Marie-Henri Beyle, writing under his penname Stendhal, published his last complete work, the novel The Charterhouse of Parma, in French in 1839. It tells the story of an Italian nobleman who fights in the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and then navigates the fraught political dynamics of the era known as the Italian Restoration (1814-1848). This was a time when the memory of revolution was repressed and power seemed to many to operate on caprice and intrigue amidst shifting class structures. Though set in Parma, a duchy in Italy, the book mirrors many of the political conflicts taking place in France at the time between monarchists and supporters of republican government following the French Revolution. In 1814, France restored its monarchy—albeit with a constitution that limited the king’s power—but would not become a stable Republic until 1870—a late fulfillment of the hope nourished in the French Revolution of 1789-1799.

Stendhal is among the most famed 19th-century writers for his developments in realism, psychological depth, and historical-political thematics. Influencing writers like Honoré de Balzac and Leo Tolstoy, The Charterhouse of Parma joins his novel The Red and The Black (1830) as one of Stendhal’s most important works.

The novel is narrated from an omniscient perspective, enabling the private thoughts of characters to be woven into a densely plotted story. Equally central are detailed dialogues of political scheming which demonstrate Stendhal’s interest in logical thought as well as imaginative storytelling. These were among the principles of a life philosophy he dubbed Beylism: la logique, le bonheur, l’espirt—reason, happiness, wit. The novel’s plot is inspired by Stendhal’s reading of chronicles from the Italian Renaissance and, in particular, stories of Pope Paul III, neé Alessandro Farnese, who was rumored to have had an affair with his stepmother. The plot’s rapid pace recalls an adventure-filled Renaissance tale, prompting 20th-century writer Italo Calvino to wonder that “many young people will be smitten right from the opening pages […] instantly convinced that this has to be the best novel ever written.” (Calvino, Italo. Why Read the Classics?. Mariner Books. 1991.)

Plot Summary

Across 27 eventful chapters, Charterhouse of Parma traces the life of one of the most memorable literary heroes of the 19th-century and beyond: the fiery yet self-possessed Italian nobleman, Fabrizio Valserra del Dongo. Fabrizio is by turns a revolutionary spirit seeking freedom, a womanizing libertine untouched by love, a student of theology enthralled with omens and absolutism, a roguish charmer who toys with jealous lovers, a wanted man, a besotted romantic, and a pious cleric. He is repeatedly saved by benefactors, chief among them his aunt Gina del Dongo and her companion Count Mosca. An object of jealousy, adoration, and rage for an entire cross-section of post-Napoleonic Italy, Fabrizio represents the myriad and often contradictory facets of noble identity in himself as well as the torn loyalties of those who relate to him.

Steeped in history, the novel opens with Napoleon’s invasion of Milan in 1796. Fabrizio is born of a noblewoman and a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army when Italy hangs in the balance of Republican independence and Austrian monarchical rule. At 16, he joins the Battle of Waterloo and, denounced by his elder brother, is exiled from his boyhood home. After exile, Fabrizio is sent by his aunt to an ecclesiastical academy in Naples. From there, he joins her in Parma with the idea of eventually becoming a provincial Archbishop. A political mastermind and jewel of the Parmean court, Gina schemes with Mosca, himself a powerful minister, to protect Fabrizio’s future. She harbors affection for her nephew bordering on romantic love, but Fabrizio does not reciprocate romantic feelings. Gina and Mosca are pragmatists who seek power, and at times only survival, with minimal moral regret. They justify their actions by the changing terms of necessity.

When Fabrizio kills a jealous lover, his crime becomes a political opportunity in Parma to depose Gina and Mosca. Gina stokes the Prince’s rage in an attempt to exonerate her nephew, and Fabrizio is thrown into the Farnese Tower, which is named for an incestuous prince and suggests the rumors surrounding Pope Paul III. Fabrizio is aloof of the political world he throws into a tumult, so that while a battle evolves between Gina and the Prince, he finally finds happiness in jail rather than in running from it. Fabrizio falls in love across his prison window with the jailer’s daughter, Clélia Conti. His long-prophesized imprisonment comes to pass, but with the unexpected outcome of bliss.

Gina and Mosca succeed in furnishing Fabrizio’s escape and exoneration with elaborate plans that culminate in Gina’s poisoning of the Prince, a task executed for her by a Republican-revolutionary poet. Just as Gina schemed his escape, Fabrizio schemes his return—if not to jail then to Clélia, who requites his love but, guilty toward her father, vows never to look upon Fabrizio after she assists his escape. Fabrizio spends years cloaked in a misery that is mistaken for unprecedented piety, which makes him famous among the people of Parma. Clélia weds another but bears Fabrizio’s child, whom they abduct but who dies in the process. Clélia follows. Fabrizio at last enters the heretofore unmentioned Charterhouse of Parma, a monastery, only to die a year later. Gina follows him, leaving Mosca to his riches and the new Prince to enjoy his wide-spread adoration.