SOURCE: "The Sceptical Mode," in The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists, 1850-1970, The Catholic University of America Press, 1990, pp. 11-51.

In the following excerpt, Scott discusses the importance of religion, primarily as an object of ridicule and derision, in several French Realist novels.

An aim common to most novelists during the second half of the nineteenth century was to depict as fully as possible the physical appearance and social structures of the modern world. Thus churches as buildings and the Church as institution were necessary ingredients of their novels on a purely documentary level. The grander the scale of the social panorama, the truer this was, and it is in the novels of Zola that churches and church ceremonial, as an important aspect of life at all social levels, are the most fully and frequently depicted. Some of Zola's most...