The beast within: the contested image of the railroad in French visual culture, 1837-1877

Between 1837, when the first railraod were authorized by the July Monarchy, through the 1870s there were vociferous public debates on the utility of the train, large scale government funding for rail infrastructure, and notable depictions of the train in print, photography and literature. During this period there was also a notable - if currently unrecognized - dearth of painted depictions. This absence suggests that the Impressionists' paintings of the railroad in the 1870s were more than novel images of modern life, and provide evidence of the contested perception of the railroad, industrialization and aspects of modernization in the aftermath of l'année terrible that so far have been unaddressed by art historians and scholars of the nineteenth century.