In The red and the black, Stendhal created the great flawed hero Julian Sorel, a driven and intelligent man who however fails to understand the ways of the world he sets out to conquer. The book satirizes French society of the time, particularly the hypocrisy and materialism of its aristocracy and the Roman Catholic Church, and foretells a radical change in French society that will remove both of those forces from their positions of power. In 1850 Tsar Nicholas I banned The red and the black, along with all Stendhal's other works, and it was among the books purged by Franco in Spain.
On the Catholic Index of forbidden books