Religious crowds at Lourdes in Zola and Huysmans

Abstract

In Lourdes (1894), Emile Zola established the model of the passive crowd ready to adopt a «new religion» of justice and happiness but also ready to follow a conservative meneur. As a pioneer in this approach to crowds, Zola foreshadowed a change of emphasis in late nineteenth-century crowd studies, such as those by G. Tarde and G. Le Bon. In The Crowds of Lourdes (1906), J.-K. Huysmans consolidates the concept while integrating it into catholicism. This essay seeks to restore to the religious crowd in the industrial and cosmopolitan age its rightful place in that era's thought on the phenomenon of the crowd.