The Nature Rush. Crowds out for a Good Time in the 19th century novel
A symbol of the “advent of leisure” (Corbin), the day in the country became a new ritual in the 19th century, which many novelists seized upon. The green suburbs thus became the setting for a particular kind of crowd : an urban crowd of workers, prostitutes, and middle-class people looking to relax, but also a Sunday crowd, which intended to break away from the social constraints of the week. This article proposes to study this crowd, eminently Parisian even as it runs away from the capital. Zola, Maupassant, and the Goncourt brothers highlight the number and density of the crowd that invades the communes bordering Paris every Sunday, to emphasize the disconnect between the idealistic vision of nature—the invigorating and regenerating open air—and the lived reality, i.e., the impossibility of escaping the crowd, the suffered proximity, the soiled grass, the unbreathable air of eateries, and the poor-quality deep-fried food. Under the pen of the novelists, the green suburb is turned into a caricature of bucolic setting, an illusion of nature reduced to the dimensions of a marked trail or a noisy open-air café. The once idyllic setting, conducive to daydreaming and rural romance, becomes that of an explosion of conformist vulgarity where all the stupidity abhorred by the great novelists of the century is concentrated.