Fantastical Steam Machines: Fuel and Energy in Nineteenth-Century Parisian revues de fin d’année

Abstract: This paper examines the ways in which the nineteenth-century revues de fin d’année dealt with the issue of energy. It observes that the authors of those revues endeavored to portray and stage some of the century’s most striking phenomena (notably the advent of the steam engine) while avoiding others (for example, depictions of coal itself). The influence of féerie , which guided the artists’ staging choices, partly explains this silence, but ideological representations were also at play. Faced with the ambivalence inspired by steam, some revue writers imagined a gallery of machines— at once monstrous, poetic, and fanciful— that captured these contradictions.