The World As It Shall Be

Émile Souvestre (1806–1854) was a prolific Breton writer best known in his own time for social realism and folklore, which makes Le Monde tel qu'il sera something of an anomaly in his bibliography. The book's premise is straightforward: the lovers Marthe and Maurice, unhappy with the materialism of their own era, are transported by a spirit to the year 3000, where they tour the "Republic of United Interests." What they find is a society that has achieved every material ambition of the industrial age and lost everything else in the process.

The Republic is organized entirely around economic utility. Geographic regions have been converted into specialized production zones: the French make only gloves, Timbuktu supplies all the world's tailors, the former northern United States has been given over to stock speculators. Individual bodies follow the same logic. A professor named Selinghuysen has developed methods to concentrate all of a person's vital energy into whichever limb their trade requires, allowing the rest to atrophy. A blacksmith needs arms; a dancer needs legs. The head, in both cases, becomes superfluous. Children are assessed by phrenologists in state nurseries, ticketed with their assigned profession, and dispatched to their trade district. The "hot-house academy" for those deemed intellectually capable accelerates mental development through controlled atmosphere and heat, producing children who can calculate eclipses before they can speak, then lapse into second childhood by their twenties.

The domestic world is equally mechanized. Steam-powered household systems dispense heat, light, water, and fresh air. An endless-band newspaper called the Everlasting World scrolls through every subscriber's home without pause. Marriage is administered by a government secretary who matches applicants by their listed financial prospects. Alcohol, tobacco, and personal dietary choice have all been legislated away for the citizens' own benefit. Citizens are in bed by nine.

Souvestre's target is not technology itself but the ideology driving its application: the conviction that every human problem has an optimal, legislatable solution, and that the role of the state is to enforce those solutions on a population that cannot be trusted to choose wisely for itself. This is recognizably the same critique that Zamyatin would develop more rigorously in We (1920) and that runs through Huxley and Orwell: the benevolent totalitarianism of pure rationalism. Souvestre frames it as comedy, but the comedy has a bitter undertow. Marthe and Maurice's journey is not one of discovery but of mounting horror.

The novel's connection to American readers came through a curious detour. The January 1856 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine published a piece titled "January First, A.D. 3000" that reproduced illustrations from the French edition alongside an entirely original English text. Souvestre's characters do not appear. In their place, an unnamed time-traveler explores "Peerless City," now situated on Borneo, and receives a tour from a citizen of the Republic of United Interests. The satire is redirected toward American targets: P.T. Barnum is recalled as a former U.S. president, George Washington is debunked as a mythological figure, and local political figures of the 1850s are lampooned in the manner of the historical revisionism that runs through Souvestre's original. The Harper's piece is a fairly clever piece of American comic writing, but it is not a translation, and it strips away the emotional framework that gives the French novel its weight. Marthe and Maurice's dread is gone; what remains is spectacle.

Le Monde tel qu'il sera anticipates Albert Robida's Le Vingtième Siècle (1883) and, more broadly, the tradition of illustrated speculative satire in French popular culture. Its direct influence on the canonical Anglo-American dystopia is harder to trace, partly because it remained unavailable in English until the Wesleyan University Press translation by Margaret Clarke appeared in 2004, with an introduction by I. F. Clarke. That translation finally made Souvestre's actual novel accessible to English readers, rather than the Harper's approximation that had stood in its place for nearly 150 years.