ABSTRACT
In The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal's greatest work, the fate of the artist has not yet been resolved to the condition of alienation that becomes a cliche in modern culture. The Charterhouse of Parma was written in 1839, fifty years after the first French Revolution. In The Charterhouse, Stendhal gives us post-Napoleonic Europe in which the counterrevolution has for the moment triumphed, but the energies created by the revolution and Napoleon have not been extinguished. Or at least the postrevolutionary aristocratic imagination is obsessed with the fear that Jacobin energies are always potentially explosive. By creating the empire and restoring the aristocracy, Napoleon betrayed the revolution. The positive ideal of aristocratic liberty may be glimpsed at moments in the life of old aristocracies—a life at once spacious, grand, filled with heroic risk, the life of the knight-errant. Fabrizio in effect is freed from the taint of association with the meanness and corruption of the actual historical aristocracy.
