Badiou & The Charterhouse of Parma

The question of what a Badiouian reading of a novel might be is a complicated one, Badiou's own account of Beckett notwithstanding. Quite unexpectedly then, while reading Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) it occurred to me that this is indeed a Badiouian novel. The story, of course, is set in Parma after Napolean's defeat, in a small absolutist state whose sovereign (Prince Ranuce-Erneste IV) is irrationally fearful of—paranoid about—liberals. Its hero is the naive and dashing young aristocrat, Fabrizio del Dongo, who aged seventeen flees from his reactionary family to fight for Napoleon, ending up, confused, at what turns out to be the battle of Waterloo.
Fabrizio is a hero because he has complete personal integrity: he is consumately and thoughtlessly brave; he follows his passions, know no hesitations, is committed to aristocratic honour. Both the novel's main women characters fall in love with him, first his aunt Gina, a beautiful and savvy woman in her thirties, and then, after he is jailed by a court faction opposed to his aunt, by Clelia, his jailor's young and innocent daughter.
The novel is finally about absolutism it seems to me: it describes absolutism's impact on life at court: the way in which politics become minaturised; the ways in which courtly intrigue requires skills of concealment, in which fear dominates. But also the way in which courtly life under the rule of an unpredictable despot is strangely liberating, since one is not able to participate in, or be responsible for, society at all. One is free to luxuriate in one's private integrity and intelligence, and in one's passions. It's a terrible political condition, but not as bad as America as Stendhal explicitly says. At the same time, the novel's real meaning appears only when the utter boredom of court society stands revealed: the characters' passions; their ability to reject worldly goods suddenly makes full sense: its not just worth having to put up with this. So if absolutism liberates by stripping subjects of all social responsibility; it also invigorates by the sheer weight of its censorship of everyday life excitements.
In this situation the characters live for love, which happens to them as if by chance. Gina, her lover and Parma's prime minister, Count Mosca, Fabrizio and Clelia will sacrifice almost everything for love. They live in the true because they are faithful to love, to put this in Badiouean terms. They have no commitment to society, to progress, to history, to justice: in an arbitrary absolutist regime, barely hanging on against liberalism, no such committment makes any sense at all. And that's the condition of their being able to live in the true (if not the true of science, art or politics to name Badiou's other "truth procedures")

There's a historical reason for this conjuncture. At a meta-level, both Badiou and Stendhal belong to post-revolutionary moments. Badiou's work only makes sense when read against the defeats of 1968; Stendhal's when read against the defeats of 1789, 1815 and 1830. It is this that turns them from history, from rational progressivity towards an honour economy set in a world where contingency reigns. But they also share an enmity to what they believe America stands for: shop-keeping morality and justice, or, in a word, utilitarianism.