La Foi expérimentale: Lourdes d'Émile Zola

Abstract

This article would like to show the rhetorical ambivalence of Émile Zola's Lourdes, in which the naturalist method (seeing, showing) is the one used by the young Sophie Couteau to convince her audience of the miracle of which she is the lucky one. It is precisely the paradox of this novel to denounce the religious imposture and the commercialization of the miracle, while underlining the similarity of the methods employed by the religious discourse, the medical discourse and by the naturalist novel.