Aristocracy and Modernism: Signs of Aristocracy in Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu

The heir to Balzacian obsession, Proust, for whom every social invitation seems an "open Sesame" to restored life, escorts us into labyrinths where primeval gossip conveys to him the dark secrets of all splendour, until this becomes, under his too close and yearning gaze, dull and cracked. Yet the placet futile, the preoccupation with a historically-condemned luxury class whose superfluity any bourgeois could show by calculations, the absurd energy squandered on the squanderers, is more thoroughly rewarded than the unclouded eye for the relevant.

—Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, § 107¹

The Salon, Distinction, and Class Struggle

It is undeniable that "class struggle" constitutes a central part of the world of Proust's novel, if we mean by this the major cultural battle fought out during the Third Republic between the ascendant bourgeoisie and the persistent ancien régime, to borrow Arno Mayer's phrase.² The dominance of the bourgeoisie, claims Mayer, has been grossly overstated in the historiography of the transition from feudalism to early and then industrial capitalism, and to Modernity. While that dominance economically, and in terms of financial and government posts, may or may not be overemphasized, certainly cultural hegemony was by no means secured overnight, as if the Revolution, in overturning a society of orders politically, had revolutionized the rules of society and art. The old order persisted until the final decimation of the vestiges of nobility in the Great War and the fundamental (technological) changes in art, pastimes, and public gatherings (for instance, through the moving picture) definitively modified the cultural landscape.

This continuity in the social sphere can be observed clearly through a focus on the specific space of the salon. One can discern there how the cultural hegemony of the elite was cashed out in specific codes of comportment and conversation and how, through the ruses of distinction and the "laws of imitation," homo hierarchicus persisted even while the political basis of a society of orders was undermined by absolutist and republican evolutions. What are at stake in the salon are the forms of distinction that govern social interaction among the ruling classes in France during this period. Distinction, a term I borrow from Pierre Bourdieu,³ is most broadly an evaluative recognition of difference within a general economy of symbolic capital. More specifically, as I intend the term here, it means adherence to, or interpellation by, a set of rules governing the manifestation and discernment of elements of a differential, formal system of signs which bear the burden of expressing, legitimizing, and reproducing power, prestige, and ideological class domination. The salon is a theater of distinction, and, as a space dominated by the nobility, is a veritable workshop of the "signs of aristocracy." Perhaps more famously, the salon is also the center of the cultural and artistic life of France.

The codes of distinction were modified but retained over the course of the Enlightenment period to such an extent—one need only think of the contemporary stereotypes of France as the most cultivated and conversible of cultures—that they survived the upheaval of the Revolution, and were relatively easily resuscitated after the fall of the political society that gave rise to them, by the Empires and the Restorations of the nineteenth century.⁴ Several key figures, among them Balzac and Sainte-Beuve, served a reinvention of the tradition of the salon, which thus persisted as a social institution even as it became a lieu de mémoire, a culturally sustaining fantasy, for republican France.

These salons continued to structure the social world of the Third Republic. Artistic salons grew in number and importance over the course of the nineteenth century, causing modifications in the constitutions of more social and aristocratic gatherings.⁵ Above all, the arts—music, painting, theater—reached their pinnacle as signs of cultural capital...