La Nación, el Segundo Imperio y la Tercera República. Pedagogía cultural y novela francesa en la Argentina (1901-1920)

The “Biblioteca de La Nación” (1901-1920) is a collection of universal literature intended for new readership brought on by immigration, that was massively sold at a low price during Argentina’s modernisation process. Almost half of the 872 titles of the catalogue are translations of novels written in French. Selected by the newspaper La Nación, a symbolic centre of liberalism in Argentina, these novels respond to a clear line of cultural production, which is the Second Empire and the Third Republic in France. This article intends to analyse the ideological implications of that corpus through the study of the plots; the symbolic capital those novels convey; the way they relate to Émile Zola’s work.