Le Rouge et le Noir is set in the latter years of the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830) and the days of the 1830 July Revolution that established the Kingdom of the French (1830–1848). Julien Sorel's worldly ambitions are motivated by the emotional tensions between his idealistic Republicanism and his nostalgic allegiance to Napoleon and the realistic politics of counter-revolutionary conspiracy by Jesuit-supported legitimists, notably the Marquis de la Mole, whom Julien serves for personal gain. Presuming a knowledgeable reader, Stendhal only alludes to the historical background of Le Rouge et le Noir—yet did subtitle the novel Chronique de 1830 ("Chronicle of 1830"). Similarly, the historical background is depicted in Lucien Leuwen (1834), one of Stendhal's unfinished novels, posthumously published in 1894.
Stendhal repeatedly questions the possibility and the desirability of "sincerity" because most of the characters, especially Julien Sorel, are acutely aware of having to play a role to gain social approval. In that 19th-century context, the word "hypocrisy" denoted the affectation of high religious sentiment; in The Red and the Black it connotes the contradiction between thinking and feeling.
In Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1961), philosopher and critic René Girard identifies in Le Rouge et le Noir the triangular structure he denominates as "mimetic desire"; that is, one desires a person only when he or she is desired by someone else. Girard's proposition is that a person's desire for another always is mediated by a third party. This triangulation thus accounts for the perversity of the Mathilde–Julien relationship, which is most evident when Julien begins courting the widow Mme de Fervaques to pique Mathilde's jealousy, and it accounts for Julien's fascination with and membership in the high society he simultaneously desires and despises. To help achieve a literary effect, Stendhal wrote most of the epigraphs—literary, poetic, historic quotations—that he attributed to others.
