The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [13]
Proust’s life and his work straddle three major eras in French history: the aftermath of the Paris Commune; the years of the Third French Republic known as the belle époque; and the period of the First World War and its immediate aftermath. He was born shortly after the time of the Commune, when the working classes assumed control of government in the French capital following extended civic unrest after defeat in the Franco-Prussian war (July 1870 to January 1871). While the city his parents fled, fearing for their lives, was one so wracked by conflict that its inhabitants were reduced to killing and eating garden birds and animals from the zoo in order to survive, the bulk of Proust’s active, creative years were those of the belle époque, the time from around the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair to the outbreak of the First World War. For the affluent, amongst whom Proust moved in his adolescence and his adult life, this was a world of banquets, champagne and finery; but it was a world which, in June 1914, was precipitated into the largest, most bloody conflict the world had ever witnessed.2
The July Monarchy of 1830 ended in 1848 when Louis-Philippe d’Orléans abdicated. The Second Republic was proclaimed and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, whose uncle had been defeated at Waterloo in 1814, was elected President. After a coup d’état against the constitution in 1851, he proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III the following year and by the mid 1850s Baron Haussmann, Napoleon’s prefect of the Seine, was well under way with his project of reconstruction and renewal, pulling down much of the insalubrious, old Paris and building a city fit to call itself an Imperial Capital. Napoleon’s disastrous war with Prussia, however, ending in French defeat and his capture at Sedan, near the Belgian border, in September 1870, marked the beginning of the end of the Second Empire. The Third French Republic was proclaimed on 4 September 1871 when Proust was not yet two months old.
These and subsequent events (above all the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War) do feature in Proust’s novel but not because he seeks to offer a chronicle of the Third Republic. Rather, they feature in the conversation and debates of the characters and as forces that shape and alter these individuals through time. As Malcolm Bowie puts it, ‘political parties and factions are named but not described. Upheavals within the Church, the army or the judiciary are notable only for the shock waves and the ripples of curiosity they send through dinners and receptions’.3 This is not to say that Proust was uninterested in politics and current affairs; he was an engaged reader of newspapers and incorrigibly inquisitive, but what interested him above all were the behavioural motivations of the individual in his or her relationships, not the unfolding of major events per se. These were only interesting for Proust when they permitted him insight into the functioning of the psyche, the workings of the desirous mind or the dynamics of individuals’ behaviour when they ‘belong’ to a certain social group. It is arguably Proust’s (and his Narrator’s) lack of belonging to a single definable group that permits the depth of analysis that he offers. As one of his biographers puts it, Proust ‘possessed both a grasp of how society works and a sufficient distance from it to view it objectively and then to write about it’.4
The society of the Third Republic was many-layered, deeply divided along class lines, formed of many discrete sets: some were dwindling remnants of times past (such as the old nobility, centred in Paris in the faubourg Saint-Germain), others were gradually swelling in size, confidence and clout, namely the various strata of the wealthy – and ambitious – bourgeoisie. Balzac’s Comédie Humaine had chronicled the rise of money and ambition through the societal landscapes of the First Empire and the Restoration; Proust’s novel goes on to explore a variety of social milieux of the belle époque and we can trace the trajectories of various individuals (such as Bloch,