Designing with Iron in Mid‐Nineteenth‐Century France

In art and architectural history, metal – especially iron – has a metonymical relationship with both architectural rationalism and, as the quintessential material of the industrial age, modern building in France. By examining the ways that iron was simultaneously both structural and ornamental in the Second Empire, the author aims to revisit the wider historiographical problem that understands iron, and the modernization of France itself, in heroic terms. Iron and its manipulation divided some of its greatest champions during the critical years of French industrialization. A broader consideration of Second Empire designs in iron, whether rolled or cast, structural or decorative, instead reveals a fraught and contested understanding of the material and its many applications. Far from bolstering an orthodox modernist genealogy, it shows how French self-representation in iron adhered to long-established aesthetic conventions in the industrial age.