La journée d'un parisien au XXIe siècle

This article that we print under the rubric “Futures of yesteryear” gives an account of Parisian life in the 21st century as imagined by Octave Béliard in 1910.
The description will undoubtedly give our readers considerable pleasure. They will probably be struck by the key role accorded by the author to “the fairy Electricity”, whose benefits are frequently mentioned, as well as by the role of different types of transport, in the air and on land, which make it possible to move around the city at all levels, to reach “Buénos-Ayres” in less than three hours and to travel to the Moon, the final refuge of animals (horses, dogs, cats, sheeps…) that are to be found on Earth only in the Natural History Museum.
The world described by Octave Béliard is deeply influenced by rapid technological development, especially domestic robots and all kinds of machines that allow workers to finish their day’s labours at noon and to spend the rest of the day improving their minds and amusing themselves thanks to banners in the sky (better than the Internet!), the telephone (the “visiophone”), the “phonocinematograph” and the “telephototheatrophone”… Every aspect of life is shaped by technical progress, including food produced by “culinary chemistry”, including milk and wine, since cows and vines exist only on the Moon…
Although the text is an extraordinary reflection of the hopes pinned at that time on scientific and technological progress, it has little to say (at least compared with current concerns) about work, social relationships and civic life. The latter seems in any case to be organized in somewhat simplistic fashion: “the division of fortunes having removed the idle from this society, everybody shares in moderation and without harshness in manual labour that is no longer seen as degrading”.