because of the vengeful feelings towards the rich and powerful. Therefore, when Julien possessed her for the first time; it was not the feeling of love, but the ambitious successful feeling of Napoleon, the “joy of carnival.”

If we say that Julien’s search for Monsieur de Rênal’s wife has some sincere emotions, then Julien’s search for Mathilde de la Mole is purely political. Mathilde is not only an arrogant and aristocratic girl from the nobility, but she is also greatly affected by the French Revolution. She believed that with another revolution, the one who dominates society will be the youth like Julien. So a marriage with Julien is not only full of romantic but also powerful pattern. And on the other hand, Julien believes that marriage will lead him to a higher power and decides to cheat on his love.

However, Julien failed, because the situation at that time was still controlled by the feudal government and the class. Julien is not in that circle of people; and these people would never allow someone like Julien to achieve his aspiration.

“The Red and the Black” excelled in creating typical characters in typical settings, balanced art structure, and “drawing” technique. And the reason why critics call Stendhal “the father of the modern novel” is his outstanding ability to describe the psychology of his characters. The authors of realism insist on having realistic details, but Stendhal is different from Balzac. He focused on the details and the realistic psychological parts, rather than the physical environment. The author often used one or two sentences to expand the action of the people and the environment, and uses page after page to describe the mental part. As an example, the author used 3 pages for Julien to notice Madame de Rênal’s letter and kill her with a gun, but he described her love with Mathilde with hundreds of pages of detailed texts. In addition, Madame de Rênal’s mixed feelings of joy, bread and regret, but not wanting to give up her love for Julien, demonstrated Stendhal’s great abilities.