Abstract

This article analyses the effects of the Dreyfus Affair on the social production of signs that separates «Swann's Way» from the «Guermantes' Way» in Marcel Proust's Recherche. The «social kaleidoscope» takes a turn in new direction and produces a new alignment of positions. This is the end of the young's narrator idealised vision of the aristocracy: «the fairy must perish if we come in contact with the real person to whom her name corresponds».