Best known for the novels Le Rouge et le Noir The Red and the Black , and La Chartreuse de Parme The Charterhouse of Parma , , he is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism. A self-proclaimed egotist, the neologism for the same characteristic in his characters was "Beylism". He was an unhappy child, disliking his "unimaginative" father and mourning his mother, whom he loved fervently, and who died in childbirth in , when he was seven.
His closest friend was his younger sister, Pauline, with whom he maintained a steady correspondence throughout the first decade of the 19th century. His family was part of the bourgeois class of the Ancien Regime , which explains his ambiguous attitude toward Napoleon , the Bourbon Restoration , and the monarchy later on.
The military and theatrical worlds of the First French Empire were a revelation to Beyle. As an assistant war commissioner, he served in the administration of the Kingdom of Westphalia , one of Napoleon's client states in Germany.
From to , Beyle lived in Braunschweig Brunswick , where he fell in love with Wilhelmine von Griesheim, whom he called Minette, and for whose sake he remained in the city. He travelled extensively in Germany and was part of Napoleon 's army in the invasion of Russia.
He arrived in Paris in , largely unaware of the general fiasco that the retreat had become. After the Treaty of Fontainebleau , and the fall of Napoleon, he left for Italy, where he settled in Milan. His novel The Charterhouse of Parma , written in 52 days, is set in Italy, which he considered a more sincere and passionate country than Restoration France. An aside in that novel, referring to a character who contemplates suicide after being jilted, speaks about his attitude towards his home country: "To make this course of action clear to my French readers, I must explain that in Italy, a country very far away from us, people are still driven to despair by love.
