Stendhal’s Inscribing Realism in "Le rouge et le noir"

Abstract

Stendhal is considered one of the first great European realist writers because his novels advanced some literary features that later become prototypical of nineteenth-century realism. Here we will vindicate Stendhal’s pioneering realist character, but from a different perspective. Through the concepts of “documentality” (Ferraris) and “liberal governmentality” (Foucault) it will be defended that Stendhal is a realistic writer also because of the way in which his texts (we will focus on Le rouge et le noir) reproduces the new ways of establishing social reality in 19th century. Starting from Ferraris’s thesis that social reality is largely constructed by the accumulation of inscribed acts, we will argue that Stendhal’s realism can be also identified by the way Le rouge et le noir reflects an already fully capitalist world in which reality is built more and more on the basis of economic-administrative documentalities to the detriment of traditional, metaphysical-based ones.