The thesis asks how the industrial endeavors of the late 19th century encouraged contemporaries to characterize their time. The consultation of dissimilar sources and heterogeneous voices of the period shows that the expectations of the future promised by technical advances contributed to reinforcing critical readings of the past and desirable figurations of a future rich in possibilities but continually postponed. This led the fin de siècle actors to search for concepts, allegories, and metaphors that would allow them to make the agonizing march towards progress intelligible. In this characterization of time, it is possible to partially delve into the anxieties, longings, and judgments that the elite sectors (mainly) used to make sense of their temporality.
