ABSTRACT

In his encyclopaedic – yet fictional – descriptions of Second Empire France, the novelist Émile Zola (1840-1902) often grappled with iron architecture and its unstable place within the nineteenth-century imaginary. Across the twenty volumes of his Rougon-Macquart series (subtitled A Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire), Zola brought his readers face to face with iron buildings in their many facets: as new typological forms in the rapidly changing city; as nodes within emerging networks for the circulation of commerce and capital; as sites of labour and production; as monstrous symbols of oppressive modernity; and as oneiric sites for escape from it. Zola’s descriptions of the market, the department store and other iron buildings provide telling indices of attitudes towards iron architecture: both the author’s and his public’s.