It may seem incongruous to end this book with a chapter on ruins. The preceding chapters explored writers' responses to aspects of Second Empire France and examined the relationship between the period's social and technological innovations and its literature, but being neither new nor of recent interest, ruins hardly seem to fit this pattern. Yet each chapter has shown evidence of Second Empire writers' preoccupation with the idea of ruin in its broadest sense as they attempted to negotiate the changes taking place around them. The breakdown of order underlies many descriptions of display as writers dismantled the confident assurance of exhibition rhetoric, and that imagery of collapse is present throughout: in the recurrent evocations of disintegrating railway tracks and shattered carriages, in the frequent depiction of culinary confections destroyed not just by consumption but by acts of violence, in photographers' concern to record crumbling monuments in an attempt to preserve them from the ravages of time, and in the persistent association of fashionable costume with the idea of moral and financial ruin and social disintegration.

French writers' interest in the subject of ruins dates back at least as far as the Renaissance, when Du Bellay imported the Italian humanists' melancholy reflections on ruins into French culture. For Romantic writers, ruins had inspired sombre musings on the transience of existence and human endeavour.