- Person
- Marcel Proust
- Lived
- 1871–1922
- Field
- Literature
- From
- French
The story
In December 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian artillery officer of Jewish descent, was convicted in a closed military court of collusion with a foreign power. The case rested on an unsigned note, and he was publicly stripped of his rank and sent to the penal colony on Devil's Island. When evidence emerged that another officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was the real culprit, the army suppressed it, acquitted Esterhazy and brought new charges against Dreyfus based on forged documents.
The Dreyfus Affair tore France apart and unleashed a wave of antisemitism. It also divided Proust's own family: Marcel, his brother Robert and their mother, who came from a Jewish family, took the side of the wrongly accused officer, while their father, a prominent Catholic doctor, sided with the army.
Proust was among the earliest Dreyfusards. After Émile Zola published his open letter "J'Accuse...!" in L'Aurore, building support for a retrial, Proust attended Zola's trial. He proudly claimed to have been the one who asked the novelist Anatole France to sign the petition in support of Dreyfus's innocence.
The New York Review of Books notes that Proust became intensely involved in the affair, and that his advocacy brought him closer to Jewish friends such as the salon hostess Geneviève Straus and the composer Reynaldo Hahn, while straining friendships with aristocrats such as the Comte de Montesquiou. Even Hannah Arendt, a sharp critic of assimilated French Jews, acknowledged that he was ready in emergencies to identify himself as a Jew.
Dreyfus was reconvicted at a second trial in 1899, then pardoned, and in 1906 he was fully exonerated and reinstated in the army. The affair left a deep mark on Proust's great novel, In Search of Lost Time, in which the elegant Charles Swann is shunned by high society for his Dreyfusard views. Through the novel, readers still see how the affair divided the drawing rooms of Paris.
Why it matters
Proust lent his voice to the cause of justice for a persecuted Jewish officer when the affair was dividing France, and his novel preserved its lessons for later generations.
About Marcel Proust
Paris novelist, son of a Jewish mother, whose seven-volume In Search of Lost Time transformed the modern novel’s grasp of memory, time and desire.
More about Marcel Proust
- Marcel Proust's madeleine taught the world about memoryIn Swann's Way (1913), a madeleine dipped in tea brings back a lost childhood, Proust's famous image of involuntary memory.
- Marcel Proust helped pioneer stream-of-consciousness writingMarcel Proust's seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, some 1.25 million words long, helped pioneer stream of consciousness and shape modernism.
- Marcel Proust brought John Ruskin to French readersWith help from his mother, Marcel Proust translated John Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906) into French.
- Marcel Proust celebrated France's Gothic cathedralsIn a 1904 Le Figaro article, 'The Death of Cathedrals', Marcel Proust called Gothic cathedrals the most original expression of French genius.
Sources
- Marcel Proust Wikipedia
- Proust's Jewish Question The New York Review of Books
- Dreyfus affair Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.