His Racine et Shakespeare ( Racine and Shakespeare), published in two parts (18), called for a new kind of historical drama as a way to confront contemporary political divisions.

Throughout his early career, however, he longed to write plays and prepared for the task by falling in love with a series of actresses and going to the theater as much as possible. Stendhal also tried his hand at political biography, authoring two histories of Napoleon- Vie de Napoléon (1817 Life of Napoleon) and Mémoires sur Napoléon (1837 Memoirs of Napoleon)-as well as at politically inflected travel writing- Rome, Naples et Florence (1817 Rome, Naples, and Florence) and Promenades dans Rome (1829 Walks in Rome).

A lifelong music lover, he wrote first about his favorite composers- Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase (1815 Lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio), Vie de Rossini (1823 Life of Rossini)-borrowing heavily from Italian sources, as he did in his Histoire de la peinture en Italie (1817 History of Painting in Italy).

Stendhal tried a number of genres and subjects before turning to the novel. He died in 1842 in Paris from an attack of apoplexy. With a liberal government once again in power after the Revolution of 1830, he secured a post as consul to the small Italian city of Civitavecchia, which provided him with the leisure, and secure income, necessary for his writing. After a seven-year sojourn in Milan, he spent most of the 1820s in Paris, where he published his first novels.

Following Napoleon from his triumphant crossing of the Alps to his disastrous retreat from Moscow, he began to write in earnest when Waterloo left him unemployed. Arriving in Paris in 1799, on the eve of Napoleon's coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (9 November), he renounced his plans to study mathematics at the École Polytechnique in order to serve as a clerk at the Ministry of War, headed by his cousin Pierre Daru. Stendhal was the pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle, a major author and minor bureaucrat, whose life spanned the turbulent period from the French Revolution to the July Monarchy, and whose writing helped mark the advent of both Romanticism and realism in French literature.īorn in 1783 in Grenoble, the young Beyle, an ardent republican, found himself at odds with his conservative bourgeois family from an early age. STENDHAL (MARIE-HENRI BEYLE) (1783–1842), French novelist.

The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal