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In the middle of the 1850’s, a new tool was invented in England by the scientific community to study the submarine world: the aquarium, in which several species of the aquatic flora and fauna could live in a self-sustained environment. Widely spread among amateurs, the aquarium rapidly became very famous especially in France: known as the “aquarium mania,” this popularity kept up during the 1860’s and was then suddenly interrupted. This article intends to study the appearance and the fleeting existence of the “aquarium mania.” Therefore we’ll analyse what in the French cultural behaviour and in the French system of representations could produce such a “time” of the aquarium. First considered by the women of the bourgeoisie as an original and pleasant decoration for their interiors, the aquarium also suited deeper aspirations of French people at this period: among the first signs of the mass culture, it was considered as a new image producer, which proposed an astonishing spectacle. In a world also dominated by the industrial growth and the growing capitalism, it appeared in an ambiguous way as a representation of the modernity and of the scientific progress, but also as the possibility to a return to nature, for a spiritual and moral rise.
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