The Crowd of Soldiers in Zola’s La Débâcle : from aesthetics to ethics
First, this article will look at some of the ways in which the crowd is analyzed in the novels of Émile Zola, before attempting to examine the possible repercussions of the crowd on the ethical level. The Zolian crowd, often “monstrous,” and the different aesthetic strategies of its staging, have indeed repercussions on the level of the characters’ “savoir-vivre.” Through the analysis of the exemplary case of Zola’s La Débâcle, this paper focuses on the ethics of the main character, Jean Macquart, in opposition to the collective character of the crowd.