French Literature Reviews - 2026
Stendhal in the Pléiade
Novel and Narrative Prose
Stendhal
COMPLETE NOVELS
BIBLIOTHÈQUE DE LA PLÉIADE . Volume I: 1248 pages - €50.00
"Let no one enter here who is not a paradox": such is the modern, renewed version of the ancient injunction that might well be inscribed on the pediment of Stendhal's oeuvre. [...] Everything is paradoxical about Stendhal, starting with the posthumous destiny that allowed him to hit the jackpot in the lottery of glory during the exact draws he explicitly foresaw for 1880 and 1935—a rather risky anticipation that proved entirely justified. A man who, while far from unknown (it was in his capacity as a "man of letters" that he received the Legion of Honour in 1835), was viewed by most as a gifted, dilettante polygraph, a caustic conversationalist, a remarkable doctor of Italian matters, and an excellent collector of often scandalous anecdotes, transformed after his death into a major novelist of his century. Fragmentary and of limited initial resonance, his works, against all odds and through entirely different paths, would come to rival the massive, totalizing enterprise of Balzac—the only one, through a sort of highly symbolic knighting, to have recognized him during his lifetime as a great writer. Rarely, if ever, has an apparently reckless yet fundamentally meticulous wager (for Stendhal programmed his own survival, constantly thought of his unimaginable future readers, and took care to avoid anything that, by dating his fiction too precisely, might render it obsolete) been more brilliantly won...
Philippe Berthier.
COMPLETE NOVELS [2005]. New edition.
VOLUME I: Anecdote - Novel - Journal de Sir John Armitage - Ernestine ou La Naissance de l'amour - Souvenirs d'un gentilhomme italien - Armance - Vanina Vanini - Le Coffre et le Revenant - Mina de Vanghel - Le Philtre - Le Rouge et le Noir. Edited by Yves Ansel and Philippe Berthier, preface by Philippe Berthier, introduction by Yves Ansel, 1248 pages, bound in leather, 105 x 170 mm. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade Collection (No 4) (2005), Gallimard -rom. ISBN 2070117146. Published: 24/02/05
This edition gathers works such as Armance and Le Rouge et le Noir, alongside shorter narratives including Vanina Vanini and Mina de Vanghel, accompanied by introductory material and editorial apparatus. The volume presents a foundational corpus of nineteenth-century French fiction within the established framework of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series. Readers interested in nineteenth-century French literature and the editorial history of Stendhal complete novels may find this volume relevant.
The publication highlights the complex posthumous trajectory of an author whose scattered early reception evolved into lasting canonical status alongside contemporaries like Balzac. Stendhal's approach to fiction, marked by careful anticipation of future readers and avoidance of overly specific period details, is discussed through the framing materials provided by Philippe Berthier and Yves Ansel. The collection documents the evolution of a literary oeuvre that bridged anecdotal writing and major novelistic achievements.