Julien Sorel is the protagonist of The Red and the Black: the son of a carpenter from Verrières, a young man of astonishing memory and a secret admirer of Napoleon, who tries to rise in society through a career in the Church and dies condemned at twenty-three.
At nineteen, still being beaten by his father for reading, he knows the New Testament in Latin by heart and enters the mayor's house as a tutor. There he wrests a raise from his employer and tells himself, "I won a battle." Then he conquers Madame de Rênal as one who wages a campaign. He is guided by three books, Rousseau's Confessions, the bulletins of the Grande Armée, and the Memorial of Saint Helena, and he chooses the cassock out of calculation, not out of faith.
At the seminary in Besançon he learns that visible merit attracts enemies. In Paris, as secretary to the Marquis de La Mole, he refines his coldness and wins back Mathilde with a method borrowed from Prince Korasoff. His rise reaches its height with the name Chevalier de La Vernaye, and, with two days as a lieutenant, he already finds the rank too small.
What keeps him from being merely a social climber is that calculation fails at decisive moments. When Madame de Rênal's letter undoes his future, he shoots at her instead of maneuvering. At the trial he accuses instead of defending himself, and in prison he tells her that he loved only her. The novel shows him from within, with sympathy and without absolution.