Proust in Brittany Marcel Proust was born just weeks after the Paris Commune in the summer of 1871. His life reaches into the twentieth century and through the First World War. Born into one of the successful bourgeois families that emerged from the revolutions in France, his documented life and his own novels present readers with a leisured social class in which a young man could choose to become a writer. His narrating character in his major novel, À la Recherche du temps perdu (published over the period 1913-1927), is called the young Marcel, and with Proust's declared intent to scientifically investigate personal memory, the volumes of À la Recherche hover between fiction and autobiography. Actual key figures from the time are mentioned in his novel, for example, Viollet-le-Duc, renovator of Notre-Dame cathedral. This further connects the narrative with the real history of this era. Even though Proust's own critical writing challenged nineteenth-century literary critic
ISSN 2753-7803
