Abstract
The second component of Proust's beloved 17th century, alongside aristocratic memory, is Christian memory, which also crops up throughout the Recherche. The cathedral is often cited as the place and symbol of Proust's traditionalism. Thus, "cathedrals exerted far less prestige on a 17th-century devotee than on a 20th-century atheist", says the narrator, as he considers that politeness did not disappear with court society, and that a hierarchy subsists in democracy (II, 747); or "like [the stalls] we see leaning against the sides of cathedrals that the aesthetics of engineers have not cleared away" (II, 316), to point out the community of aristocracy and craftsmen around the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes. Two essential themes are thus suggested: the cathedral is both true democracy and aesthetic redemption. As a form of attachment to tradition, the cult of Christian memory runs through the Recherche.
After the Dreyfus affair, Proust's second commitment was to anticlerical politics and the law of separation. But as early as "L'irréligion d'État", an article published in Le Banquet in 1892 , the radicals were portrayed as "persecuting religion in all its forms", and France owed Christianity "its purest masterpieces". In this virulent article, the young man spoke out against "a doctrine of destruction and death" (CSB, 348-349).
The idea was taken up again in "La mort des cathédrales" (The Death of Cathedrals), an article published in Le Figaro in 1904 , at the height of the debate on the separation of France, and foreshadowing Barrès' La Grande Pitié des églises de France (The Great Pity of the Churches of France) . Proust denounces the disaffectation of France's churches, which are to be converted into "museums, conference halls, casinos" (CSB, 144). Yet the cathedral is the living memory of France: "It can be said that, thanks to the persistence in the Catholic Church of the same rites and, on the other hand, of Catholic belief in the hearts of the French, cathedrals are not only the most beautiful monuments of our art, but the only ones still living their integral life" (CSB, 143). Worst symptom of this evil: the State "subsidizes the lectures at the Collège de France, which are, however, addressed to only a small number of people and which, next to that complete integral resurrection which is a high mass in a cathedral, seem quite cold" (CSB, 147).
Proust's words, "integral life", "complete integral resurrection", recall the 1869 preface to Michelet's Histoire de France (the italics are his): "Even more complicated [than Géricault's desire to remake the paintings in the Louvre and appropriate everything], more frightening was my historical problem posed as the resurrection of integral life, not in its surfaces, but in its inner and profound organisms."
