Steam Age Quotes

“The July Monarchy was the start of France’s Steam Age, a period when steam technology, much of it imported from England, began to transform perceptions of space and time (the steamboat and the railroad), material culture (the powerloom for weaving cloth), and the circulation of words and images (the mechanized printing press). The number of steam engines in France rose from six hundred in 1830 to five thousand in 1847, and contemporaries were powerfully aware of the changes they portended. Indeed, the July Monarchy has never received sufficient acknowledgment for setting the stage for the major economic boom of the 1850s and 1860s, for which the Emperor Napoleon III was happy to take credit. Nevertheless, in two fundamental ways, France before 1848 was more like it had been at the end of the eighteenth century than like it would be by the beginning of the twentieth.”
― Robert J. Bezucha, The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848