Abstract
After the memory lapse of the 18th century, we had to come to Proust's attraction to the classics of the Grand Siècle and the omnipresence of the 17th century in La Recherche. As early as 1920, Jacques Rivière spoke of "Proust et la tradition classique" in La NRF. What is Proust's classical temptation? We're not talking about scholastic neo-classicism, Maurrasian traditionalism, Gidian purism or Rivière's moralism.
Yet the traditionalist memory of the Ancien Régime is not absent from La Recherche. Charlus reminds the narrator in Le Temps retrouvé : "Vous m'avez fait lire autrefois l'admirable Aimée de Coigny de Maurras" (IV, 376). "Mademoiselle Monk ou la génération des événements", collected in L'Avenir de l'intelligence (1905), is a tale inspired to Maurras by Aimée de Coigny's memoirs of her role as the linchpin of the Restoration with Talleyrand at the end of the Empire. The Restoration was the result of a fortunate combination of circumstances: the unpredictable complicity between Aimée de Coigny and Talleyrand. Yet, concludes Charlus: "If the present Aimée exists, will her hopes be realized? I do not wish so."
The equation between the Revolution, Romanticism and the Republic as a continuation of the Enlightenment - and the Reformation - forms the basis of Maurras's doctrine, but Romanticism is by no means abhorred by Proust, on the contrary, who defends Nerval, for example, against his assimilation to the backward 18th century to make him a Romantic (CSB, 233). The fact remains that the conflict between the two sensibilities - Ancien Régime and République - is very present in La Recherche. We can no doubt speak of La Persistance de l'Ancien Régime sous la République, to use the title of Arno Mayer's book (1983), in economics, politics, mores and culture.
Courtly society penetrates a commentary on the Princess of Parma's way of receiving homage and gracefully lifting up those who humbly kneel before her. At length, the narrator analyzes the aristocratic or courtly dialectic of grace and humility, deference and friendliness, on the verge of disappearing in a "new society", democratic and egalitarian (II, 746-747).
