Published by a small bookseller in Providence, Rhode Island, the first work of Stendhal's to appear in America was The Life of Mozart, Haydn, and Métastase, popular in its time and all but forgotten today. The year was 1820, and the thirty-seven-year-old Stendhal was eleven years away from bringing forth Le Rouge et le noir, the novel that would install him among the literary titans of nineteenth-century France. Yet with the exception of the British edition of The Life of Rossini in 1824, more than seven decades would pass before another of Stendhal's books would emerge from a press in either the US or the UK. It was only in 1895 that an American publisher would issue an English translation of La Chartreuse de Parme, with the first translation of Le Rouge et le noir arriving in 1898. While America neglected Stendhal, Stendhal grappled with America. As Michel Crouzet, a distinguished scholar of French Romanticism, shows in his valuable study, Stendhal absorbed the accounts of European visitors to the United States, scrutinized its politics, and found in its growth a confirmation of his forebodings about liberal society.

Though Stendhal's youthful correspondence is spotted with inchoate plans to visit his cousins on their thriving sugarcane plantation in Louisiana, he never set foot in America. Instead, as Crouzet argues, Stendhal formed his vision of the country from journals; the travel narratives of Basil Hall, Morris Birkbeck, and Frances Trollope, among others; and the writings and biographical accounts of the Founding Fathers. Over the years, he moved from an admiration of America for its republican ideals to disillusion with a society submitting to the tyranny of a materialistic and anti-intellectual majority. By 1829 in his Promenades dans Rome, Stendhal saw fit to epitomize the American character in a crass, wealthy Georgia slave-owner on a tour of Italy. Insensible to Rome's aesthetic power, Stendhal's American boasts insipidly of his countrymen's achievements in canal-digging, while his capacity to convey evaluative judgments seems limited to the expressions “How cheap! How dear!” (183).

Stendhal et l'Amérique is generous with insights not just into Stendhal's work, but also into his extended mileu. Crouzet emphasizes, for instance, that despite shared ground in their reflections on America, Stendhal was contemptuous of Tocqueville, suspecting him of using the first volume of Démocratie en Amérique to cast aspersions upon republicanism and thus curry favor with the July Monarchy. Elsewhere, Crouzet sets Stendhal's opinions within the broad contours of transatlantic relations. He has outstanding pages on La Fayette's triumphant tour of the United States in 1824 and 1825 – the high-water mark for Franco-American goodwill in the first half of the century. Noteworthy too is Crouzet's discussion of the lofty esteem accorded Franklin by the nineteenth-century French literati. Saint-Beuve styled him “le poète du sens commun” (108).

Crouzet's book richly illuminates not only Stendhal but also the processes of reception and interpretation by which America assumed its prominent place in the thought of nineteenth-century France.