Paris-moisson, Paris-moteur: métamorphoses de l'espace urbain dans Paris de Zola

Paris , the last of Emile Zola's three-city cycle novels (1898), can be read as a rewrite of the romantic myth of Paris, and as an attempt to dissociate the Parisian space from its revolutionary legend. This article analyzes, from a work on its intertexts (internal and external to the work of Zola) and the precise reading of certain images (the field, the machine), the way in which the novel transforms Paris into an abstract principle scientific transcendence of the violence and antagonism of urban space - ultimately transforming it into pastoral utopia.