From the Dreyfus Affair to the Albertine Affair. Sociopoetics of conspiracy in À la recherche du temps perdu

French Belle Époque is characterized by a spy mania. During this time, fights against traitors are multiplying. In this article, we would like to show how this social discourse gets into Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu and fuels at the same time an imagination and a poetics of the conspiracy. First, this imagination belongs to armchair conspiracists. Between Dreyfus affair and Eulenburg affair they have indeed a lot to do. This imagination belongs then to the narrator, who is convinced that he is at the heart of a conspiracy, which turns the novel into a paranoid detective story. But he is perhaps the victim of a trick played on him by his imagination. Affected in turn by suspicion, the reader must also become a detective, in search of the traces that form the frame of the conspiracy narrative. More generally, the analysis of the Proustian imagination of conspiracy brings to light a number of interactions concerning a society that also seems to have entered the age of suspicion, fragmented into “little clans” that operate on the model of secret societies.