Léon Daudet and Marcel Proust

Léon Daudet x Marcel Proust 😵‍💫

I’m starting to read “Souvenirs et polémiques” 📘 by Léon Daudet, @editions_bouquins @robert_laffont , starting with Antoine Compagnon’s preface to the most recent edition, now out of print, which dates from 2015. 🕰️

As a historian of literature from the Third Republic, Antoine Compagnon places Léon Daudet within his family and intellectual context: we see a young author from an anti-Semitic background 🤢, who initially turns his back on his family and joins the Hugo ‘clan’. Then, after the marriage had ended in utter failure, Léon Daudet remarried a distant cousin and adopted the ideas of his original social circle – only worse. 🤮

Following in Drumont’s footsteps, he denounced Dreyfus during the affair 😓, unlike Proust, who, in the wake of “J’accuse…!”, went round to his acquaintances to collect signatures in support of Zola.

A whole far-right political and literary scene resurfaced 😰 when Léon Daudet became a columnist and editor-in-chief of the newspaper “L’Action française” in 1908… 🤬

Léon Daudet thought, wrote and lived in a state of terrifying blindness: for example, in 1936, he supported Pétain out of anti-German sentiment… 😵 He died in 1942.

A literary critic 🗞️, he championed Proust’s pastiches in @lefigarofr in 1908, and helped him win the Prix Goncourt in 1919 🌟 for “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” 🌸. In 1932, out of a sense of machismo, he backed Céline and ultimately described Proust as “the Balzac of small talk”… 🤭

Léon Daudet certainly wrote too much (around 130 books and 9,000 articles). But to ignore Daudet, Maurras and Barrès today is to fail to understand the extent to which anti-Semitism permeated French thought at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. 🙁

#MarcelProust #LéonDaudet #proustagram