The Clock of the Centuries Read online

  The Clock

  of the Centuries

  by

  Albert Robida

  Translated by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  L’horloge des siècles, here translated as The Clock of the Centuries, was originally published in book form in 1902, and is notable as the first full-length literary account of time in reverse. It was not, however, the first satirical farce Albert Robida had written and illustrated in which he had played tricks with time; his earlier story “Jadis chez aujourd’hui” (here translated as “Yesterday Now”), serialized in the children’s periodical Le Petit Français Illustré between May 10 and June 14, 1890, provided the seed of the idea and a preface to its ideological development. I have, therefore, combined the two in this volume.

  “Jadis chez aujourd’hui” is a cheerfully ironic celebration of the great Exposition Universelle which opened in Paris in 1889, and for which the Eiffel Tower was constructed. That ostentatious exhibition of technological and cultural prowess was one of a long series initiated by London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, which had been sited in the Crystal Palace. Paris had been the first city to follow in London’s footsteps in 1853, and when London had organized a sequel in 1863, Paris had dutifully followed suit in 1867. Robida, whose first novel had been a comic pastiche of Jules Verne, probably knew that Verne had taken considerable inspiration from the 1867 exposition; it was there that Verne saw the submarine Le Plongeur, which presumably assisted in the inspiration of the Nautilus—a machine that Robida borrowed for his own epic of exploration.

  London’s third Great Exhibition ran from 1871 to 1874—dark years in French history, following defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and the collapse of the Second Empire—and Paris again trailed behind in 1878. The 1889 exposition, however, set out to establish a new standard and could not be written off as any mere imitation; it was not until 1925, in fact, that London managed to put on a fourth exhibition, by which time many other cities had got in on the act and World War I had wrecked Europe so comprehensively that the United States of America, which had already taken the lead in the race to be principal engine of world progress in the 20th century—economically and technologically, if not culturally—would henceforth be unchallengeable. In 1889, however, that title was still hotly contested, and the Exposition Universelle, with its iconic central tower, represented France’s bid to establish itself as the avant-garde of technological as well as cultural progress.

  The 1889 exposition was, of course, timed to coincide with the centenary of the French Revolution, which was regarded by many people—not all of them French—as the beginning of the modern era, the turning-point at which the stultifying past had been rudely toppled and the future given free rein. The Revolution had been undertaken under the banner of Progress as well as the famous slogan of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” and it had been very widely assumed in 1789 that scientific and technological advancement was the groundwork of social advancement—that progress in knowledge and techniques provided the fertile soil in which liberty, equality and fraternity might flourish, and that the advancement of liberty, equality and fraternity would, in its turn, facilitate the further growth of science and technology.

  The 1889 exposition was supposed to re-emphasize that faith and demonstrate that the associated historical agenda was proceeding apace; a degree of skepticism had, however, developed by then. The central thesis of the philosophy of progress had generated its antithesis, whose adherents considered technological advancement highly injurious to social well-being—with the result that not everyone reacted to the Eiffel Tower and the exposition’s many other exhibits in the wholeheartedly admiring fashion that their makers intended. “Jadis chez aujourd’hui” is a breezily frivolous reflection of that skepticism, in which the antithesis does not appear to have the author’s support. On balance, Louis XIV and his courtiers come off worse than the exhibitors, and the progressive future succeeds in outshining the blinkered and uncomprehending past.

  Paris followed up the 1889 exposition fairly swiftly with one that marked the end of the 19th century, and it was presumably the exposition of 1900 that prompted Robida to revisit the ideas that had floated into his head while writing his caricature of the 1889 exposition. He had only been an interested visitor to the 1889 exhibition, but he was actively involved in the 1900 exhibition. Significantly, however, the exhibit for which he shared the responsibility was not a celebration of the impending future, but a nostalgic re-creation of the past: models and illustrations of “Old Paris” as it had been in the Middle Ages and the 18th century. Robida had been working on such illustrative re-creations for some time, the produce of his being endeavors reflected in several books, most significantly Paris de siècle en siècle (1895). These historical studies had appeared alongside, and intermingled with, his speculative illustrative works exploring the potential aspect of 20th century Paris.

  Robida had produced a great deal of speculative work regarding potential technological developments, illustrating his own writings lavishly and also illustrating speculative items by several other writers. His ideas about the likely shape of the future had been shaped by his vocation as a caricaturist, which forbade him to take his inventions too seriously and thus inclined him to representations in which nothing works as intended, producing comical results—but the intrinsic ironic humor of his work grew much darker over the course of his career, and L’horloge des siècles, which constitutes a kind of interim report of Robida’s judgment on the idea of past and future Progress, includes several inklings of a deeper pessimism to come.

  Although the novel’s jocular narrative voice cannot be taken entirely seriously as a reflection of the author’s opinions, it is undoubtedly the case that the philosophy of progress takes something of a caning in the course of the narrative, and the antithesis to its thesis is given extravagant scope to make itself heard and felt. The further the story proceeds, the more committed the narrative voice becomes to the notion that 19th century technological progress has been an unmitigated disaster, and that the world went seriously awry in 1789. There comes a point when the reader can no longer believe that the author is simply playing with ideas, and is encouraged to accept that the story’s rhetoric as a heartfelt element. Robida’s subsequent work, especially the work he did after World War I, confirms the fact that he eventually became mordantly pessimistic about the past and likely future effects of technological development on the quality of human life.

  Despite the relative triumph of the 1889 Exposition Universelle and its central folly, the decline in the fashionability of the philosophy of progress was already reflected by then in the critical success enjoyed by a prominent avant-garde of Decadent literature, which took it for granted that European civilization and culture were tottering on their last legs. The narrative voice of L’horloge des siècles is markedly unsympathetic to the stylistic embellishments, flagrant moral skepticism and symbolist affectations of Decadent literature, but one did not have to be a literary Decadent to support the thesis that some kind of historical terminus was imminent, and that contemporary civilization was rotten at the core. Although 1900 was 100 years short of the calendrical Millennium, there is a sense in which L’horloge des siècles is a wholehearted Millennial fantasy; it is a frankly Apocalyptic narrative, in which the Supreme Clockmaker, having contemplated the progressive prospectus for the 20th century, decides that enough is enough and stops time dead in 1901, and then starts the human story in motion again—as much by way of prescribing an educative penance as granting amazing grace, one suspects—in such a way as to require people to review their history in reverse, with wryly-enlightened eyes.
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  The novel is, of course, a comedy, and Robida saw no need to be thorough in the extrapolation of his premise. He avoids even mentioning many corollaries of the premise that might be deleterious to the arguments his narrative voice presents, initially in a candidly cavalier manner. While extolling the virtues of growing every younger, he is careful not to require or invite his readers to contemplate what will happen to his rejuvenated characters when the time comes for them to re-enter the maternal womb, and he is similarly coy about specifying the process by which the dead return to life. He is also remarkably vague about the workings of forgetfulness and its relevance to the benefits of experience; although his narrative voice and his principal characters wax lyrical about their golden opportunity to “ameliorate” the past that they are bound to re-live, the author is careful not to go into detail about exactly what they might do and how, or what relics of the former future they will be able to deploy in the process.

  The patchwork structure of the novel facilitates this kind of selective blindsight, but blurs the whole to such an extent that, were it a painting, it would be every bit as impressionistic as the works of modern art that the characters in the story are so liberal in denouncing. Despite this patchwork quality and selective vision, however, the work has some very striking passages as well as some pleasantly amusing ones, and it certainly offers a tongue-in-cheek challenge to the philosophy of Progress that was, at the time, novel and ingenious. Although modern critics—including Jacques van Herp, who supplied a “Postface” to the 1994 reprint issued by the Belgian publisher Grama—often compare L’horloge des siècles to Philip K. Dick’s novel of time in reverse, Counter-Clock World (1967), the resemblances are slight because Dick takes a keen interest in the surreal quality of those aspects of reversed life that Robida omits or ignores—the reversed passage of food through the alimentary tract, the practicalities of un-death and re-birth, etc.—and is relatively uninterested in the kind of assault on the philosophy of progress that is Robida’s primary obsession. The literary work with which L’horloge des siècles actually has most in common is probably Archibald Marshall’s satirical farce about a world in which the profit motive works in reverse, Upsidonia (1915), although its nostalgic element also links it in an interesting manner to such late 19th century retreatist Utopias as William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Its most revealing context is, however, Robida’s own evolving oeuvre, especially those aspects of it that employed futuristic visions.

  Albert Robida was born in “the year of revolutions,” 1848, in Compiègne, a town with a long and august history stretching back to a Medieval heyday. In more recent times, Louis XV had built a fine château there, which Napoléon I had further embellished, but a much earlier French King, Louis I, nicknamed le Débonnaire, also had a significant connection with the town, having been deposed there in 1832. Jeanne d’Arc had been held prisoner there by the Burgundians in 1430, when the town suffered several sieges, about which Robida wrote an account. It was, therefore, a town whose natives were easily able to cultivate an appreciation of the vast changes that had taken place over the centuries in French political history.

  Robida was the son of a carpenter, who might in an earlier era have been apprenticed to his father and inducted into the guild supervising and organizing that craft—an awareness reflected in L’horloge des siècles’ comments on the virtues of such institutions. Instead, he was directed towards a legal career, but he did not complete his initial course of study. Instead, he undertook to develop and exploit his skill as an illustrator and caricaturist; he joined the staff of the Journal Amusant in that capacity in 1866. He went on to become one of the most prominent and successful French illustrators of the second half of the 19th century, second only to Gustave Doré. Whereas Doré became famous for his lavish illustrations of literary classics, however, Robida initially specialized in contemporary and historical themes. Unlike Doré, Robida was also a writer, and the texts he wrote in support of his work became increasingly elaborate, until he eventually embarked on a novel that would give his illustrative talents unprecedented opportunities for flamboyance and imagination.

  The most popular French writer of the 1870s was Jules Verne, and Robida set out to write a five-part series of farcical adventures parodying Verne’s romances of exploration, Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul dans les 5 ou 6 parties du monde et dans tous les pays connus et même inconnus de M. Jules Verne [The Very Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnin Farandoul in the 5 or 6 Continents, and in all the countries known, and even unknown, to Jules Verne] (1879).1 The five-story series was issued in 100 parts, each one handsomely decorated. With a blithe disregard for issues of copyright, Robida borrowed Verne’s Captain Nemo and Phileas Fogg, giving them prominent roles supportive of his Tarzaneque hero, who is raised by apes on a remote Pacific island and returned to civilization as a kind of primitive superman. Jacques van Herp suggests that the hero’s family of intelligent primates was also inspired by a minor Verne story, “Gil Braltar,” which was reprinted in 1880 in Le Petit Français Illustré, along with a glowing appreciation by Robida of Verne’s works. Fortunately, Verne found Saturnin Farandoul’s adventures very amusing, and gladly gave his blessing to the appropriations.

  Robida followed up the adventures of Saturnin Farandoul with another substantial text. Early in his career, Verne had written a novelistic account of Paris in the 20th century, which his publisher, P.-J. Hetzel, had advised him not to publish and which languished in oblivion until the end of the century in which it was set, when it was rediscovered and belatedly published. Robida was presumably aware of the existence of this suppressed novel, and set out to fill the gap that Hetzel’s short-sightedness had created. Le Vingtième siècle (1882-83; revised book edition 1895; tr. as The Twentieth Century) was, like its predecessor, initially issued as a part-work, this time in 50 parts. Although it is cast as a farcical comedy, and shows the influence of its equally inventive and scathingly skeptical predecessor, Emile Souvestre’s Le monde tel qu’il sera (1846; tr. as The World as it Shall Be), the novel’s adventurous description of life in the 1950s shows far considerably more foresight than the other accounts of the future produced before that date.

  The plot of Le Vingtième siècle is a tokenistic device facilitating a tour of the institutions, folkways and international relations of Paris in the mid-20th century—1952 in the book version. Its heroine, Hélène Colobry, has just left school and is instructed by her guardian, the billionaire banker Raphaël Ponto, to find a means of earning a living. She dutifully tries out careers in the law, politics and journalism, coming unstuck in very instance, before reconciling herself to the fact that she is so generally incompetent that she will have to face the ultimate ignominy of shopping around for a husband instead. Although the tone of the narrative voice is light satirical, the novel’s feminist sympathies seem quite genuine, and its tacit rhetoric contrasts sharply with the off-hand condemnation of feminism offered by the narrative voice of L’horloge des siècles.

  Although the politic situation in Le Vingtième siècle’s version of 1952 inevitably provides grounds for mockery, the general increase in liberalism featured in the novel is depicted as sympathetically as its feminist corollary, and although the dominance of aerial transport is shown to have its drawbacks, the general attitude to airships and other new technologies is broadly admiring. Viewed as a whole, the novel is very amiable as well as funny, and its satirical aspects are conspicuously good-humored. The part-work was, however, immediately succeeded by a much shorter text supporting a series of illustrations published in La Caricature, a periodical founded by Robida and Georges Decaux. This was a lurid account of La guerre au vingtième siècle (1883; with new text in book version 1887; second text tr. as “War in the 20th Century”—sans illustrations—in I. F. Clarke’s 1995 anthology The Tale of the Next Great War 1871-1914).

  Here, there was a much more evident contrast between Robida’s convictions and his subject-matter, and the contemplation of
the difference that more powerful engines of war might make to casualty figures inevitably gave him a gloomier view of the utilitarian potential of further technological advance. He had already exhibited pacifist sympathies in his earlier works, and the work he put into his illustrations of air fleets, submarine armies and gigantic tanks might well have helped to sharpen these sympathies into passionate conviction. The satirical tone of La guerre au vingtième siècle is much more acidic than that of its predecessor, especially in the second version of he text, which moves the principal action backwards in time, from 1975 to 1945, and locates its chief battlefields much closer to home; the war described in the second version eventually involves the entire world, having escalated from its local origins in 1937.

  “Jadis chez aujourd’hui” was written not long after the original version of La guerre au vingtième siècle, and was rapidly followed by Robida’s next substantial, but more specialized, survey of 20th century life, La vie électrique [Electric Life] (1890). He went on to add several other sidebars illustrating the future of transport, but none is very substantial. In “La locomotion future” [Future Locomotion], which appeared in the January 1895 issue of Le Monde Moderne, Robida’s illustrations accompanied an essay by Octave Uzanne, a writer peripherally associated with the Decadent movement—he was later to illustrate Les conquérants de l’air [Conquerors of the Air] by the much more flamboyantly Decadent Georges de Lys. Robida provided his own brief texts for a pair of single-page depictions of “L’automobile en 1950” and “L’aviation en 1950,” which appeared in Annales Politiques et Littéraires in the 1908 Christmas issue, but they must have been hackwork written to commission. The tone of all these works is upbeat; Uzanne concludes with the hope that better communications will allow much better political relations to develop between nations, and that new means of locomotion therefore constitute a great leap forward in social as well as technical progress. The sequence was, however, interrupted in more ways than one by L’horloge des siècles.