The Future Looks Backward: Projection and trhe Historical Imagination in 19th-Century France

Though scholars widely acknowledge the great debt of the science fiction genre to pre-20th-century French writers, in The Future Looks Backward, I turn the traditional account of early futuristic writing on its head by revealing how representations of the future in France were driven less by an interest in progress than by an ongoing dialogue with the past. Drawing on fictional and nonfictional sources from the 18 th to the 20th centuries, I show how writers such as Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Stendhal, Theophile Gautier, Jules Verne and others used the future as a rhetorical mode by which to make sense of the present in relation to the fading traces of an often-idealized history. I chart the progression from this surprisingly retrospective view of the future through much of the 19th century, to the eventual shift toward a futuristic literature dominated by the modern impression of a future that encroaches ever more closely upon our experience of the present.;Bound up as well in the 19th century's discursive treatment of the future are new interrogations of history as such, as being a multi-temporal phenomenon, existing somehow at once in the present, past, and future simultaneously. The future becomes a rhetoric by which not only to predict and shape history, but to understand and manage history per se. Chapter 1 examines the temporal multiplicity and backward-looking future of Mercier's L'An 2440 (1771). Chapter 2, following up on the idea of the temporal fold created between the future and the past that is examined in Chapter 1, looks at Stendhal's autobiographical works and his rhetorical use of the future as a means of paradoxically establishing literary authority in the face of ulterior historical and epistemological changes that he cannot predict. Chapter 3 explores the mid-19th century phenomenon of alternate and apocryphal histories of Napoleon, focusing in particular on the alternate history by Louis Geoffroy, Napoleon et la conquete du monde: Histoire de la monarchie universelle (1836), which, through the corrective narrative of an invincible Napoleon, shows how the infinite possibilities of the future run aground sooner or later upon the need to understand more about the past in order to continually surpass it. Maintaining a dialogue with Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, I argue that the 19th century reaches a point of crisis when historical action becomes inescapably citational. In chapter 4, I examine the relationship between changes in 19th-century Paris and writers' responses to the physical restructuring of the city as a loss of architectural and cultural reference, and in particular the ways in which this experience is expressed as the future arriving too soon in the material environment of everyday life. I show how in both fiction and nonfiction of the 19th century, from Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, Jules Verne, and Victor Fournel's monumental work on Haussmannization and its erasure of old Paris, Paris nouveau et Paris futur (1865), employed the future as a rhetorical method by which to express the unwelcomed encroachment of so-called progress upon the present.