Stendhal, Illogicality, and Imagination: The Dirt of Politics and the Politics of Dirt in the Vie de Henry Brulard, Lucien Leuwen, and La Chartreuse de Parme

Abstract

This article looks at the ways in which Stendhal foregrounds representations of dirt in a number of his autobiographical and fictional texts, most notably the Vie de Henry Brulard, Lucien Leuwen, and La Chartreuse de Parme. It shows how Stendhal assigns apparently contradictory political meanings to these representations. In particular, the article aims to recontextualize Henry Brulard’s declaration: ‘J’ai horreur de ce qui est sale, or le peuple est toujours sale à mes yeux’. It is argued that, in his fiction, Stendhal takes care to distinguish between the physical dirt imputed to ‘le peuple’ imagined as ‘la canaille’ and the moral dirt that he detects in all classes and shades of political opinion in Restoration and Orleanist France. It is further argued that Stendhal uses this distinction to draw attention to a series of disjunctions between reality and illusion that together came to shape the post-Revolutionary political order as far as he was concerned. The article begins and ends by setting its analysis of the dirt of politics and the politics of dirt within the broader context provided by longstanding critical debates revolving around the questions of Stendhal’s alleged (political) inconsequentiality, that it is to say the illogicality of his reasoning, and the dominant role played by his imagination.