- Email: [email protected]
From space to time
862
FROM SPACETO TIME Le futur: une initiative franco-britannique! 1. F. Clarke
The first half of this series is now coming to an end; and in the last two articles for 1990 this history of future thinking will move on to the first great outpouring of futuristic fiction in the 1870s. As I. F. Clarke points out, the literature of things-to-come came into existence wholly, solely and exclusively as an AngloOne line of French invention, or-if you prefer- me initiative franco-britannique. this advance into the future runs from Francis Bacon to H. G. Wells; the other from Rabelais to Jules Verne. Out of this literary common market came the characteristic modes of writing about the seemingly limitless range of future possibilities-from balloon battles to Star Wars. No doubt all those many writers who contributed to the new literature would agree with the Belgian poet and dramatist, Maurice Maeterlinck: ‘The past is of use to me as the eve of tomorrow; my soul wrestles with the future.’
The articles in this series have now arrived at that point when it becomes profitable to go forward in order to took backwards at the last stages in the emergence of an unmistakeabie modern style in writing about coming things. That is to say, the beginning of the first major period in the literature of the future coincides with the commencement of the modern world about the year 1870. By that time the long formative process in futuristic fiction had arrived at its first perfection as a most effective literary device, admirably adapted to the task of projecting the dominant hopes and fears, the technological ambitions and social expectations of any advanced society. It was an evolutionary triumph. Ever since the classic utopias of the Renaissance, writers had gone on experimenting with ways of presenting
Professor I. F. Clarke, Emeritus Professor of English in the University of Strathclyde, is a recent convert to the araDhicallv futuristic potentials of information ‘tech&logyune initiative
informatique.
their anticipations of things-to-come. In that sustained struggle for communication the favourable variations were preserved, and out of these came the new and well established specific modes in the genre of futuristic literature. The immediate occasion for the first great explosion of imaginary wars, utopias and dystopias of the future was the rapid Prussian victory in the War of 1870. That astounding event was an unmistakeabie signal of new directions in warfare, in technology, and in the system of European politics. The war had found the French unprepared for the new-style use of railways for the mobilizing and concentrating of large masses of troops; and at Sedan they discovered that their bronze muzzle-loaders were hopelessly outgunned by the cast steel breech-loading artillery from Krupps. The war had served to concentrate attention on the new kind of society then in its first phase of development-mass populations increasing every year, vast new urban concentrations, centralized governments, a rapid communications system by press and telegraph that sup-
FUTURES October 1990
From space to time
plied the latest news from all over the world, a constant exploitation of the sciences that ensured an ever-increasing rate of technological invention, and a fatal readiness to use all the resources of knowledge and technology in the waging of war. New literature The tale of the future had come into existence as the necessary literary response for a society that knew it was changing and would go on changing. So, the War of 1870 caused LieutenantColonel Chesney to project the new kind of warfare into his account of the coming invasion of the British Isles in his notorious Battle of Dorking of 1871. Again, the War of 1870 confirmed the novelist, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, in his disillusionment with the unprecedented material progress of the age; and in The Coming Race of 1871 he revealed a highly advanced society so bored with life that their depressed citizens had not the heart to rejoice in the technological progress that had given them automata, aerial vehicles, musical machines, television, sleepteaching, and a limitless source of The retort triumphant to that power. dismal account of the future came the following year in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, a most popular story read everywhere as a demonstration of Western society’s immense new powers and as an attractive anticipation of the better things-to-come. Thus, the beginnings of modern futuristic literature in the 1870s coincided with the publication of these widely read stories in English and French. And so it had to be, for the public in Britain and France had been long prepared for the first great advance into the future. Indeed, the honours for the origination and development of the new literature have to be shared equally between British and French writers. The prologue to the modern book of the future opened in the Newtonian epoch of the early 18th century. The Principia Mathematics had revealed a new model of the universe as an all-embracing system of actions and reactions-coherent, precise in every detail,
FUTURES October 1990
863
and seemingly beyond all questioning. What Newton had done for the mechanics of the cosmos, so the thinking went, others could do for the systems and activities of all humankind. Comprehensive
theory
One of the first to follow the example of Newton was Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, who had the original idea of attempting a physical history of the globe. In 1719 he sent out circular letters to the scientific world asking for information and observations. However, once he had discovered the far more fascinating subject of mankind, he abandoned the project. Instead, he turned to the far more challenging matter of human institutions; and he toiled away, dictating to secretaries and writing to correspondents everywhere, working long hours in the vast study (60ft by 40 ft) in the ancestral home at La Brede. Finally, in 1748 he published the two volumes of L’Espritdes Lois at Geneva. It proved to be of immense influence-undoubtedly the most important French book of the 18th century. Montesquieu had given the world a comprehensive sociological theory that sought to explain the basis of law and of government for all peoples and in all times. In its day it was the first and last word on the uniformity of human institutions, a vademecum to the influence of geography and climate on cultural and political systems, to the links between commerce and the structure of politics, to relations between the mother country and its colonies, to the formative effects of religion on civil society, and so on through 31 books presented with great authority and in a most persuasive style. By 1750 L’Esprit des Lois had gone through 22 editions; it had been translated into most European languages, and was read by men as different as Frederick the Great and George Washington. Though he knew it not, Montesquieu had set the social sciences in motion. From his time a succession of most distinguished French theorists would go forward with the great work of explaining society to the citizens-Turgot, Condorcet, Fourier, Saint Simon, Auguste Comte. The immediate effect of
864
From space to time
L’Esprit
des Lois, so his contemporaries was to spread the idea that the freedom of the citizen depended on the right balance between (and separation of) the legislative, judicial and executive powers. The Frenchman held up the British system of government as the model for all who sought to increase the degree of political liberty in their societies. By that example he directed attention towards the future-towards those necessary actions that would bring about the desired results. There can be no doubt about the consequences. The scale of Montesquieu’s influence ‘may be read at large in the bills of rights of American and French constitutions’.~ Again, his influence showed in the ways in which his contemporaries began to think that, given a sound knowledge of the workings of the social system, it would be possible to discern the pattern of coming events,
believed,
Idea of progress Once the mechanism of change had been revealed, the idea of progress began to signal the changes that might come. Two years after the publication of L/Esprit des Lois the idea of progress became the keystone of a new philosophy of history. On 17 December 1750 Anne Robert Jacques Turgot presented a thesis to the Sorbonne on A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Dugan Mjnd, which he opened with a grand flourish in the Newtonian style: ‘The phenomena of nature, governed as they are by constant laws, are confined within a circle of revolutions which are always the same.’ Another sentence, and he was straight into the doctrine of human progress:’ The succession of mankind, on the other hand, affords from age to age an ever-changing spectacle. Reason, the passions, and liberty ceaselessly give rise to new events: all the ages are bound up with one another by a succession of causes and effects which link the present state of the world with all those that have preceded it. The arbitrary signs of speech and writing, by providing men with the means of securing the possession of their ideas and communicating them to others, have made of all the individual stores of knowledge a common
treasure-house which one generation transmits to another, an inheritance which is always being enlarged by the discoveries of each age. Thus, the human race,, considered over the period since its origin, appears to the eye of a philosopher as one vast whole, which itself, like each individual, has its infancy and its advancement.
From that Turgot went on to show that the evidence of human history pointed to significant patterns in the rise and growth of nations. Look at the Phoenicians, said Turgot, and the ways in which they spread across the Mediterranean, founding colonies as they went. There was a lesson there, for colonies cling like fruit to the parent tree until maturity and then, ‘once they had become self-sufficient they did what Carthage was to do later, and what America will one day do’. With that we enter familiar territory and we can hear the first confident formulation of the notion that humankind has advanced and is destined to go on advancing. The idea of the future was beginning to find its natural shape in the extrapolation of observed trends and in the complacent assumption that things must tend always to the better. As Montesquieu had demonstrated the political structures and operating patterns that are body and soul to human societies, so Turgot revealed those necessary connections between past and present that pointed to the future. Turgot came back to the causes of progress in his later Discourse of Universal History, planned and partly written up in notes but never published in his lifetime. There he enlarged on and emphasized his conviction that the level of material progress depends on the sciences and, in particular, on the mechanical arts. In his last and uncompleted paragraph, Turgo anticipated major elements in the Victorian idea of progress : 3 The invention of printing spread not only the knowledge of books, but also that of the modern arts, and it has greatly perfected them. Before its invention, a host of admirable techniques, which tradition alone passed on from one craftsman to the other, excited no curiosity at all among the philosophers. When printing had facilitated their communication, men began to describe them for the use of the craftsmen. Through this, men of letters became aware of a
FUTURES
October 1990
From space to time
thousand ingenious operations of which they had been ignorant, and they found themselves led towards an infinity of notions which were full of interest for physics. It was like a new world, in which everything pricked their curiosity. Thus was born a taste for experimental physics, in which great progress could never have been made without the help of inventions and technical processes .
These ideas about the nature of progress were central to another major project which was dedicated to the propagation of the new doctrines. This was the ~nc~c/o~~~;e, a work of intellectual enterprise which has good claim to be considered the most important French publication of the mid-78th century. The enormous undertaking looked to the future: it was a work of propaganda, a war machine directed against all that the contributors abhorred-religion, the authority of the Church, despotic government; again, it was designed to disseminate information on the widest possible scale. The contributors included Voltaire, d’Anville, Euler, Holbath, Marmontel, Montesquieu, Turgot, and the indefatigable Diderot, who was the editor and chief defender of the great project. After all the delays, the a-r&, lettres de cachet, and the other devices employed to stop the work, the last of the 21 volumes appeared in 1765; and by that time the progressive theories, rationalistic doctrines, and secular optimism that shaped the entries spread the beliefs of the Enlightenment throughout France. Already by 1765 the thought had come to the French dramatist, Sebastien Mercier, to write a tale of the future that would show how the teachings of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire had become the staple of education in the year 2440. The centre-piece in the library of the 25th century will be, of course, the Encyciopkdie, organized on a new system and all the plates re-engraved.
In a dream beheld When L’An 2440 appeared in 1771, it proved to be a best-seller throughout Europe: by 1793 there had been 11
FUTURES October 1990
865
French editions, four English translations, two American editions, translations into Dutch and German, and many imitations. Although L’An 2440 is a slowmoving and excessively explanatory narrative for the modern reader, it was evidently a revelation for Europeans in the last quarter of the 18th century. For the first time in the course of utopian literature an author had established the rational links between contemporary social ideals and the better world that would evolve in the course of time-tocome. Place had finally yielded to time: the ideal state was no longer elsewhere; it waited for that happy day when mankind would make a final rendezvous with social justice, right order and universal harmony. ‘August and venerable Year!‘, so Mercier began his story, ‘thou who art to bring felicity upon the earth! Thou, alas! whom I have only in a dream beheld.’ And the dreamer exits still exclaiming at the perfection, tranquillity and beauty of his future Paris. Mercier had set the style for many writers after him. His dreamer asks innumerable questions, and the most benign and obliging citizens of the futurehistorians, philosophers, librarians, and others-appear to explain how life in the 25th century is all that the citizens of the 18th century could have desired. Latin and Greek have vanished from the curriculum of the schools, replaced by modern languages; the citizens are all deists in the 18th century mode, and the promptings of social justice have led to the ending of colonialism. The peoples of America have recovered their ancestral lands, and a Montezuma rules once more in Mexico. There are two kingdoms in Russia, Poland is a strong monarchy, Portugal has been joined with the UK, and throughout a peaceful world constitutional monarchs are dedicated to the service of their peoples;3 Sovereigns have, at last, been prevailed on to listen to the voice of philosophy; they are now linked together by the strongest ties, they are become acquainted with their own interests. After so many centuries of error reason has at last resumed her seat in their souls. They have opened their eyes to those duties with which the safety and tranquillity of their people exacted from them. They have made their glory consist in governing
In the 1780s balloons
were a major entertainment.
The earliest visual anticipations
Here at Lille the troops and the townspeople
turned out
of coming wars imagined vast French rafts on their way to invade the British Isles.
Some of the most striking images of the future in the 19th century came from the illustrators of Jules Verne: the coming conquest of the air
or the conquest of the sea-Captain
Nemo alone in the oceans.
Le capitaine Nemo prit la ~~~u~urdu soieil (p. 99).
868
From space to time
wisely, wishing rather to cause the happiness of a small number than to gratify the frenzied ambition of ruling over desolated countries filled with aching hearts, who always detested the usurped power of the conqueror. Kings have with one accord set limits to their empire.
Mercier was less certain about the shape of technological progress. Indeed, he failed to go any further than a simple act of faith in his belief that there would be ‘all sorts of machines for the relief of man in laborious works, and capable of much more force than those in our times’. He remained fixed in the 18th century mould of experience and the best he could hope for would be bigger and better canals in the 25th century. By that time the engineers of the new age would have ‘effected the long meditated project of building canals from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf . . . By this means Egypt is open to every nation in the world, and is become the great mart of commerce between Europe, India and Africa.’ That failure to project the most likely pattern of invention and mechanical development was inevitable. Indeed, it points to a primary factor that decides the accuracy of all anticipations of technological progress: the imagination has to wait on new technologies before it can begin to foresee their most likely applications. James Watt’s steam engine had not yet begun to turn the wheels of industry, and the Europeans had not yet seen the new balloons sailing over their cities. By the 178Os, however, the signs of coming changes were on the increase. Watt had taken out patents for his doubleacting steam engine, and by 1783 his machines were at work in most of the Cornish mines. The first industrial age was powering up, and during that same year of 1783 the Parisians witnessed the first spectacular and entirely convincing demonstration of the potentialities of the new sciences, when they saw the first manned balloon ascent in human history.
New technologies During summer was the Cape century. When
and autumn 1783 Paris Canaveral of the 18th the first trial Montgol-
C&es went up, they were the wonder of the age. Then the marvel of marvels happened on 21 November 1783, when Jean Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes took off in their Montgolf&e. Sebastien Mercier saw that momentous event, and he wrote that ‘it was a moment which never can be repeated, the most astounding achievement the science of physics has yet given to the world’.5 Louis XVI, still a happy monarch, agreed; and in the Letters Patent that ennobled the Montgolfier brothers he recorded that ‘we have no doubt but that this invention will cause a memorable epoch in physical history; we hope, also, that it will furnish new means to increase the power of man, or at least to extend his knowledge’. The King had foreseen the technological future far more accurately than he would ever manage to anticipate the course of political events. The last quarter of the 18th century was the time when the Europeans began to perceive more clearly than ever before that the rate of change was accelerating. When Captain Cook sailed into Botany Bay in April 1770, he had removed the future from the world map; for the discovery of the Australian continent ended the old expectation of finding new lands in the margins of the world. Thus, Terra Austra/is ceased to offer an acceptable location for ideal states at that time when the idea of progress and the evidence of technological advances were signalling that the first great age of transformation had begun. The balloon ascents confirmed this new expectation of coming things: they seemed to promise that the conquest of the skies would follow soon. The press and the printing trade found rich pickings in the new business of anticipation. The newspapers and the magazines seized on the monthly novelty of the balloons: they reported the latest despatches on the tragic death of the first aeronaut, Pilatre de Rozier, on the first air crossing of the Channel by Blanchard and Jefferies, on balloon ascents everywhere; and so they have gone on ever since to the most recent reports of the NASA project for an expedition to Mars. At the same time an advance in visual communications introduced the
FUTURES October 1990
from
public to the first images of the future, for new engraving techniques had led to a rapid expansion in the print industry. Again, novelty was a most profitable stock-in-trade. Handsome impressions of balloon ascents over the major European cities sold in large numbers from Trade Birmingham to Bologna. expanded into the new business of visual fantasies, as engravers turned out their visions of the balloon battles-tocome, or of the vast balloon transports for the trans-Atlantic travellers of the future, even balloon journeys to the Moon. Within two decades the image of the future had become part of the war effort-against the British or against the French-when patriotic draughtsmen revealed vast rafts on their way to invade the British Isles, airborne infantry crossing the Channel by balloon, or French troops occupying the House of Commons. And so the business of visual communications has gone on growing: presenting images of the future in the illustrated magazines of the 19th century, finding immense new opportunities in the cinema of the 20th century, and still hard at work today in television documentaries about tomorrow’s world and in the many space adventure films of recent years. The idea of the future, then, had already become well established during the last decades of the 18th century. According to Turgot, the lesson of human history revealed how humankind had advanced and would go on advancing. According to Louis XVI the first balloon ascents were the promise of
FUTURES
October
1990
space
to time
869
greater advances to come. According to Sebastien Mercier the balloon ascents of 1783 were an invitation to look into the future and foresee the day when air travel would be an everyday affair. In a revised edition of L’An 2440, which he completed in 1786, Mercier took the opportunity to add a new chapter on L’A&ostat in order to describe the coming conquest of the air. The flying machine comes in from Peking, and when it settles on the ground, ‘eight mandarins emerged from the cabin which was suspended beneath the aerostat’. In that better future world of the 25th century the aeronauts will ‘travel through the storm, moving from one climate to another in twenty-four hours, traversing distances that used to separate the most distant countries’. One of the first predictions in the new literature of the future, and for once uncommonly accurate. Notes and references 1. George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (London, George Harrap, 1956), page 471. 2. Ronald L. Meek (editor), Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cam-
bridge,
Cambridge
University
Press,
1973r, page 41. v 3. Ibid, page 118. Return: or 4. Sebastien Mercier, Astraea’s the Halcyon Days of France in the Year 2440, translated by Harriot Augusta Freeman (London, Printed for the Translator, 1797), page 113. 5. Sebastien Mercier, The Waiting City. Paris, 1782-88, translated and edited by Helen Simpson (London, George Harrap, 1933), page 314.
FROM SPACETO TIME Le futur: une initiative franco-britannique! 1. F. Clarke
The first half of this series is now coming to an end; and in the last two articles for 1990 this history of future thinking will move on to the first great outpouring of futuristic fiction in the 1870s. As I. F. Clarke points out, the literature of things-to-come came into existence wholly, solely and exclusively as an AngloOne line of French invention, or-if you prefer- me initiative franco-britannique. this advance into the future runs from Francis Bacon to H. G. Wells; the other from Rabelais to Jules Verne. Out of this literary common market came the characteristic modes of writing about the seemingly limitless range of future possibilities-from balloon battles to Star Wars. No doubt all those many writers who contributed to the new literature would agree with the Belgian poet and dramatist, Maurice Maeterlinck: ‘The past is of use to me as the eve of tomorrow; my soul wrestles with the future.’
The articles in this series have now arrived at that point when it becomes profitable to go forward in order to took backwards at the last stages in the emergence of an unmistakeabie modern style in writing about coming things. That is to say, the beginning of the first major period in the literature of the future coincides with the commencement of the modern world about the year 1870. By that time the long formative process in futuristic fiction had arrived at its first perfection as a most effective literary device, admirably adapted to the task of projecting the dominant hopes and fears, the technological ambitions and social expectations of any advanced society. It was an evolutionary triumph. Ever since the classic utopias of the Renaissance, writers had gone on experimenting with ways of presenting
Professor I. F. Clarke, Emeritus Professor of English in the University of Strathclyde, is a recent convert to the araDhicallv futuristic potentials of information ‘tech&logyune initiative
informatique.
their anticipations of things-to-come. In that sustained struggle for communication the favourable variations were preserved, and out of these came the new and well established specific modes in the genre of futuristic literature. The immediate occasion for the first great explosion of imaginary wars, utopias and dystopias of the future was the rapid Prussian victory in the War of 1870. That astounding event was an unmistakeabie signal of new directions in warfare, in technology, and in the system of European politics. The war had found the French unprepared for the new-style use of railways for the mobilizing and concentrating of large masses of troops; and at Sedan they discovered that their bronze muzzle-loaders were hopelessly outgunned by the cast steel breech-loading artillery from Krupps. The war had served to concentrate attention on the new kind of society then in its first phase of development-mass populations increasing every year, vast new urban concentrations, centralized governments, a rapid communications system by press and telegraph that sup-
FUTURES October 1990
From space to time
plied the latest news from all over the world, a constant exploitation of the sciences that ensured an ever-increasing rate of technological invention, and a fatal readiness to use all the resources of knowledge and technology in the waging of war. New literature The tale of the future had come into existence as the necessary literary response for a society that knew it was changing and would go on changing. So, the War of 1870 caused LieutenantColonel Chesney to project the new kind of warfare into his account of the coming invasion of the British Isles in his notorious Battle of Dorking of 1871. Again, the War of 1870 confirmed the novelist, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, in his disillusionment with the unprecedented material progress of the age; and in The Coming Race of 1871 he revealed a highly advanced society so bored with life that their depressed citizens had not the heart to rejoice in the technological progress that had given them automata, aerial vehicles, musical machines, television, sleepteaching, and a limitless source of The retort triumphant to that power. dismal account of the future came the following year in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, a most popular story read everywhere as a demonstration of Western society’s immense new powers and as an attractive anticipation of the better things-to-come. Thus, the beginnings of modern futuristic literature in the 1870s coincided with the publication of these widely read stories in English and French. And so it had to be, for the public in Britain and France had been long prepared for the first great advance into the future. Indeed, the honours for the origination and development of the new literature have to be shared equally between British and French writers. The prologue to the modern book of the future opened in the Newtonian epoch of the early 18th century. The Principia Mathematics had revealed a new model of the universe as an all-embracing system of actions and reactions-coherent, precise in every detail,
FUTURES October 1990
863
and seemingly beyond all questioning. What Newton had done for the mechanics of the cosmos, so the thinking went, others could do for the systems and activities of all humankind. Comprehensive
theory
One of the first to follow the example of Newton was Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, who had the original idea of attempting a physical history of the globe. In 1719 he sent out circular letters to the scientific world asking for information and observations. However, once he had discovered the far more fascinating subject of mankind, he abandoned the project. Instead, he turned to the far more challenging matter of human institutions; and he toiled away, dictating to secretaries and writing to correspondents everywhere, working long hours in the vast study (60ft by 40 ft) in the ancestral home at La Brede. Finally, in 1748 he published the two volumes of L’Espritdes Lois at Geneva. It proved to be of immense influence-undoubtedly the most important French book of the 18th century. Montesquieu had given the world a comprehensive sociological theory that sought to explain the basis of law and of government for all peoples and in all times. In its day it was the first and last word on the uniformity of human institutions, a vademecum to the influence of geography and climate on cultural and political systems, to the links between commerce and the structure of politics, to relations between the mother country and its colonies, to the formative effects of religion on civil society, and so on through 31 books presented with great authority and in a most persuasive style. By 1750 L’Esprit des Lois had gone through 22 editions; it had been translated into most European languages, and was read by men as different as Frederick the Great and George Washington. Though he knew it not, Montesquieu had set the social sciences in motion. From his time a succession of most distinguished French theorists would go forward with the great work of explaining society to the citizens-Turgot, Condorcet, Fourier, Saint Simon, Auguste Comte. The immediate effect of
864
From space to time
L’Esprit
des Lois, so his contemporaries was to spread the idea that the freedom of the citizen depended on the right balance between (and separation of) the legislative, judicial and executive powers. The Frenchman held up the British system of government as the model for all who sought to increase the degree of political liberty in their societies. By that example he directed attention towards the future-towards those necessary actions that would bring about the desired results. There can be no doubt about the consequences. The scale of Montesquieu’s influence ‘may be read at large in the bills of rights of American and French constitutions’.~ Again, his influence showed in the ways in which his contemporaries began to think that, given a sound knowledge of the workings of the social system, it would be possible to discern the pattern of coming events,
believed,
Idea of progress Once the mechanism of change had been revealed, the idea of progress began to signal the changes that might come. Two years after the publication of L/Esprit des Lois the idea of progress became the keystone of a new philosophy of history. On 17 December 1750 Anne Robert Jacques Turgot presented a thesis to the Sorbonne on A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Dugan Mjnd, which he opened with a grand flourish in the Newtonian style: ‘The phenomena of nature, governed as they are by constant laws, are confined within a circle of revolutions which are always the same.’ Another sentence, and he was straight into the doctrine of human progress:’ The succession of mankind, on the other hand, affords from age to age an ever-changing spectacle. Reason, the passions, and liberty ceaselessly give rise to new events: all the ages are bound up with one another by a succession of causes and effects which link the present state of the world with all those that have preceded it. The arbitrary signs of speech and writing, by providing men with the means of securing the possession of their ideas and communicating them to others, have made of all the individual stores of knowledge a common
treasure-house which one generation transmits to another, an inheritance which is always being enlarged by the discoveries of each age. Thus, the human race,, considered over the period since its origin, appears to the eye of a philosopher as one vast whole, which itself, like each individual, has its infancy and its advancement.
From that Turgot went on to show that the evidence of human history pointed to significant patterns in the rise and growth of nations. Look at the Phoenicians, said Turgot, and the ways in which they spread across the Mediterranean, founding colonies as they went. There was a lesson there, for colonies cling like fruit to the parent tree until maturity and then, ‘once they had become self-sufficient they did what Carthage was to do later, and what America will one day do’. With that we enter familiar territory and we can hear the first confident formulation of the notion that humankind has advanced and is destined to go on advancing. The idea of the future was beginning to find its natural shape in the extrapolation of observed trends and in the complacent assumption that things must tend always to the better. As Montesquieu had demonstrated the political structures and operating patterns that are body and soul to human societies, so Turgot revealed those necessary connections between past and present that pointed to the future. Turgot came back to the causes of progress in his later Discourse of Universal History, planned and partly written up in notes but never published in his lifetime. There he enlarged on and emphasized his conviction that the level of material progress depends on the sciences and, in particular, on the mechanical arts. In his last and uncompleted paragraph, Turgo anticipated major elements in the Victorian idea of progress : 3 The invention of printing spread not only the knowledge of books, but also that of the modern arts, and it has greatly perfected them. Before its invention, a host of admirable techniques, which tradition alone passed on from one craftsman to the other, excited no curiosity at all among the philosophers. When printing had facilitated their communication, men began to describe them for the use of the craftsmen. Through this, men of letters became aware of a
FUTURES
October 1990
From space to time
thousand ingenious operations of which they had been ignorant, and they found themselves led towards an infinity of notions which were full of interest for physics. It was like a new world, in which everything pricked their curiosity. Thus was born a taste for experimental physics, in which great progress could never have been made without the help of inventions and technical processes .
These ideas about the nature of progress were central to another major project which was dedicated to the propagation of the new doctrines. This was the ~nc~c/o~~~;e, a work of intellectual enterprise which has good claim to be considered the most important French publication of the mid-78th century. The enormous undertaking looked to the future: it was a work of propaganda, a war machine directed against all that the contributors abhorred-religion, the authority of the Church, despotic government; again, it was designed to disseminate information on the widest possible scale. The contributors included Voltaire, d’Anville, Euler, Holbath, Marmontel, Montesquieu, Turgot, and the indefatigable Diderot, who was the editor and chief defender of the great project. After all the delays, the a-r&, lettres de cachet, and the other devices employed to stop the work, the last of the 21 volumes appeared in 1765; and by that time the progressive theories, rationalistic doctrines, and secular optimism that shaped the entries spread the beliefs of the Enlightenment throughout France. Already by 1765 the thought had come to the French dramatist, Sebastien Mercier, to write a tale of the future that would show how the teachings of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire had become the staple of education in the year 2440. The centre-piece in the library of the 25th century will be, of course, the Encyciopkdie, organized on a new system and all the plates re-engraved.
In a dream beheld When L’An 2440 appeared in 1771, it proved to be a best-seller throughout Europe: by 1793 there had been 11
FUTURES October 1990
865
French editions, four English translations, two American editions, translations into Dutch and German, and many imitations. Although L’An 2440 is a slowmoving and excessively explanatory narrative for the modern reader, it was evidently a revelation for Europeans in the last quarter of the 18th century. For the first time in the course of utopian literature an author had established the rational links between contemporary social ideals and the better world that would evolve in the course of time-tocome. Place had finally yielded to time: the ideal state was no longer elsewhere; it waited for that happy day when mankind would make a final rendezvous with social justice, right order and universal harmony. ‘August and venerable Year!‘, so Mercier began his story, ‘thou who art to bring felicity upon the earth! Thou, alas! whom I have only in a dream beheld.’ And the dreamer exits still exclaiming at the perfection, tranquillity and beauty of his future Paris. Mercier had set the style for many writers after him. His dreamer asks innumerable questions, and the most benign and obliging citizens of the futurehistorians, philosophers, librarians, and others-appear to explain how life in the 25th century is all that the citizens of the 18th century could have desired. Latin and Greek have vanished from the curriculum of the schools, replaced by modern languages; the citizens are all deists in the 18th century mode, and the promptings of social justice have led to the ending of colonialism. The peoples of America have recovered their ancestral lands, and a Montezuma rules once more in Mexico. There are two kingdoms in Russia, Poland is a strong monarchy, Portugal has been joined with the UK, and throughout a peaceful world constitutional monarchs are dedicated to the service of their peoples;3 Sovereigns have, at last, been prevailed on to listen to the voice of philosophy; they are now linked together by the strongest ties, they are become acquainted with their own interests. After so many centuries of error reason has at last resumed her seat in their souls. They have opened their eyes to those duties with which the safety and tranquillity of their people exacted from them. They have made their glory consist in governing
In the 1780s balloons
were a major entertainment.
The earliest visual anticipations
Here at Lille the troops and the townspeople
turned out
of coming wars imagined vast French rafts on their way to invade the British Isles.
Some of the most striking images of the future in the 19th century came from the illustrators of Jules Verne: the coming conquest of the air
or the conquest of the sea-Captain
Nemo alone in the oceans.
Le capitaine Nemo prit la ~~~u~urdu soieil (p. 99).
868
From space to time
wisely, wishing rather to cause the happiness of a small number than to gratify the frenzied ambition of ruling over desolated countries filled with aching hearts, who always detested the usurped power of the conqueror. Kings have with one accord set limits to their empire.
Mercier was less certain about the shape of technological progress. Indeed, he failed to go any further than a simple act of faith in his belief that there would be ‘all sorts of machines for the relief of man in laborious works, and capable of much more force than those in our times’. He remained fixed in the 18th century mould of experience and the best he could hope for would be bigger and better canals in the 25th century. By that time the engineers of the new age would have ‘effected the long meditated project of building canals from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf . . . By this means Egypt is open to every nation in the world, and is become the great mart of commerce between Europe, India and Africa.’ That failure to project the most likely pattern of invention and mechanical development was inevitable. Indeed, it points to a primary factor that decides the accuracy of all anticipations of technological progress: the imagination has to wait on new technologies before it can begin to foresee their most likely applications. James Watt’s steam engine had not yet begun to turn the wheels of industry, and the Europeans had not yet seen the new balloons sailing over their cities. By the 178Os, however, the signs of coming changes were on the increase. Watt had taken out patents for his doubleacting steam engine, and by 1783 his machines were at work in most of the Cornish mines. The first industrial age was powering up, and during that same year of 1783 the Parisians witnessed the first spectacular and entirely convincing demonstration of the potentialities of the new sciences, when they saw the first manned balloon ascent in human history.
New technologies During summer was the Cape century. When
and autumn 1783 Paris Canaveral of the 18th the first trial Montgol-
C&es went up, they were the wonder of the age. Then the marvel of marvels happened on 21 November 1783, when Jean Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes took off in their Montgolf&e. Sebastien Mercier saw that momentous event, and he wrote that ‘it was a moment which never can be repeated, the most astounding achievement the science of physics has yet given to the world’.5 Louis XVI, still a happy monarch, agreed; and in the Letters Patent that ennobled the Montgolfier brothers he recorded that ‘we have no doubt but that this invention will cause a memorable epoch in physical history; we hope, also, that it will furnish new means to increase the power of man, or at least to extend his knowledge’. The King had foreseen the technological future far more accurately than he would ever manage to anticipate the course of political events. The last quarter of the 18th century was the time when the Europeans began to perceive more clearly than ever before that the rate of change was accelerating. When Captain Cook sailed into Botany Bay in April 1770, he had removed the future from the world map; for the discovery of the Australian continent ended the old expectation of finding new lands in the margins of the world. Thus, Terra Austra/is ceased to offer an acceptable location for ideal states at that time when the idea of progress and the evidence of technological advances were signalling that the first great age of transformation had begun. The balloon ascents confirmed this new expectation of coming things: they seemed to promise that the conquest of the skies would follow soon. The press and the printing trade found rich pickings in the new business of anticipation. The newspapers and the magazines seized on the monthly novelty of the balloons: they reported the latest despatches on the tragic death of the first aeronaut, Pilatre de Rozier, on the first air crossing of the Channel by Blanchard and Jefferies, on balloon ascents everywhere; and so they have gone on ever since to the most recent reports of the NASA project for an expedition to Mars. At the same time an advance in visual communications introduced the
FUTURES October 1990
from
public to the first images of the future, for new engraving techniques had led to a rapid expansion in the print industry. Again, novelty was a most profitable stock-in-trade. Handsome impressions of balloon ascents over the major European cities sold in large numbers from Trade Birmingham to Bologna. expanded into the new business of visual fantasies, as engravers turned out their visions of the balloon battles-tocome, or of the vast balloon transports for the trans-Atlantic travellers of the future, even balloon journeys to the Moon. Within two decades the image of the future had become part of the war effort-against the British or against the French-when patriotic draughtsmen revealed vast rafts on their way to invade the British Isles, airborne infantry crossing the Channel by balloon, or French troops occupying the House of Commons. And so the business of visual communications has gone on growing: presenting images of the future in the illustrated magazines of the 19th century, finding immense new opportunities in the cinema of the 20th century, and still hard at work today in television documentaries about tomorrow’s world and in the many space adventure films of recent years. The idea of the future, then, had already become well established during the last decades of the 18th century. According to Turgot, the lesson of human history revealed how humankind had advanced and would go on advancing. According to Louis XVI the first balloon ascents were the promise of
FUTURES
October
1990
space
to time
869
greater advances to come. According to Sebastien Mercier the balloon ascents of 1783 were an invitation to look into the future and foresee the day when air travel would be an everyday affair. In a revised edition of L’An 2440, which he completed in 1786, Mercier took the opportunity to add a new chapter on L’A&ostat in order to describe the coming conquest of the air. The flying machine comes in from Peking, and when it settles on the ground, ‘eight mandarins emerged from the cabin which was suspended beneath the aerostat’. In that better future world of the 25th century the aeronauts will ‘travel through the storm, moving from one climate to another in twenty-four hours, traversing distances that used to separate the most distant countries’. One of the first predictions in the new literature of the future, and for once uncommonly accurate. Notes and references 1. George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (London, George Harrap, 1956), page 471. 2. Ronald L. Meek (editor), Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cam-
bridge,
Cambridge
University
Press,
1973r, page 41. v 3. Ibid, page 118. Return: or 4. Sebastien Mercier, Astraea’s the Halcyon Days of France in the Year 2440, translated by Harriot Augusta Freeman (London, Printed for the Translator, 1797), page 113. 5. Sebastien Mercier, The Waiting City. Paris, 1782-88, translated and edited by Helen Simpson (London, George Harrap, 1933), page 314.