Dinner with Proust: Dreyfusism and Anti-Semitism in À la recherche du temps perdu

Proust the socialite whose 1901 dinner party fostered reconciliation between political opponents must be distinguished from Proust the novelist, who kept probing the wounds of the Dreyfus Affair and the anti-Semitism it exacerbated. Proust, despite his personal contempt for anti-Semitism, refused to purge it from his narrator’s thoughts. The narrator is a persistent Dreyfusard who nevertheless criticizes the Dreyfusism of his Jewish friends Bloch and Swann. Proust thus establishes the narrator’s political self-determination but risks having him appear complicit with the anti-Semitism of the Guermantes. Ultimately, the narrator proves an ambivalent philo-Semite and critical observer, rather than mere bystander, of the anti-Semitism and anti-Dreyfusism of the Guermantes circle. By means of his flawed narrator, Proust confronts readers as divergent as his dinner guests in their attitudes towards Jews and the Affair, implicitly criticizing the weaknesses and inconsistencies in their beliefs.