La foule religieuse de Lourdes chez Zola et Huysmans

The Émile Zola’s novel Lourdes is systematically ignored by Crowd’s studies and draw up in 1894 the model of the generous and peaceful crowd opened to “a new religion” of justice and happiness, but also willing to be ruled by a conservative leader. Probably Zola is the first great author to study the crowd by anticipating a change of tone from crowd’s specialists of the late nineteenth century, especially Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon. So, these writers become the voice of this very different crowd compared to the dreaded proletarian urban crowd. Unlike Zola, the Joris-Karl Huysmans’ literary work Les foules de Lourdes (1906) reinforces the notion of positive crowd by integrating it into the official Catholic religion.