Writing the Train: Imperial Visions, Masculinity and Nationalism in the Work of French writers in the Last Third of the Nineteenth Century

摘要

This article examines the responses of the Médan group of French writers – adherents to the aesthetics of the naturalist novel centered around Gustave Flaubert, Edmond Goncourt, Guyde Maupassant, and Emile Zola – to railway construction as a component of the project of nationalism. Existing scholarship, and Eugen Weber in particular, have emphasized how the French educated elite welcomed the creation of a united railway network, considering it essential for the spread of Republican and modern values. However, in defining railway construction as a Republican project, the intellectuals had to compete with the legacy of the Second Empire, which itself had sought to turn the modernization of transport into a sacred symbol of its civilizing mission. Because of the attachment of imperial symbolism to the railway, Flaubert, Goncourt, Maupassant and Zola doubted the benefits of railroads as the agent of civilizing mission. In his Labête humaine (1890), which portrays the life of railway station employees in Le Havre during the late 1860s, Zola underlined that economic modernization and fast transportation did not succeed in disseminating refined culture and civility among the French. The positive aspects of modern technology had failed to compete with the corruption of morality provoked by the politicians of the Second Empire. These same authors, however, recognized that detailed knowledge of modern technological phenomena would become the essence of a modern masculinity, and redefined an emotional attachment to the symbols of this technology (including the railway) as a part of the subjectivities of the modern Frenchman. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.