When the illustrated press was a new media: Confrontation between image and text

19th Century mass produced illustrated press was very different from the daily press. First, it was usually a weekly paper which did not necessarily concentrate on the 'news' but was rather a reflection on the events of the week. Second, the image was an essential part of its content and, as such, had a predominant role. Actually, not only were the images independent from the texts, except of course the commentaries which described them, but they sometimes contradicted them. Taking this type of contradiction into consideration, the paper I am proposing will discuss the way the combination image and text could open a new space for debates which could not be expressed otherwise. In that context, it will analyse an important part of the generalist French and English illustrated press (as opposed to the specialist illustrated press such as humouristic press for instance) during the six first months of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. It will use four English periodicals - The Graphic, The Illustrated Times, The Penny Illustrated Press et The Illustrated London News - and five French illustrée. It will essentially analyse the illustrations in the form of engravings in their papers - l'Illustration, le Monde Illustré, l'Univers Illustré, le Journal illustré et la Presse entirety, namely with their captions, titles and commentaries, using visual examples to support the discussion. It will also take into consideration the chronicles in order to do a comparison between the visual and textual content. The analysis will be put into a larger context. Indeed, it will look at the competitive conditions within which these papers published, either nationally or internationally, their importance and limits, taking into account some of the problems specific to the illustrated press, namely the fact that the text and the image did not travel at the same speed : while the former could be communicated via telegraphy, this was not the case for the latter. This caused a certain amount of paradoxical situations. These questions will be seen as over-determining the content of each paper, in ways which was more or less significantly different from its competitors according to the economic and political conditions within which they were published. At the horizontal level, this affected the formation of public opinion as understood in the classical definition of the 19th Century, and at the vertical level it influenced the public of different classes.