Marcel Proust celebrated France's Gothic cathedrals

Person: Marcel Proust
Lived: 1871–1922
Field: Literature
From: French

The story

Marcel Proust was born in Paris in 1871 to a Catholic father, the physician Adrien Proust, and a Jewish mother, Jeanne Weil. He was baptised and raised in his father's faith but never practised it, and later described himself as an atheist with something of the mystic about him. Yet the great churches of France moved him deeply.

Proust's love of architecture grew from his reading of the English critic John Ruskin, whose writings tied the beauty of Gothic building to the spiritual life of the people who made it. Proust translated Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens, a study of the great cathedral at Amiens, into French, publishing it in 1904 with a long introduction of his own.

In 1904, as France debated the separation of church and state, Proust published an article in Le Figaro titled "La mort des cathédrales" ("The Death of Cathedrals"). In the article he called Gothic cathedrals probably the highest, and unquestionably the most original, expression of French genius. Though he was not religious himself, he valued them as great works of art and as part of the living heritage of the nation.

The article was consistent with views he had held for years. In an 1892 essay, "L'Irréligion d'État", he had condemned extreme anti-clerical measures such as the expulsion of monks, warning that the negation of religion could bring the same fanaticism, intolerance and persecution as religion itself. He went on to oppose the 1905 law separating church and state, even though it was pushed through by many of his fellow supporters of Alfred Dreyfus.

Proust's political outlook was liberal and pluralist, and he rejected bigotry on all sides. His interest in church buildings stayed with him: his plans of 1908 included studies of stained-glass windows and of tombstones, alongside the early drafts of what became In Search of Lost Time. His article on the cathedrals reflected his conviction that France's religious heritage belonged to its whole culture, believers and non-believers alike.