| 1871 | (10 July) Marcel Proust is born to Jeanne Proust née Weil and Dr Adrien Proust in the village of Auteuil, to the west of Paris. His mother is a non-practising Jew, his father a non-practising Catholic. He is very weak in infancy. |
| 1872 | The Proust family moves to an apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. |
| 1873 | (24 May) Birth of Robert Proust, Marcel’s brother. |
| 1878–86 | Family vacations at Illiers in the Eure-et-Loir (the village is renamed Illiers-Combray in 1971, commemorating Proust’s novel and the centenary of Proust’s birth). |
| 1881 | Proust’s first, and near fatal, asthma attack. Respiratory and other health problems will henceforth be a permanent part of his life. |
| 1882–9 | Proust attends the Lycée Fontanes (renamed Condorcet in 1883); attendance poor due to ill health, but various friendships formed. |
| 1889 | Proust turns 18. His final year of lycée. Inauguration of the Eiffel Tower as the entrance arch to the World’s Fair. |
| 1890 | Enrols at the Faculty of Law and the School of Political Science. |
| 1891 | Journalism appears in Le Mensuel. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. |
| 1893 | Publications in the important journal La Revue blanche. Completes Licence en droit. |
| 1894 | President Carnot assassinated in Lyon by an anarchist. (Dec.) Court martial judges Captain Albert Dreyfus guilty. |
| 1895 | Completes Licence ès lettres. Unpaid position at the Bibliothèque mazarine. Scarcely attends due to ‘ill health’. Stays in Brittany with Reynaldo Hahn. Begins notes towards Jean Santeuil. Trial of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency. |
| 1896 | (Mar.) Publication of Les Plaisirs et les jours. |
| 1897 | Duels with journalist Jean Lorrain over Lorrain’s public insinuations of Proust’s homosexual relation with Lucien Daudet. Neither combatant is injured. Henry James, What Maisie Knew. |
| 1898 | (13 Jan.) Zola’s ‘J’accuse!’ in L’Aurore. Later in the year Proust attends Émile Zola’s trial. |
| 1899 | Jean Santeuil abandoned. Proust starts work on a translation of John Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens. Sigmund Freud, Die Traudeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams). Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. |
| 1900 | Ruskin’s death. Proust publishes a series of articles on Ruskin. Travels to Venice with his mother and friends in April; returns to Venice, alone, in October. |
| 1902 | Travels to Belgium and Holland with Hahn, visits Bruges and Amsterdam amongst other places. Sees Vermeer’s View of Delft and many old Dutch masters. |
| 1903 | (Feb.) Marriage of Robert Proust. Society pieces published in Le Figaro. (Nov.) Sudden death of Proust’s father. |
| 1904 | La Bible d’Amiens published. Translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies is begun. Society journalism continues. |
| 1905 | ( June) Proust’s important essay on reading, the preface to Sésame et les lys, is published. ( July) French government passes a law separating the Church from the State. Madame Proust is taken ill in Évian and rushed back to Paris by Robert. (26 Sept.) Death of Madame Proust. (Dec.) Having promised his mother he would do so before her death, Proust checks in to the clinic of Dr Paul Sollier, an experimental psychologist and ex-pupil of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. His psychotherapeutic treatment lasts until late January. |
| 1906 | Dreyfus reinstated in the army. Sésame et les lys is published. Proust resolves to move into what was his great-uncle Georges Weil’s Paris residence, 102 Boulevard Haussmann. |
| 1907 | Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon completed in Paris. Various articles and stories published. Summer in Cabourg on the Normandy coast. Proust meets Alfred Agostinelli, a young taxi-driver. Proust will return to Cabourg every year between 1907 and 1914. |
| 1908 | Proust plans a project ‘Contre Sainte-Beuve’ (‘Against Sainte-Beuve’), part critical essay, part dialogue. Features of what will become In Search of Lost Time take shape. Pastiches appear in Le Figaro. Gustav Klimt exhibits Der Kuss (The Kiss) for the first time. |
| 1909 | Contre Sainte-Beuve amounts to around 400 pages; publishers show no interest. F. T. Marinetti’s first Manifesto of Futurism in Paris; Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. |
| 1910–11 | Proust develops the core sequences of his novel that will become Swann’s Way, Time Regained, part of The Guermantes Way and, latterly, parts of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. |
| 1912–13 | Successive rejections from publishers. |
| 1913 | In the spring, Agostinelli moves into Proust’s apartment as a secretary. Swann’s Way is accepted for publication at the author’s expense by |
| Grasset. Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. (14 Nov.) Publication of Swann’s Way. | |
| 1914 | (May) Agostinelli dies, drowned in the Mediterranean as a result of a flying accident. (Aug.) French forces mobilized. Printing presses cease activity during the war. James Joyce, Dubliners. |
| 1915 | Proust develops Sodom and Gomorrah and the ‘Albertine cycle’: The Captive and The Fugitive. |
| 1916 | Negotiations with the Nouvelle revue française (NRF), who wish to take over publication of Proust’s novel from Grasset. (May) Proust reports suffering a 70-hour period of insomnia. ( July) First Dada manifesto proclaimed in Zurich. |
| 1917 | (Feb. and Oct.) Revolution in Russia. (18 May) In Paris, Proust attends the première of Parade, performed by the Ballets Russes, with a scenario by Jean Cocteau, score by Erik Satie, set and costumes by Picasso, and programme notes by Guillaume Apollinaire. |
| 1918 | Proust’s fragile health becomes a near-constant preoccupation as he devotes longer and longer hours to correcting his novel. |
| 1919 | ( June) NRF reissues Swann’s Way, publishes Pastiches et mélanges (selected journalism) and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Proust has to move house, twice, eventually settling at 44 Rue Hamelin in October. (Dec.) In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower awarded the Goncourt Prize. |
| 1920 | André Breton employed by Gallimard as proof-reader for The Guermantes Way. (May) Breton and Philippe Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), the first work of surrealist (or proto-surrealist) ‘automatic writing’. (Oct.) First instalment of The Guermantes Way published. |
| 1921 | (May) Proust sees Vermeer’s View of Delft once more, at an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. Second instalment of The Guermantes Way published in tandem with the first part of Sodom and Gomorrah. |
| 1922 | Increasing doses of self-medication. (Feb.) Joyce’s Ulysses published in Paris. (Apr.) Second instalment of Sodom and Gomorrah published. (Oct.) T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land appears in The Criterion. (18 Nov.) Proust dies after developing pneumonia. Gaston Gallimard and Robert Proust undertake to publish the remaining volumes of the Recherche. |
| 1923 | Publication of La Prisonnière. |
| 1925 | Publication of Albertine disparue; Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. |
| 1927 | Publication of Le Temps retrouvé. |